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At the Top of American Tough Guy Fiction
“While Dashiell Hammett was the first and did the most to create American Tough Guy Fiction as its own Genre of almost respectable Literature (just read "The Maltese Falcon" and see why), still, looking at each writer's complete works, Raymond Chandler was the more consistently excellent writer. While everybody drank too much back then, Hammet was the worst drunk of all, and it seems to have affected some of his work. But Chandler stayed surprisingly flawless. Yes, some readers do prefer Hammett... it is a close call... but when I do re-reads, I consistently reach for Raymond Chandler first.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-19.
What about "The Long Goodbe" in particular. Well, I am reading it now because it is also in print in French and in German. I'm reading it through in all three languages. Its amazing how close the German runs to the English, but the French is close enough that one can still tell that it is the same book (a triumph of French Translation, as it turns out).
Oh, that reminds me of Raymond Chandler's huge stylistic innovation, that he wrote the books in the first person tense from his main character's point of view... "I saw this, I did that..." In most other fiction we have this Omniscient Third Person Observer... a God-Like Narrator that tells the story and describes the characters -- "Liz tossed the stone at Darcy, and Darcy derisively sneered, feeling contempt for all beneath him". With Raymond Chandler we experience everything through the perceptual and intellectual filters of his Private Detective Phillip Marlowe. It definitely helps in establishing reader rapport and identification with the hero... the books first person experience subtly becomes the readers first person experience... when Phillip Marlowe bumps his toe, the reader says "ouch!"
Oh, this edition in particular is a fine book. The paper is good and the print is big, and the photo on the cover is nothing that is so embarrassingly stupid that one needs to hide the book from one's friends. ” -
Still the best mystery novel ever written
“This is a book for people who love to read. They are a small group.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-31.
Elmore Leonard once said, concerning his writing, that he "leaves out the stuff people don't want to read." I interpret that to mean that he writes for people who don't like to read, or, rather, who haven't the patience or attention span to read other than dialogue. There are many of them, those folks who don't like to read, and ironically they are the ones keeping the publishing industry alive. You will find them bragging in parties or writers' groups about how many books they've read that week. "I'm reading five right now, two almost finished, I'm about to begin another, and all together I've read seventy-two this year."
These are people who are more interested in "getting through" a book rather than taking the time to enjoy it. I understand. In younger and less discriminating days I did the same. Now I can barely find a handful of books a year I deem worthy to begin, most of which I find I haven't the stomach to finish. And when the contemporary standard of excellence in the mystery genre has become Evanovich, where is one to turn?
To the past, unfortunately, for the wasteland that has become today's fiction brings a thirst for quality which can only quenched by quality. 'The Long Goodbye' remains the standard of excellence for mystery novels, and though many continue to assault the citadel, all continue to fall abysmally short.” -
Another Chandler page turner...
“The Long Goodbye easily rates as one of Chandler's best. Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in Lake are personal favorites, but I think they've been eclipsed. Chandler's novels are short. Sometimes, frustratingly so. One isn't so eager that they be over. The Long Goodbye remedies this coming in at 380+ pages. 380+ pages of pure, unadulterated, magnificent Chandler.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-07-08.
A wealthy and philandering trust fund daughter is slain in a horrible manner. Suspicion quickly falls on her peripatetic husband - a man with whom Philip Marlowe is already acquainted. An untimely death also comes to a local novelist which serves to tie a plot in knots that only Marlowe can unravel.
It is a work well done. Chandleresque suspense, pace, and that beguiling wit fill The Long Goodbye from start to finish. Marlowe's interaction with the local police is worth the price of admission alone. Throw in some goons with an illicit habit or two, a few stiffs, and the 1940's Los Angeles aura and you've got a book almost impossible to put down. It may well be Chandler's finest. 5 stars.” -
0 of 1 members found this review helpful.
The very noir-est
“One of the noir-est of the noir. Philip Marlowe, private detective. Lone wolf, paladin, man of honor. The usual philosophical drunks and women with "mink[s] that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile". Crooked cops and crooks with a conscience.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-02-25.
Terry Lennox's very rich, very nymphomaniac wife is found dead, her head bashed in. Lennox takes it on the lam to Mexico, and then is found dead with a bullet in his brain and a confession in front of him. But did he really do it? A lot of people want Marlowe to think so, and not to look into the case. But then he gets dragged into trying to save an alcoholic, best-selling novelist, and, as with any good noir novel, there's a connection.
Also as in any good noir novel, nobody is what they seem or means what they say. Mysteries are "solved", but there are no tidy endings, no real heroes or villains. The atmosphere is all. And there is plenty of that here.” -
0 of 1 members found this review helpful.
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.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-11-12.
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."
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