The Long Goodbye

Promises what it says, really. A very long, unevenly written tale about a private eye who helps out a polite, gentle alcoholic after a chance encounter outside a club. A murder happens, then a suicide, but through a long and meandering chain of events, the detective stays involved instead of bowing out, because of course he does; this is a novel.

I haven't read Chandler before, nor watched adaptations, and I was most impressed by the writing style. Brisk, acidic prose that spares no one, including himself.

"They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops’ eyes. They get them at the passing-out parade at the police school."

“'Sold it, darling? How do you mean?' She slid away from him along the show more seat but her voice slid away a lot farther than that."

Surprisingly for me, I soon grew uninterested in the supposed mystery, which essentially dies down for a good third of the book, and only picks up in the last third. There's a rush of events in the first quarter, then a lot of alcoholic binges, with trips back and forth to estates outside of L.A. The last 15% or so slowly wraps up the plot, first with another murder, a surprise denouement worthy of Hercule Poirot, another suicide, and then another couple of twisty consequences and follow-ups. Curiously, the case is 'wrapped-up' by the police at least twice, both times in error, although the reader isn't sure of this. Marlowe comes out with some surprise information at the very end that was not particularly alluded to earlier, nor did the reader have an inclination that his suspicion was heading that direction, especially as he continues making principled stands. It takes on the aspect of a magic trick rather than an organic series of events made clear.

That said, the prose was amazing.

"There’s nothing around here but one great big suntanned hangover."

Chandler also has a lot of opinions to work out,

about the law:

"The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer."

about decorators:

"The fellow who decorated that room was not a man to let colors scare him. He probably wore a pimento shirt, mulberry slacks, zebra shoes, and vermilion drawers with his initials on them in a nice Mandarin orange."

about writers:

"Maybe you always ought to ask a writer how the book is going. And then again maybe he gets damned tired of that question."

about rich people:

“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn't, on account of it cut into their profits."

and about gambling:

"You think those palaces in Reno and Vegas are just for harmless fun? Nuts, they’re there for the little guy, the something-for-nothing sucker, the lad that stops off with his pay envelope in his pocket and loses the week-end grocery money. The rich gambler loses forty grand and laughs it off and comes back for more."

and the press:

"Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.”

I mean, honestly, I found it kind of fascinating to read modern sentiments from someone writing 70 years ago. I'm sure that says something profound, but you'll have to explain it to me.

Wikipedia and the like talk about how this is Chandler's favorite and most autobiographical novel. He apparently wrote it while his wife had a prolonged fatal illness, and his own mental health struggles seemed to be mirrored by the character Roger Wade. It adds interesting insight, to be sure, and it could very well explain why I felt the middle third of the book wasn't about a mystery at all, but about Wade's problems.

Overall, I'm definitely worth reading and likely rereadable for the prose, although I've heard [b:The Big Sleep|2052|The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)|Raymond Chandler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1371584712l/2052._SY75_.jpg|1222673] ranks up there as well. Note there is some weird racial descriptions about Mexicans, both in a town in Mexico and one in specific, but I think it largely passed a sniff test. Women fare about as well as you would expect from noir genre stereotypes. On the whole, re-readable, with caveats. show less

This is a book by Raymond Chandler, which means that it is excellent. Many reviewers (and there are a lot of perceptive reviews of this book on Goodreads) believe that it's Chandler's masterpiece, but I disagree. The structure throws me. Chandler is the master of the perfect, punchy, assertive sentence, yet his hero Philip Marlowe strolls passively through hundreds of pages until the mystery is resolved, almost despite him, at the end. Marlowe is manipulated, used, beaten, even spat upon without throwing a punch. He doesn't want to be involved in what he's involved in, but he allows himself to be pushed and pulled out of vague feelings of personal obligation. One plot seems to end a third of the way through. When a new story takes its show more place, we wait a very long time to find out how they connect.

I love a lot of things about this novel--and make no mistake, this is a real novel, not just a pulp thriller. The heat and technicolor seediness of southern California, circa 1953, is vividly rendered. The book doesn't shy away from the ugly, which includes the easy racial slurs flung about by the hero, but neither does it make the mistake, so common to this type of fiction, of denying the existence of the beautiful. If the world looks cheap and worn through Marlowe's eyes, it's because of the part of it he makes his way through. The dialogue, of course, is a joy and endlessly quotable, as is much of the description. "I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string." "There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican. This guy was one of the hard boys..."

