Tag: Raymond Chandler

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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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 Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

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Having read a Philip Marlowe continuation novel, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne, I felt it was time to return to the original novels by Raymond Chandler. A long time ago, he used to be a real favourite of mine. How would his writing seem to me now, a lifetime later?

I assumed that I had read all the Philip Marlowe books, so when I took The Little Sister out of the library, I thought I would be re-reading it. As I started reading, it did not seem very familiar and I realised that I had missed this one.

What a treat it was to have a Marlowe story come up fresh! I think it might just be the best of them, having a slight edge over The Long Goodbye. What I had forgotten is the intensity of Chandler’s writing, the visual quality that makes reading him feel like watching a film noir in one’s mind’s eye. He is such a marvellous prose stylist. Let’s face it, he’s a considerably better writer than many other American writers of the second half of the twentieth century who have more “literary” reputations.  

He didn’t invent that distinctive first-person style, but he did refine and perfect it. Every now and then we get a hint that Marlowe is an educated man. “Browning, the poet not the gun.”, for example. This justifies the language in which his thoughts are framed.

So many of the writers I have liked over the years use a style that derives from Chandler. Len Deighton borrowed quite heavily from Chandler in his early novels, perhaps most of all in Billion Dollar Brain where the assassin uses the same killing method as in The Little Sister. Derek Raymond went so far as to adopt “Raymond” as his pen name. Philip Kerr used a world-weary, Marlowe style detective to examine the Third Reich.

This time, I’m not going to bother with a detailed description of the plot. Chandler himself was famously unconcerned about that side of things. During the filming of The Big Sleep, when asked to confirm a detail in the plot, he said he had no idea. What plot there is here is driven by the search for some photographs that could compromise the career of a rising Hollywood star. But why are people prepared to kill to get them? 

It’s the atmosphere, the sense of place, the feeling that Marlowe is involved in murky goings-on that he can’t quite understand, that are so compelling. Marlowe’s not really a logical detective in the Holmes manner, more of an intuitive one like Maigret.

This story seems even more cynical than the others. It’s full of quotable passages, including the famous line about Los Angeles: “A city with all the personality of a paper cup”. There is a description of a well-off lawyer: “He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.”

Perhaps it is the Hollywood setting that makes this one so good. Chandler had seen it all from the inside by the time this was published and he uses his knowledge to great effect. He had worked very successfully in the film industry, writing the original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia and adapting Double Indemnity. As the movie mogul says “Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars’ worth of book-keeping”.

The reference to the studio owning “1500 theatres” is a reminder that this was published in 1949 and set in the late 1940s, just before the legal challenge that forced the studios to sell off the cinemas, thus ending their monopoly of the business that was more or less a licence to print money.

It’s a detective story but also a look at the dark side of Hollywood glamour. Money values have become the only values in Los Angeles, making the city a target for all kinds of criminal interests and vulnerable to corruption. This is something more than a murder mystery and Chandler is a serious writer who cannot be confined to a category marked “detective story”.

He is contemplating serious matters here as in this description of Marlowe coming across a dead man: “Something had happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence.”

Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

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Lawrence Osborne was the third writer commissioned by the estate of Raymond Chandler to write a Philip Marlowe continuation novel and Only to Sleep was published in 2018.

The brilliant idea here is that it is 1988, the tail-end of the Reagan era, and Marlowe is seventy-two, retired and living in the part of Mexico that is just south of California. When an insurance company in San Diego approaches him to investigate a claim, he can’t resist accepting the case; one last job to stave off the boredom and inertia of retirement.

It’s the sort of mystery familiar from Marlowe’s earlier career. Wealthy property developer Donald Zinn has died in Mexico and his Mexican widow is making a claim on the life insurance. The company suspect it may be a fraud and that Zinn is still alive. Marlowe is despatched to Mexico to find out the truth.

Marlowe is not quite what he was, though. That’s hardly a surprise given the hard living that was depicted in Chandler’s books. He has got his drinking just about under control, but tends to have strange dreams. He has a limp because of arthritis and walks with the aid of a cane. It’s suggested that he is impotent now. Something of what he was remains though, because the cane is actually a swordstick. His determination and quick wits in a sticky situation are still intact, too. So is that moral sense, the feeling that in the end he will do the right thing because he can’t help it. 

Marlowe laments the way the world has changed, and what he sees as debased modern tastes in clothes and music. He remains a suit-and-tie man, fond of the old jazz songs. As much as a detective story, this is a meditation on the passage of time, ageing and retirement, and facing up to mortality.

Pretty soon the plot turns into a pursuit of a man who may or may not be Zinn. There’s a hint that Zinn is a sort of sinister double of Marlowe, being another retiree yet married to a Mexican woman half his age. It has the same dream-like feel of never quite coming into focus that you find in Raymond Chandler’s books. This is reflected in the title, taken from an Aztec song: “We come here only to dream/We come only to sleep”.

The real main character of this book is Mexico, described with such vividness that you have to read quite slowly to take in the precise, descriptive prose. Osborne is also a travel writer, after all, and catches the bright light and colour of Mexico. He has reproduced the distinctive tone of Marlowe’s first-person narration, but also subtly adapted it. Marlowe is as observant as ever, but the setting is Mexico, not Los Angeles. He is older and a bit gloomier.

Once again Marlowe is on a quest, a road trip from hotel room to hotel room as he goes further south into Mexico and further from America in every sense. Much as the book recalls Chandler, it also reminded me quite strongly of Patricia Highsmith. I am thinking of those tales of American expatriates adrift in Greece or North Africa where dollars will buy a lot of things not available at home. There’s also a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald in a rather sinister Gatsbyesque masked party.

This is that rare thing, a continuation novel that is based on the work of another writer yet stands up on its own as work of fiction. I don’t think you have to have read Raymond Chandler to get a lot out of Only to Sleep.