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The
Long Goodbye
by
Raymond Chandler
Reviewed
by
Mike Baker
“The
room was so quiet you could almost hear the temperature drop.”
Marlowe’s occasional drinking buddy and lost cause,
Terry Lennox, shows up on Marlowe’s doorstep, gun in hand, needing a fast
ride to Tijuana, which Marlowe assumes means Lennox did something very bad.
He doesn’t want to know, and he says so. Later, Lennox’s wife Sylvia is found
naked with her melon smashed, dead as a graveyard, with Lennox discovered in
a Mexican motel room, with a self-inflicted fist-sized hole in the back of
his head.
Next, Marlowe gets hired to watch a
dangerous blackout alcoholic named Roger Wade, who also happens to be a
bestselling author of historical action novels, bodice rippers, and genre
fiction. There’s a connection between Wade, his wife Eileen, and the
now-deceased Mrs. Lennox. ’50s LA shenanigans ensue.
It took me a solid week to read the
first 40 pages of The Long Goodbye. Marlowe describes his on-again,
off-again friendship with Terry Lennox, which Chandler needs for the setup
and the novel’s turn, but Chandler could have done the same thing in two
pages. I almost quit the book but didn’t. And I’m glad for it. Chandler was
watching his own wife die as he wrote the book, and, in retrospect, it feels
like he was writing the way he might have been living—a little dead inside,
punctuated by moments of clarity and pain. I kept thinking it could have been
pages shorter, but not being Chandler’s equal as a word mechanic, I was at a
loss for exactly how and where it could have happened.
“The
tragedy of life isn’t that things die young. It’s that they grow old and
mean.”
Chandler ends certain chapters, not
by advancing the plot, but by describing nature—mockingbirds, mostly, living
in the bushes and trees of LA. Both as metaphor and warning, they foreshadow
the book’s hard, perilous direction but also rope in ideas one might have
about a man lamenting his losses.
It’s as if Chandler is playing a
writing game whose single rule is to see how flat he can go, taking the
reader to the edge of irritation and disdain before doing something
interesting, thus causing the rubes reading the book to hang in one more
time—literary chicken, if you will—a hardboiled1 version of The
Aristocrats! Except it isn’t, is it? Something is grinding at Chandler,
and thus Marlowe, who was always Chandler’s surrogate—a man of letters becomes
a man of action. Except in this book, Marlowe keeps taking beatings. He’s
ineffectual as a man and as a detective, seemingly a step behind. Again, this
seems right because this isn’t The Big Sleep. Like the vigilantes are
fond of telling the soon-to-be-dead, “This isn’t business, it’s personal.”
There is the issue of Terry Lennox
and Roger Wade.
I stayed away from this in my review
of The Big Sleep, where Marlowe is massively homophobic, which was
common for the time, but to the extent that one wonders what he’s actually
uncomfortable with: gay men, or his own secret unspoken love of dick. The
Long Goodbye is different in that he consistently describes Terry Lennox
as you would describe a crush. Again, it was more common back then, deep male
friendship, and maybe more innocent. You either buy it or you don’t. An
alternative, for me, has to do with Marlowe’s fundamental loneliness. Lennox
is a lost soul like Marlowe. He’s drawn to Lennox because Lennox has
standards. He won’t take help from his friends. Marlowe sees himself in
Lennox. Lennox is a lost knight in tarnished armor, just like Marlowe.
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Somewhere in the middle of the book, he meets
historical romance novelist Roger Wade who says of his own books that he
writes long books because people equate the length of a book with its
quality. Wade is similar—another cynical lost soul, but he’s more than that.
He’s an avatar for Chandler. A good writer, critiqued for writing genre, a
drunk. Marlowe claims he doesn’t understand him. Chandler claims to not
understand himself. This is all armchair psychology bullshit, but it sits
steady in my thinking. The fact is, Chandler is the opposite of Wade. He
isn’t a hack. He writes crime because it’s what he’s about. Wade is pure
whore.
One last note about The Long
Goodbye, and it’s a spoiler, so, if you haven’t read it or seen the
movie, stop reading NOW.
I prefer the movie’s ending to the book’s ending2, and not
because Altman’s ending is more clever—it’s because Chandler’s ending, is
James Bond implausible and pulp magazine corny. Chandler was a better writer
than that. Altman’s is the ending I wish Chandler wrote.
I would 100% recommend you read this
before you read any of the mediocrity most of us paperback original
aficionados grind through as we desperately hunt for that absolute gem—but
only if you’ve read The Big Sleep first. This is not for amateurs.
This is for the die-hard believers, the windmill tilters, and the white
knights adrift in a world full of darkness.
“Cops
never say goodbye. They always hope to see you again in the lineup.”
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1. I read a review of Philip Kerr’s March
Violets where the reviewer accused Kerr of trying to out hardboiled the
masters. He apparently never read the 2 pages Chandler spends pontificating
on the different types of blondes, tragic or otherwise, and how Mrs. Lennox
was something wholly never seen before in the blonde department. Chandler
regularly out hardboils himself. He spends two pages cataloging the different
types of tragic blondes but only four sentences describing the different
reasons people become murders. This isn’t a criticism. It’s that he
understood tragic blondes were more complicated than murders.
2. Ironically, it turns out, the book’s long
wobbly plot made it perfect for Robert Altman’s wobbly narrative approach,
and while I’m not throwing shade on Chandler or the book, for a novel it’s
better as a movie even if you think Eliot Gould is too laconic, mumbly, and
irreverent to be Marlowe—he has the same cool detachment as Marlowe but seemingly stands
back from his anger trying to objectively sort through the clues.
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