The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
In The Long Goodbye by noir master Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe befriends a war veteran who is struggling and has the scars to prove it. Then he learns that Terry Lennox had a wealthy, nymphomanic wife, whom he had divorced, who had later committed suicide. And now that Lennox is on the run, Marlowe is being sought after by the police and a crazed mobster.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
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Marlowe is hired to get someone out of a jam and solves the case rather quickly, however, the answers provided by the solution leave more questions than they do answers. When Marlowe independently seeks out the facts, he learns that his client has been hiding a previous crime from him and that his original purpose in being recruited was to tie up any loose ends.
As he tries to investigate the case on his own, Marlowe finds himself enmeshed and implicated in the suspected murder case and has to contend with a number of dirty, unpredictable, and unsavoury personalities in the city. These aforementioned folks engage in quite a few pranks, and it is always intriguing to see how Marlowe tries to read them and assess the potential harm before moving on.
The Long Goodbye is undoubtedly a mystery; Marlowe’s research takes centre stage. I guess I could overlook it because overall I was just pleased with how Chandler pulled everything together. The finish is a little foggy and jumbled, and the conclusion could be a little unrealistic.
Along the way, he narrowly avoids being seduced by both a dark and a fair woman gets detained and threatened by police, is assaulted by hoods, and comes face to face with a terrifying but incredibly cunning crime boss who, almost always, is less corrupt than the affluent clients or the police. Marlowe finally unravels the underlying riddle of the first one, but the satisfying conclusion only leaves him with a sour taste in his mouth. Prior to the publication of Playback, in which he is, oh no, engaged, Marlowe only killed one person and slept with one woman.
This book, the sixth in the private eye Philip Marlowe series by noir master Raymond Chandler, is my pick for the best American novel of the post-World War II era. Chandler hung his artistic concerns and pessimistic vision from the fragments of the private eye/noir tropes like a coatrack. Contrary to his contemporaries Hammett and Cain, he has more in common with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. (and frequently is on par with Max Perkins’ big boys).
