When it comes to Raymond Chandler’s novels starring the smart-ass, misanthropic PI Phillip Marlowe, there’s The Long Goodbye and then there's everything else Chandler ever wrote—and it’s a long, lonely drive in-between. The Big Sleep, Farwell, My Lovely, and The Little Sister are all seminal works of the hard-boiled genre, too be sure; and on any other day of the week each is its own fuel-injected suicide machine; but in a bare-knuckled brawl, these books are packing wet noodles for arms when th...

I enjoyed the atmospherics and mood of this one, the last of Chandler’s detective stories featuring Philip Marlowe. This one is different in being more meditative and in having more of a focus on alienation among the wealthy residents of gated compounds. Chandler also restrains Marlowe’s use of colorful similes in his interior monologues, which became a cliché in many of his imitators. Compared to the earlier tales, Chandler is more judicious here in the playful, sardonic banter Marlowe uses for...

Tom was a quiet, reserved kind of guy. Which at the time was unusual within my circle of friends. Most everyone I knew back when I first returned to Sheffield was a lush, a druggie or just plain crazy. I made friends in pubs and clubs. My friends didn’t exist in the daytime. Except Tom. He was 24/7. Normal. I was in a bad way myself, although I couldn’t see it. Perhaps the company I kept gave me a false sense of my emotional and physical well-being. When J is getting the sack because he has been...

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)So are you familiar already with the "One Book One Chicago" (OBOC) program? We're not the first city to do it (in fact, we stole the idea from Seattle), but are definitely now the largest city in America to do so; basically, roughly three or four times a year the Mayor's Office and the public library...

Queer Eye for the Private Eye"People have such queer ideas about private detectives."Raymond Chandler, "The Long Good-Bye" (page 69)Kiss Me Goodbye (An Ode to Philip Marlowe and Terry Lennox)[Apologies to Martin Fry and Christopher Marlowe]I never promised you eternityI never meant to be unkindAll I gave, you returned to meNow love's the last thing on your mind.I never promised you a miracleWhat you desired was a guarantee.This song’s not meant to be satiricalOur love was just a carnal parody.No...

I was a little underwhelmed by The Big Sleep but liked it well enough that I thought I might over the course of a few years read all the Marlowe mysteries in order. But when late last year a friend of mine read The Long Goodbye, the sixth Marlowe mystery, and gave it a rare (for him) five stars, it occurred to me that civilization might very well collapse before I got a chance to read books #2-5, and at that point the pages of The Long Goodbye would be needed as kindling to warm the intrepid ban...

To say goodbye is to die a little.There are some books that just feel good to have on your dashboard, never too far from your fingertips to read in the tiny gaps between obligations and responsibility. The type of book that rides shotgun and keeps you company through the darker hours, through lonely nights at a shady laundromat or booze-soaked rainstorms on your porch. Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is that sort of book, that sort of friend. The past few months have seen some bleak times an...

(Book 511 from 1001 books) - The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6), Raymond ChandlerThe Long Goodbye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. Some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book". The novel opens outside a club called the Dancers. It is late October or early November. No sp...

Philip Marlowe a cynical shamus looks down at the parking lot of The Dancers Club, watching a drunk be put into his car a silver Rolls Royce, but the annoyed valet has trouble, the left leg refuses to be moved inside, instead remains firmly on the ground. Where the rest of the intoxicated man will soon be also. The pretty red- headed woman sitting next to him or was, in the automobile is very angry with good reason. Turns out she is Sylvia Lennox ex- wife of this inebriated war veteran (Second W...

As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm reading detective fiction and stealing everything of value. My story takes place in L.A. of the early '90s, but I'm buying every type of firework on the stand and lighting the fuse. Though I've seen Philip Marlowe adapted to film or television, my introduction to the fiction of Raymond Chandler is The Long Goodbye, the author's sixth novel featuring the Los Angeles private dick. Published in 1953, it's long in the tooth, but it's a testament to Chandler's...

