The Long Goodbye

Rating:
Summary: Complex noir book by genre master
Review: "The Long Goodbye" is unlike most of Chandler's other novels. It's longer. It's loaded with more description, internal life, and character investigation. Its plot -- though seeming more random -- is actually tighter and more pointed than his earlier work. In some ways it's more ambituous and revealing than his other work. In other ways, it contradicts his earlier writing style. But no matter how you look at it...it's awesome.

There are a couple of things I've always admired in Chandler.

First, he conveys everything in scene. After an obligatory physical description, everybody is characterized through dialog or action. As a result, the plot flies by, and we are treated to a very concrete, participatory read.

Second, Philip Marlowe tells us almost nothing about himself or his background or even what he's thinking, but we know him better than we know ourselves, thanks to the gritty voice, the nature of his observations, and the conclusions he makes about his world.

"Goodbye" does these things, but slides more towards self-introspection. There are lengthy passages where Marlowe spends time by himself. These passages could seem awkward to the die-hard hardboiled detective fan, but they work. They also show Chandler's writing ability.

In "Goodbye," a writer of popular novels plays a prominent role. Roger Wade writes romance best-sellers; he despises his own genre novels and aspires to write more literary fiction. As a reader of "Goodbye," it's easy to see the paralells between Wade and Chandler, and "Goodbye" seems to be an attempt to write something "literary."

But based on the success of "Goodbye" on its literary merits, it's evident that Chandler wrote the hardboiled dectective novels because he wanted to; not because he couldn't do anything else.

Rating:
Summary: Philip Marlowe . . and 'all my children.'
Review: Certainly The Long Goodbye is one of the top ten mysteries written, maybe even the top three. It has that tremendous yet subtle notion of pathos, loyalty, the purity of truth, (perhaps uniqely American) 'stick-to-it-iveness' or relentlessness, and a gritty, scarred, hero.

And certainly Marlowe is the father of a whole bunch of bastard children. Spenser, the oldest, his brother Dave Robicheaux, the darker cousins Lucas (Davenport) and no, not Elvis but Joe Pike.

Juxtapose that against the beauty and insight of Chandler's writing, his voice resonating with the truth about, say relationships. He writes about the war-hero, shattered after the trauma of death, through the words of his wife: "I love my husband. Not as a young girl. That's passed. That man I loved then died in the war. But I love him."

The names and notions intertwine. Marlowe's loyalty to Terry Lennox is the stuff of The Knights of the Realm. The women are tough and knowledgeable. The time is past. Or is it?

Top shelf writing from a man who wrote little but said a lot.

Rating:
Summary: Raymond Chandler's masterpiece, despite the Big Sleep.
Review: Don't get me wrong from that summary up there. I liked The Big Sleep, it was one of the great novels of any type, mystery or otherwise. But there is something about The Long Goodbye that really gets you. Something about it that's beautiful and dark and all around wonderful.

"Beautiful" is not a term often applied to hardboiled novels like this, but this book is. The story of Philip Marlowe finally confronting his age, finally finding someone he might spend the second half of his life with, The Long Goodbye takes you into Marlowe's mind and soul the way no other of Chandler's seven Marlowe novels does.

This novel, the sixth in the series, is so good that most people overlook the fact that there was a seventh (many people, when they mention Chandler, leave out "Playback"). Although "Playback" was a good novel, The Long Goodbye is, in a sense, Chandler's long goodbye to his readers, giving them one very memorable classic before he died.

I can't possibly gush about this novel anymore. All I can say is that you should read it.

Rating:
Summary: Vintage Chandler... his longest, and one of his best...
Review: Every time I finish reading one of Chandler's Marlowe novels, I end up feeling depressed, because it's one less Chandler novel that I can read for the first time. In my mind, he's that good -- he is one of the only writers that I am consistenly incapable of setting down to go to sleep... I finished the last half of "The Long Goodbye" at about 5:00 am -- I was so wrapped up in it, that I failed to notice the time. Alas. Now, as for that review...

IF YOU HAVEN'T READ ANY CHANDLER, you should stop reading this and go take a look at his first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep. It's worthwhile to read them in order, or at the least, to read that one first... you'll get a good feeling for whether or not you like Marlowe, and you'll learn a bit more about him. Then, if you like that, come back and take another look at this review.

IF YOU HAVE READ OTHER CHANDLER, then you already know, to some degree, what you're in for. You know Chandler's style, and I can promise you that this book offers up more of it, in abundance. I was a little thrown off for the first 50-some pages, because Marlowe has moved out of his trademark apartment and into a small house in a quiet residential neighborhood, and that didn't jive with me... but it works. Marlowe is, in his way, maturing. (If you've read his unfinished final work, Poodle Springs, then you know Marlowe will eventually get married. Perhaps this evolution says as much about Chandler as about his beloved P.I.)