I wouldn't mind reading this again, knowing more about it going in, and I'd be happy to revise my opinion. But as it stands, I prefer Chandler's books to be as compact and tightly structured as his prose. And I like Philip Marlowe a little better when he's more in charge of his own direction. This is, probably by design, a sad book at it center, lacking the exhilaration found earlier in the series. show less

"The bar was pretty empty. Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century Fox, using double arm gestures instead of money. They had a telephone on the table between them and every two or three minutes they would play the match game to see who called Zanuck with a hot idea. They were young, dark, eager, and full of vitality. They put as much muscular activity into a telephone conversation that I would put into carrying a fat man up four flights of stairs. There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. The customer was middle-aged, handsomely dressed and drunk. He show more wanted to talk and he couldn't have stopped even if he hadn't really wanted to talk. He was polite and friendly and when I heard him he didn't seem to slur his words much, but you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life, and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world." show less

I’ve attempted this book in the past and failed to engage even though I love Chandler and the Marlowe series to pieces. This time it clicked and wow, I think it might be his most personal novel in the sense of how much he evokes through Marlowe. As usual the writing is snappy, the plot is convoluted and Marlowe gets ensnared by his own emotions and sense of morality.

Here are some noteworthy gems -

“I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don’t read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.” p 11

“Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate stranger.” p 19

“I puffed the cigarette. It show more was one of those things with filters in them. It tasted like high fog strained through cotton wool.” p 39

“And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” p 64

And of course, the second paragraph -
“There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn’t quite. Nothing can.” p 1

It’s the longest of the Marlowe novels and the pace is less break-neck, but it still cranks along making the reader wonder how the Terry Lennox/Roger Wade situations will connect. You know they will. Readers of this type of fiction or other thrillers made after Chandler broke ground will connect the dots before he explains it, but watching Marlowe get there is half the fun. The reader doesn’t get everywhere ahead of Marlowe and his detective work, observational skills and sheer guts are spot on as usual. show less

I have never before read a book which so well enumerated, in such poetic yet clear language, precisely how systemic corruption works in all forms, and exactly how deep it roots itself into American society.

Every observation and comment in this book from 1953 is exactly as relevant and infuriatingly accurate in 2025.

While the writing isn't as sharp as Raymond Chandler's earlier works, The Long Goodbye tells a more complicated story, one that takes longer to uncoil. An older Philip Marlowe has grown more cynical and has seen too much of Los Angeles, of police and high society, and of America, as evidenced by his numerous diatribes against big business and the government littering the novel. Marlowe especially sounds more like a conspiracy theorist than a private eye as he explains how the legal system is used to perpetuate organized crime.

Still smart, resourceful and above all patient, Marlowe winds up in jail under suspicion of aiding the accused uxoricidal murderer Terry Lennox—a man he barely knows—flee to Mexico. After Lennox's highly show more suspicious suicide, Marlowe is propositioned by the publisher of a famous writer, and then the writer's wife, to keep the writer sober long enough to finish his latest book while also being warned not to investigate the death of Lennox's wife. On the way to that final, surprising goodbye, several more people will die and Marlowe will prove himself the match of the powerful people he rails against.

Several things in the novel feel Gatsby-influenced: the cocktail party where the rich congregate, the beautiful women whose affections turn out badly for the men subjected to them. Unlike Fitzgerald, Chandler does not imbue these events and characters with romantic auras; instead, everyone involved is tainted or destroyed.

The Long Goodbye is a well-paced tale of violence and corruption populated by hard-drinking men and the beautiful women that supposedly love them. A highly enjoyable read. show less

It has been a while since I read Raymond Chandler; I forget what a delight the language is. I have been laughing a lot while reading this. His exposition on the different types of blondes is beyond hilarious and worth the price of admission, objectification taken to the absurd.

I read the first chapter as part of an exercise for my writing class, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the whole thing. Great choice. I warn that this is a product of its time, and the discourse about Mexicans is . . . problematic. They all have knives, they all have a price, and they are all very smart (or maybe crafty is the right word) and cover it up. I am not sure if they fare worse than women, but they certainly do not fare better. To be fair show more though, the White, blonde and rich of both genders come off as the ugliest folks. Nobody is noble other than Philip Marlowe. In the end he has his dignity and no bank account, but at least he gets laid. This really is a blast. I need to read more Raymond Chandler. The world sucks and this made me happier than a 14% drop in Tesla shares.

I listened to this narrated by Scott Brick, and I think it is the right way to go. Chandler's dialogue is a joy to listen to. show less