Philip Marlowe saves a drunken guy from being dumped in a ditch. He does it again another time. He does is yet again another time. And another. And another. Finally he gets into trouble for doing this: no good deed ever goes unpunished.This book gives a very realistic gritty picture of US life in early fifties. It provides social commentary on the subject. It is considered by many critics to be the best Raymond Chandler novel, a classic of literature in general. It also happened to be unnecessar...

This is the sixth and last of the full-length novels that Raymond Chandler wrote featuring his iconic detective, Philip Marlowe. It's also the most personal in that Chandler seems to have based two of the characters, Terry Lennox and Roger Wade, at least in part on himself.At the book opens, Marlowe meets a man named Terry Lennox outside of a nightclub. Lennox is very drunk and his date drives off and leaves him. Marlowe, being a good samaritan, takes Lennox to his own home, sobers him up and th...

Chandler’s known as the king of LA noir and word is this is his best. His writing is lean and clean, short staccato sentences with not a word wasted. Almost poetic in its brevity – not to be confused with lack of substance. Humour me, I’m trying it out on this review (view spoiler)[it's fun - you should try it sometime (hide spoiler)] Marlowe’s amazingly complex, a fast-talking P.I. surviving on tough cynicism. Deep down just a stand-up guy with a soft spot for underdogs. Got a moral core that

A down and out friend of Marlowe's flees to Mexico with Marlowe's help, his wife dead under suspicious circumstances. Marlowe's friend soon turns up dead, an apparent suicide. But what does his death, if anything, have to do with a drunk writer Marlowe finds himself watching?I'm not really sure how I feel about the Long Goodbye. It's Chandler so the writing is great, with Chandler's trademark similes and hard-boiled atmosphere. On the other hand, it's written a little differently than his other

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.” ― Raymond Chandler, The Long GoodbyeLabels like genius and masterpiece get thrown around a lot in the arts. Certain writers are deemed to be brilliant and yet their stars fade quickly. Their notable books are soon forgotten, misplaced, unread and eventually pulped. Other writers seem to have the opposite trajectory. They are viewed as pulp or genre writers, but over time they seem to transcend the genre and even seem to dance on the graves...

People. They pass through your life, your mind, your heart, bundled in their own worlds with their wants and needs and feelings. And they'll tangle you up and drag you with and leave you with a lump in your throat and a weight in your gut. That's the best case scenario. Worst case scenario you end up broken, in jail, dead. Philip avoids the latter case with an insight into the human condition so instinctive and accurate it is frankly terrifying. Doesn't help him at all with the former though. Be...

Marlow is back and drawn into the nightmare world of rich alcoholics, adulterers, and of course, of murder. A solid Philip Marlow story full of twists and ever increasing complications that kept me there right to the end. I enjoyed the experience even I felt it was a tad too long and the Marlow of the books never seems as powerful a character as the one that I got from the movies in my youth.

The Long Goodbye"The Long Goodbye" is the sixth novel in Chandler's Philip Marlowe universe, written some years after Chandler's other Marlowe novels and at a time when Chandler was going through a rough patch. "The Long Goodbye" is a large departure in some measures from the other Marlowe novels and has a different feel and rhythm to it altogether. Gone is the frenetic pace, the snappy dialogue, the quick pulling it all together. There is a certain melancholy, a wistfulness, to this one. And, i...

It is generally agreed that The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s penultimate novel, is his final masterpiece. A single reading easily affirms that. A rereading, which brings with it a foreknowledge of events and the ability to consider all its far-reaching elements collectively, creates a corollary to that longstanding assertion: yes it is a classic--but it should not have been. There are several structural flaws, though each can be quelled with the same irrefutable response. For example: the bo...

Chandler wrote tighter, tougher books, but this one was his masterpiece. I'd been pulled into loving noir by Hammett & W. R. Burnett but they didn't write like Chandler. The Long Goodbye has all the best snappy dialog and constant menace, but it had something more. It was cynical poetry, it had the brittleness and immediacy of the "existential", as we used to call it. It had a thoroughly adult, disillusioned worldview but it also had a hero who refused to renounce his principles, even when his p...