Once the plot starts moving, of course, you're just along for the ride. Like all Marlowe novels, you have that perfect feeling of riding shotgun in the mind and conscience of a fascinating and well-developed character, and it's enough to sustain you through WHATEVER Chandler cares to write about. But, as I said, this is Vintage (no pun intended) Chandler -- some of his best work. Like several other books of his, I would give it more than 5 stars if I could, because nothing he wrote deserves less. The plot develops in three acts, which seem unrelated until he begins to pull them together, and when he does so, it is nothing less than amazing to behold. (I thought I was outguessing him, and knew what was going to happen. Stupid me -- he was still three steps ahead of me, and I had egg all over my face when I was done with the last page. I love him for that.)

If you're a mystery fan, or even a fan of good stylistic writing, this is some of the best stuff you could hope for. Call it pulp if you like, and say that Hammett outsold him if you must, but for my money, Chandler had more style than anyone else who's ever tackled the genre. Marlowe remains one of the best, most complete, and most enjoyable creations of literature that I have ever found, and I only wish that Chandler had left us more of him. *sigh*

BOTTOM LINE: If you haven't read this one yet, I envy you. It's a hell of a ride, and it's got plenty of re-read value. Worth owning, and a must for Chandler fans.

Rating:
Summary: One of Chandler's Best
Review: I enjoy Chandler's prose as much as the next person but the colorful descriptives and tough-guy dialog can sometimes start to wear after a few hundred pages. "The Long Goodbye" is both longer and less prone to overdoing the similies and metaphors than other of his novels. Here we have more conventional pacing and exposition in place of neck-snapping plot reversals, and the usual terse and blunt style gives way to more depth and detail. The story never suffers from this dose of subtlety. In fact, it moves along as well as ever. And while at times the characters seem a little less colorful than in other work they also have more depth and internal contradictions that add some substance to what are sometimes stock characters in Chandler's work. A first-time Chandler reader might be more interested in something more typical of the author such as "Farewell My Lovely," but this one is all Raymond Chandler and a winner despite having more subtlety and fewer classic Chandler-isms in the writing style.

Rating:
Summary: Assaulting the Citadel
Review: In 1940 a writer of classic crime and detection stories wrote: "There are no classics of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference...a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close."

Raymond Chandler included that assertion in the introduction to his collection of short stories, Trouble is My Business. The easy demystifier is to attribute the stunning falsity of those words to the fact that artists often prove themselves to be to worst judges of their own works. Or perhaps earning his name onto the screenplay for The Big Sleep along with those of Dashell Hammitt and William Faulkner lured Chandler into an uncharacteristic state of false modesty. He may have even believed what he wrote. Whatever the motivation behind his lapse of reason, he confirmed in the minds of many critics a prejudice they loved to nurture: anyone who wrote for such magazines as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly needn't risk humiliation by calling his tales "literature." And when that same writer placed pieces in The Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Review of Literature, well, that provided yet more evidence that the realm of fine writing was being dragged into the gutter by so much tripe.

Nowadays we wouldn't stand for such a snotty attitude towards literature, but only because of the risk. After all, less than three in every one hundred Americans bother to read books at all. Ironically, that statistic illuminates why we need Raymond Chandler now more than ever. Writing for a mass market is automatic for any scribe today who wishes to earn a genuine living from the craft. But that does not mean that the masses can't be elevated in the process of being entertained.

No classics of crime and detection? This from a writer who yearned for legitimate praise from literary critics and earned it in spite of himself. This from a talent as big as that of his character, Philip Marlowe, whose worst trait was racism and whose least worst trait was an eye color that switched from brown to blue depending on which book one read. Chandler himself probably suffered from the same existential race hate as his creation, and yet his minor minority characters float with as much life as anyone.

No classics? Then how to explain Chandler's genius in his third book and first classic, Farewell, My Lovely, when he paints a background in Sociology, then zaps us with psychoanalytical humor right up front-despite his loathing for the social sciences?

So powerful was Chandler's prose, even when compared to his mentor Hammett, or to his greatest protégé, Ross MacDonald, that his lack of prolificacy becomes irrelevant. From The Big Sleep through Playback (or the unfinished Poodle Springs), Chandler wrote nothing but detective stories (and not many of those). In fact, a reader could begin at the beginning, wade through the lesser pools (The High Window, The Little Sister, Trouble), soak up the classics (Farewell, The Lady in the Lake, and especially The Long Goodbye), take a week off, and be anxious to start all over again, a state of affairs untrue of the works of most other mystery writers. The reason? The joy of reading Marlowe's adventures comes less from the unraveling of clues and the making of mental wagers on suspects than from immersing oneself in the rejuvenating waters of Chandler's style, one which is disserviced by the term "hard-boiled." The term is especially deceiving when applied to Marlowe's character in the best of the canon, The Long Goodbye. Here, the presumably isolationist detective spends the better part of 300 pages befriending and absolving a young man who is every bit the deliberate outcast, hardly the behavior of a bare-knuckled womanizing pragmatist. In a sense, then, plot-the essence of most detective fiction-is the least compelling aspect of Marlowe's adventures. One hardly cares whodunit, or even why. What we do care about-because Chandler won't let us escape from it-is Marlowe's conscience. We want him to be happy, or at least not miserable. We want him to enjoy that cigarette, that cup of coffee or shot of whiskey. We want the women flirting with him to treat him well and to have no ulterior motives.

