posted on 24 Apr 2024

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Published in 1953, The Long Goodbye comes along as the sixth novel featuring the hard-boiled private dick with a heart, Philip Marlowe. If you’re a fan of Chandler’s earlier novels – The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely for example – you’ll find yourself in very familiar territory. As always there’s tons of atmosphere, plenty of smart-cracking dialogue, the constant threat of violence and plenty of colourful characters who are, on their own, worth the price of the book.

But you’ll also find something a little different with The Long Goodbye. Marlowe is older, more world-weary than ever and has developed a distinctly more jaundiced view of the kind of society that breeds the characters that populate world. Unusually for Chandler, he also drops some substantial chunks of his own biography into the book – the writer, Roger Wade, who is struggling with alcohol addiction, a dysfunctional marriage and a cloud of looming depression caused by the need to write the books that made him famous but which he dislikes, is clearly some part Chandler himself.

Chandler’s books are famous for their complexity, with plots that often don’t stand too much scrutiny for their verisimilitude and plenty of hanging loose ends that simply get forgotten. Here, however, essentially two key plotlines become intertwined and get tied-up together at the end. In the opening story strand, Marlowe finds himself developing a unlikely friendship of sorts with Terry Lennox, a distinctive-looking man who the private detective literally picks up out of the gutter as he ends up on the wrong side of an argument with his wife outside a nightclub.

The two men then meet several times for drinks before Lennox turns up one day asking for Marlowe to drive him to an airport and ask no questions. He’s not sure what to do but he agrees – only to discover later that Lennox’s wife has been found dead with her face literally smashed in. A run in with the police follows for Marlowe until the case is dropped because of links to a rich and powerful man.

Marlowe is left with a single ‘gift’ from Lennox – a ‘portrait of Madison’ (a $5,000 note).

Subsequently Marlowe is approached by a publisher to act as a minder to a successful writer – Roger Wade – who is struggling to finish his latest book. But inevitably, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds and slowly and in a circulatory way, the Roger Wade story and the Terry Lennox story begin to come together around the rich, powerful and amoral families that lie behind the characters.

Marlowe is increasingly disgusted by what he uncovers but he’s also determined to do right by his erstwhile friend, Lennox and he refuses to stop following the trail of his friend’s disappearance and supposed death.

I’ll leave you to find out how this all plays out. I’ve not really scratched much of the plot’s surface – so there’s plenty more left for you to dig into.

The Long Goodbye isn’t perhaps quite as convoluted as some of the other novels but it would still take more space than I’ve got here to summarize all the twists and turns of the story. But maybe the deepest impression you’ll be left with is the sense of a man – Marlowe or Chandler? – who has maybe seen as much of this world as he can stand. There would only be one more novel from Chandler after this – Payback in 1958 – before the author died in 1959.

Paperback copies of the book are easy enough to find – new or second hand – but if you’d like a lovely first edition with a jacket, I hope you’ve got deep pockets.

 

Terry Potter

April 2024