Product Description
Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, who he's divorced and re-married and who ends up dead. and now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 60 reviews)

The Shadow Line

Raymond Chandler didn't start out as a "hardboiled" detective writer of the "noir" genre. He didn't start out as a detective writer at all. His first published writings were Romantic poems written when he was coming of age in England. He fell back on writing this sort of thing - the aforementioned "hardboiled" detective novel that The Long Goodbye is - when his business ventures had fallen through after his return to America. The reason for this biographical opening here is that this book reads so autobiographically to me. This is not to detract from the plot, which is quite well done and has been rehashed by all the reviewers here too often for me to need to rehash it. But I don't think I would have taken to the novel if it weren't for the autobiographical subtext - if that's quite the right word in this context - of the novel.

The novel contains two significant male characters besides Marlowe: One, like Chandler, is an alcoholic and former Englishman (disguising his original identity, as best he can, under an assumed American alias). The other, again like Chandler, is an alcoholic who writes best-selling books about which he's deeply ambiguous, to put it mildly. These two alter egos of Chandler, and Marlowe's interaction with them, proved the most interesting parts of the book for me. Marlowe himself, as is no doubt intended, remains something of a cypher.

The first, Terry Lennox, whom Marlowe saves from the drunk tank by picking him off the streets before the cops can get him, gives monologues like the following, about sex, in the early going:

"It's excitement of a high order, but it's an impure emotion - impure in the aesthetic sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it." P.23

The second, Roger Wade, writes, what for me, is the best writing of the book, while drunk, on some sheets of paper he has Marlowe destroy, but not before Chandler devotes all of Chapter Twenty-Eight to recording it. The first paragraph begins thusly:

"The moon's four days off the full and there's a square patch of moonlight on the wall and it's looking at me like a big blind milky eye, a wall eye. Joke. Goddam silly simile. Writers. Everything has to be like something else. My head is as fluffy as whipped cream but not as sweet. More similes. I could vomit just thinking about the lousy racket....." p.203

I'm giving so much space to these quotes here because, for me, the book was just as much about writing, alcoholism and fear of sex as it was about the murders that Marlowe unravels. Actually, the perpetrators come to him and the crimes unravel before him. Marlowe is curiously passive for a detective, for anyone really.

The end effect of the novel is an odd but striking sense of decay. As Wade's wife, Eileen, puts it, "Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean." P.329

So, yes, as the other reviewers write, a splendid "noir" detective novel, perhaps the best. But also, and more importantly, a semi-autobiographical character study with moral dimensions punctuated with stylistic prose. One shouldn't forget, after all, to whom the "long goodbye" is directed, why it takes so long and how sad its completion.

As Marlowe puts it, "You can never know too much about the shadow line and the people who walk it."

November 12, 2008

This man knows how to write.

Terse. Fast moving. Graphic. Totally believable characters. Exciting and suspenseful. It recaptures a bygone era, but people don't change all that much. What more do you want in a mystery?
September 24, 2008

The too-long Goodbye

Originally copyrighted and published 1953.

Chandler talked his way out of a 5-star rating by making the Goodbye a little too long. Atmospheric tale with dark, almost fatalistic mood gets lost with too much talking and and too many false endings after the climax.

Still, beautiful workout so well crafted with so much heart I can overlook the faults.
July 22, 2008

Swell

So read "The Long Goodbye" and you'll know why they call them "classics" - the kind of crime fiction that defined "noir", the stuff that their disciples - I'm talking about guys like Swierczynski, Bruen, Huston, Stella, McKinty, Connolly (John, not Michael) - who drank up Chandler like mother's milk and, standing on the shoulders of Chandler, Thompson, Hammett, McBain, have launched their own brand of hip, irreverent, in-your-face noir that will be the pulp fiction that our sons and daughters will revere and lionize decades from now. Stuff that was written in the 50s - those simple days before cell phones, computers, video games, or political correctness - but still relevant today and will still have you riveted to the pages as tight as Joe McCarthy chasing down the next suspected Communist pervert.

The plot - if it really matters - has tough talking, hard drinking, fast-fisted private eye Phillip Marlowe befriending a wounded war veteran, Terry Lennox, who's hooked up with a high society, high-sexed wife but is still down on his luck. When the wife ends up dead with a face beaten to hamburger, Lennox is on the run and Marlowe ends up on the wrong side of the cops and a local gangster. The story is as lean and clipped as those beautifully streamlined Adirondack wooden speedboats of the day - the days when guys cracked wise and got sore and hung out with broads and dames, when it was OK to smoke and drink gimlets and rye whiskey sours during a bona fide cocktail hour - a rare glimpse into a slice of American history you'll not find in our revisionist history books of the day. But more importantly, this is a lesson in an understanding of irony as a powerful tool when deftly twisted into words. A lesson in the impact of tension and brutality without relying on graphics or extremes - the literary equivalent of Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" shower scene. And a primer in timing, pacing, and the street smart dialog that many try to emulate today, mostly falling short and sounding more - unintentionally - like Maxwell Smart than Phillip Marlowe.

So read it for the drama, or read it for the history lesson, or read to see where the best writers of today were schooled - just read it. An American crime classic at the top of the genre, and a master of noir at the peak of his game.
June 26, 2008

Arguably Chandler's Best

You don't read Raymond Chandler for the plots--you read him for the magnificent "hard boiled" prose. The Long Goodbye is probably his most complex work, full of world-weary insights and a somewhat more "tender" Marlowe. The great pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing how the main character, Philip Marlowe, reconciles his cynical view of humanity with a genuine desire to help a few unfortunates in life. The best Marlowe... classic....

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets
May 28, 2008

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