And so, when Chandler concluded his essay with the threat, "[That] is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel," he had already given us the classic fictionalized model for doing precisely that.


Rating:
Summary: An author's attributes
Review: Raymond Chandler was a master. Terry Lennox, one of the main characters shares some of the author's attributes. He has a propensity to drink too much and has an English accent. He has a two hundred dollar suitcase checked in a locker. Englishmen do not shake hands all the time it is observed. Marlowe says that guys like Terry always say they are sorry and it is always too late.

When Marlowe returns from taking Terry to Mexico he is met by the homicide detectives. Sylvia Lennox is found in the guest house at the back of the property, battered. The servants know all about lights and cars at unreasonable hours. The shamus finds himself in custody. Someone, not Terry Lennox, supplies a lawyer, gratis. A newspaperman friend tells Marlowe someone is building a wall round the case.

The author, as we know, is masterful. He creates an atmosphere, a spell with his writing. He is highly literate and this is gratifying to the well-read reader who is sort of slumming by reading detective fiction. Marlowe's next client, or perhaps problem is Roger Wade, a genre writer given to excessive drinking. Marlowe meets Linda Loring, someone who has known Terry Lennox, and is a sister of Sylvia. There used to be gambling in Idle Valley where Roger Wade lives. Then it became quiet. As many readers know, there is a surprise ending. It is hard to exaggerate the excellence of Chandler's achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Marlowe enters a new era
Review: The 1950's saw the end of Hollywood's classic noir period, but in writing "The Long Goodbye," Chandler asserted that his Los Angeles private eye and eternal cynic Philip Marlowe was far from finished even if the decade that made him famous was a memory and the city that inspirited him was gradually losing its sunny, stylish youth to the smog-asphyxiated, television-dominated pit of the modern age. The typical Chandler elements remain unchanged: The women are glamorous and lusty, the gangsters are ruthless but businesslike, the cops are just like the gangsters except they get to carry badges, and Marlowe always stands up to them even when they're beating him down.

The novel begins with Marlowe's recollection of his brief but close friendship with a man named Terry Lennox, an alcoholic socialite with an apparently war-scarred past and an unfaithful wife who happens to be the daughter of one of the country's richest men. One day Lennox shows up at Marlowe's house and asks him to drive him to Mexico; Marlowe concedes, and upon returning finds out that Lennox's wife has been murdered. Soon Lennox is reported to have committed suicide after sending Marlowe a "portrait of Madison."

Some time later, Marlowe is contacted by a book publisher with a request to "babysit" a man named Roger Wade, a popular writer of trashy novels, who has a penchant for violent drinking binges and tends to disappear for days at a time. Marlowe is uninterested in the job at first, but after Wade's stunningly beautiful wife Eileen hires him to find her missing husband, he becomes enmeshed in their affairs. As one of Chandler's best and most poignant character creations, Roger Wade exudes the ironic misery of a man who hates his life because he's so successful making a living at something he finds contemptible.

Are the Lennox and Wade cases connected? If you've read "Farewell, My Lovely," you know that Chandler has a way of tying together plot strands like ribbons around a Christmas present. The difference in "The Long Goodbye" is that Chandler tries to embellish the cleverly twisted plots of his concise earlier novels with longer, more grandiose storytelling and character development, and the result is merely a book that takes longer to read. This is not to say the end is unsatisfying, but it doesn't come as much of a surprise to a Chandler veteran who's intimately familiar with the man's style.

Rating:
Summary: Chandler's Best and Most Ambitious
Review: THE LONG GOODBYE has two connecting plots. The first is about Philip Marlowe's efforts to clear his friend Terry Lenox of the murder of his wife. The second is to find and protect Roger Wade, a popular author of genre fiction. The book is not only Chandler's best novel but also his most ambitious.

The character of Roger Wade is very similar to Chandler himself. This is also true of Terry Lenox to a lesser degree. Wade is an alcoholic and Chandler is in top form when he is describing the idiosyncracies of alcoholic behavior.

Rating:
Summary: Arguably Raymond Chandler's best novel.
Review: The Long Goodbye is a novel with lots of meat on its bones. The plot is engaging and complex, the characters are all extremely colorful, the dialogue is superb and the descriptive passages are in a league of their own. Chandler also provides us with an abundance of social commentary while exploring a number of important themes.
One of these themes is the nature of friendship. At the start of the book, Philip Marlowe, a well established literary character notorious for being a cynical loner, finds a friend. The friend's name is Terry Lennox and he's what could be described as a lovable lush. When Terry confesses to committing a brutal crime, Marlowe is unable to believe his friend could ever be capable of such a thing and, against all odds, looks to vindicate him.
Along the way, Marlowe meets Eileen and Roger Wade, an unhappily married couple who belong to roughly the same privileged social circle as Terry. A fabulously successful writer of romance novels, Roger is also a tormented alcoholic. A good deal of the book is concerned with examining the Wades' dysfunctional marriage.
This is a wonderful book, full of insight and bursting with humanity. It is a marvelous showcase for Raymond Chandler at the height of his literary powers. Highly recommended.