I first read Raymond Chandler when I was barely out of my teens and now I’ve come to the end of my re-read of his novels with The Long Goodbye. This was the sixth novel featuring his Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. It was published in 1953 and won the Edgar award in 1955. I know a lot of people think it is Chandler’s masterpiece. It is certainly a bit different to the others. It’s longer, moves more slowly and is sadder, somehow. There is more social comment and it’s as much a portrait of a corrupt society as anything Dickens ever wrote.
It’s something of a self-portrait as well with two characters who have elements of Chandler himself about them. If Terry Lennox is damaged by his war experiences, Roger Wade is a writer with a drink problem, who feels that his books are underrated because he writes genre fiction. The overall mood of the book feels as if F Scott Fitzgerald had decided to write a detective story. There are quite a lot of literary references as well, with quotes from T S Eliot, Shakespeare, and Christopher Marlowe.
I think the central theme in the book and what gives it that air of melancholy is Philip Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox, who is introduced in that striking opening sentence: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.”
Later on, Marlowe helps Lennox escape to Mexico without asking too many questions and then comes under suspicion himself when it turns out that Lennox was a suspect in a murder case.
That seems to be that and then Marlowe is asked by a concerned publisher to help the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who is struggling to finish a novel. Rather against his will, Marlowe finds himself drawn further into the lives of the wealthy inhabitants of the appropriately named Idle Valley.
This appears to be a second story, totally unconnected to the first but slowly and surely the connection between the two becomes apparent.
A good example of the atmosphere of the book is the scene where Marlowe stands by the lake at the back of Wade’s house and watches the speedboat and the surfer on the water. This has a kind of poetic resonance but also functions as part of the plot because we later find out that the noise of the engine masked a gunshot.
One thing that strikes me is how modern the book still feels, given that it was published in 1953. It seems to have influenced every depiction of Los Angeles since that time. There are drug-dealing doctors, mysterious out-of-town medical establishments and it all feels rather familiar from later books and films. Press magnate Harlan Potter seems to be the original for the John Huston character in Chinatown. The notorious Los Angeles smog is mentioned quite a lot, twenty years before the photo on the cover of Tim Buckley’s record Greetings from L A.
But then Chandler was a very influential writer in other ways. He didn’t invent the first-person, sardonic, private eye narrator (that was Dashiell Hammett) but he did refine and perfect the idea, giving a model to follow to many later writers such as Len Deighton and, more recently, Philip Kerr.
The phrase the “long goodbye” was mentioned in the news the other day, because of the death of Gene Hackman. It is now used to refer to cases of Alzheimer’s, apparently. That theme is in the book, though almost hidden in what appears to be a sub-plot. When Marlowe is trying to find Roger Wade, his only clue is that the doctor’s name begins with the letter “v”. He finds three such doctors and one of them runs a rather sinister old people’s home, where the frail elderly are kept sedated and presumably fleeced of their money. Later on, a character writes something in their suicide note about not wanting to live to be old so “the long goodbye” does not just refer to Terry Lennox. Did I notice that theme when I was younger? I don’t remember that I did. A really good book reveals more and deeper meanings with the passage of time and re-reading.
There is also a fascinating connection with the recent TV drama about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, in 1955. One of the detectives explains to Marlowe why the police have not looked further into a murder. “You don’t fool around with an open-shut case, even if there’s no heat to get it finalized and forgotten [. . .] No police department in the world has the men or the time to question the obvious.” This is exactly what happened in the Ruth Ellis case, I think.
Two years later, Chandler wrote a letter to the London Evening Standard criticising the decision to execute Ruth Ellis. He wrote that it was barbaric and that no other country would have done it.
I’ve never seen the 1970s film of The Long Goodbye and I don’t think I want to. It isn’t supposed to have much to do with the book, as it has been updated to the 1970s and the plot has been altered. It’s a pity, because a decent film, done in the correct period, could have been quite something.
Is The Long Goodbye Chandler’s masterpiece? I don’t know, but it does have a haunting quality, with the characters lingering long in the mind. I liked it when I first read it all those years ago and I like it even more now. One of those “books of a lifetime”, I guess.
The Good Reader 