Rating: 
Summary: The best crime drama I've ever read.
Review: Raymond Chandler brings us back into the world of private eye Phillip Marlowe for a case full of strange and unexpected surprises. A definate classic, with wonderful characters that keep you going and guessing until the very end. And what an ending, I can't belive I didn't see it coming.
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: Cynicism without becoming parody (unlike this review).
Review: Suppose life begins to look like it is being viewed through the bottom of a shot glass. The people you see are only marking time until the next powerplay, drink, or fix, or lover. You can't buy-in to the clever excuses the rich, the poor, the crooks or the cops use to justify what they've become.
You'd get a license, a cheap office with a five drawer filing cabinet holding mostly California climate and you'd wait . Wait for that moment when the door from the hallway leading into the waiting room would open and you could just make out the sillouette of your future. You wouldn't get rich. You might get dead. But at least it would be quick. Not like those fools in the suburbs, married to the boss's daughter, dying the slow death in front of the T.V. . . .If I've struck a nerve, maybe you should turn off the T.V. or the computer and strike out on your own. Maybe you could open your own office, shamus. Or maybe you should try the suit on, see if it fits, strap on the 38, watch a master pull open the desk drawer, pour himself a drink. You could buy this book, sit back and soak up the City of Night.
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.
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.
Rating:
Summary: Great mystery attempting to break the boundaries
Review: The Long Goodbye is not considered one of the "classic" Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe novels. Such a title is usually reserved for the first four novels. It does deserve to be counted among the classics, however, not the least of which is the fact that this is the book where Philip Marlowe, the knight in tarnished armor, finally gets the princess. More sentimental, perhaps, and less gritty than the first four, The Long Goodbye shows that Philip Marlowe is a character that is human, and not just an embodiment of modern-day "chivalric" ideals. I consider this my favourite of all his books, and recommend it highly
Rating:
Summary: Exciting Reading, Amazingly Detailed, Beautifully Woven...
Review: The narrator of "The Long Goodbye" created a universe full of interesting characters and their relationships. So exciting was this universe that the text seemed to crackle with energy. The fact that the narrator was able to accomplish this feat was all the more special in that he drew me into the lives of depraved, ugly people (Marlowe excluded, of course) -- individuals I would have otherwise shied away from. But the care with which the narrator described his characters imbued them with a depth transcending their pitiable roles in a series of murders. With only an exception or two, all of the major characters begged for sympathy in a plot as intricate and beautiful as anything Shakespeare produced. And the brightest of all characters was Marlowe. He glistened above the murky crimes and lies, using his intellect, culture and stubbornness to wade through predicament after predicament and finally, help bring closure to "The Long Goodbye."
Rating: 
Summary: Sexy
Review: There can be no disputing Chandler's unique voice as a masterful expression of the 'noir' vision. Philip Marlowe is simultaneously the sceptical investigator of crime and the cynical misanthrope; his stories are therefore both conventional detective stories and yet more profound responses to the imbecility and corruption of mankind. This marriage of popular and high-brow aspirations Chandler performs seamlessly: Marlowe is such a good investigator because he is so cynical; the more corruption he exposes, the more cynical he becomes. This is quite a long novel and in its detailed unravelling the complex plot takes its time. Perhaps, by the end, I missed in Marlowe a broader sense of examination and reflection; after three-hundred pages he can seem vaguely attitudinizing. It made me wonder whether he is not even more effective as the narrator of short-stories or at least of shorter novels. Nevertheless, one does not want to take anything away from the achievement of his particular voice: sour, hard, sexy, resigned, weary, sometimes bitingly comic, and, in its own way, possessed of an insistently rhythmical music.
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