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The Long Goodbye Paperback – August 12, 1988
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In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
- Print length379 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage Crime/Black Lizard
- Publication dateAugust 12, 1988
- Dimensions5.18 x 0.79 x 7.96 inches
- ISBN-100394757688
- ISBN-13978-0394757681
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.” --The New Yorker
“Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” --Robert B. Parker, The New York Times Book Review
“Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.” --Los Angeles Times
“Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.” —The Boston Book Review
“Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler’s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.” --Literary Review
“[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.” --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” —Ross Macdonald
“Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.” --Erle Stanley Gardner
“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” --Paul Auster
“[Chandler]’s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that’s like ours, but isn’t. ” --Carolyn See
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.
The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.
"Look, mister," he said with an edge to his voice, "would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg into the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?"
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.
A low-swung foreign speedster with no top drifted into the parking lot and a man got out of it and used the dash lighter on a long cigarette. He was wearing a pullover check shirt, yellow slacks, and riding boots. He strolled off trailing clouds of incense, not even bothering to look towards the Rolls-Royce. He probably thought it was corny. At the foot of the steps up to the terrace he paused to stick a monocle in his eye.
The girl said with a nice burst of charm: "I have a wonderful idea, darling. Why don't we just take a cab to your place and get your convertible out? It's such a wonderful night for a run up the coast to Montecito. I know some people there who are throwing a dance around the pool."
The white-haired lad said politely: "Awfully sorry, but I don't have it any more. I was compelled to sell it." From his voice and articulation you wouldn't have known he had had anything stronger than orange juice to drink.
"Sold it, darling? How do you mean?" She slid away from him along the seat but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.
"I mean I had to," he said. "For eating money.
"Oh, I see." A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now.
The attendant had the white-haired boy right where he could reach him--in a low-income bracket. "Look, buster," he said, "I've got to put a car away. See you some more some other time--maybe."
He let the door swing open. The drunk promptly slid off the seat and landed on the blacktop on the seat of his pants. So I went over and dropped my nickel. I guess it's always a mistake to interfere with a drunk. Even if he knows and likes you he is always liable to haul off and poke you in the teeth. I got him under the arms and got him up on his feet.
'Thank you so very much," he said politely.
The girl slid under the wheel. "He gets so goddam English when he's loaded," she said in a stainless-steel voice. "Thanks for catching him."
"I'll get him in the back of the car," I said.
"I'm terribly sorry. I'm late for an engagement." She let the clutch in and the Rolls started to glide. "He's just a lost dog," she added with a cool smile. "Perhaps you can find a home for him. He's housebroken--more or less."
And the Rolls ticked down the entrance driveway onto Sunset Boulevard, made a right turn, and was gone. I was looking after her when the attendant came back. And I was still holding the man up and he was now sound asleep.
"Well, that's one way of doing it," I told the white coat.
"Sure," he said cynically. "Why waste it on a lush? Them curves and all."
"You know him?"
"I heard the dame call him Terry. Otherwise I don't know him from a cow's caboose. But I only been here two weeks."
"Get my car, will you?" I gave him the ticket.
By the time he brought my Olds over I felt as if I was holding up a sack of lead. The white coat helped me get him into the front seat. The customer opened an eye and thanked us and went to sleep again.
"He's the politest drunk I ever met," I said to the white coat.
"They come all sizes and shapes and all kinds of manners," he said. "And they're all bums. Looks like this one had a plastic job one time."
"Yeah." I gave him a dollar and he thanked me. He was right about the plastic job. The right side of my new friend's face was frozen and whitish and seamed with thin fine scars. The skin had a glossy look along the scars. A plastic job and a pretty drastic one.
"Whatcha aim to do with him?"
"Take him home and sober him up enough to tell me where he lives."
The white coat grinned at me. "Okay, sucker. If it was me, I'd just drop him in the gutter and keep going. Them booze hounds just make a man a lot of trouble for no fun. I got a philosophy about them things. The way the competition is nowadays a guy has to save his strength to protect hisself in the clinches."
"I can see you've made a big success out of it," I said.
He looked puzzled and then he started to get mad, but by that time I was in the car and moving.
He was partly right of course. Terry Lennox made me plenty of trouble. But after all that's my line of work.
* * *
I was living that year in a house on Yucca Avenue in the Laurel Canyon district. It was a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way. It was furnished, and it belonged to a woman who had gone to Idaho to live with her widowed daughter for a while. The rent was low, partly because the owner wanted to be able to come back on short notice, and partly because of the steps. She was getting too old to face them every time she came home.
I got the drunk up them somehow. He was eager to help but his legs were rubber and he kept falling asleep in the middle of an apologetic sentence. I got the door unlocked and dragged him inside and spread him on the long couch, threw a rug over him and let him go back to sleep. He snored like a grampus for an hour. Then he came awake all of a sudden and wanted to go to the bathroom. When he came back he looked at me peeringly, squinting his eyes, and wanted to know where the hell he was. I told him. He said his name was Terry Lennox and that he lived in an apartment in Westwood and no one was waiting up for him. His voice was clear and unslurred.
He said he could handle a cup of black coffee. When I brought it he sipped it carefully holding the saucer close under the cup.
"How come I'm here?" he asked, looking around.
"You squiffed out at The Dancers in a Rolls. Your girl friend ditched you."
"Quite," he said. "No doubt she was entirely justified."
"You English?"
"I've lived there. I wasn't born there. If I might call a taxi, I'll take myself off."
"You've got one waiting."
He made the steps on his own going down. He didn't say much on the way to Westwood, except that it was very kind of me and he was sorry to be such a nuisance. He had probably said it so often and to so many people that it was automatic.
His apartment was small and stuffy and impersonal. He might have moved in that afternoon. On a coffee table in front of a hard green davenport there was a half empty Scotch bottle and melted ice in a bowl and three empty fizzwater bottles and two glasses and a glass ash tray loaded with stubs with and without lipstick. There wasn't a photograph or a personal article of any kind in the place. It might have been a hotel room rented for a meeting or a farewell, for a few drinks and a talk, for a roll in the hay. It didn't look like a place where anyone lived.
He offered me a drink. I said no thanks. I didn't sit down. When I left he thanked me some more, but not as if I had climbed a mountain for him, nor as if it was nothing at all. He was a little shaky and a little shy but polite as hell. He stood in the open door until the automatic elevator came up and I got into it. Whatever he didn't have he had manners.
He hadn't mentioned the girl again. Also, he hadn't mentioned that he had no job and no prospects and that almost his last dollar had gone into paying the check at The Dancers for a bit of high class fluff that couldn't stick around long enough to make sure he didn't get tossed in the sneezer by some prowl car boys, or rolled by a tough hackie and dumped out in a vacant lot.
On the way down in the elevator I had an impulse to go back up and take the Scotch bottle away from him. But it wasn't any of my business and it never does any good anyway. They always find a way to get it if they have to have it.
I drove home chewing my lip. I'm supposed to be tough but there was something about the guy that got me. I didn't know what it was unless it was the white hair and the scarred face and the clear voice and the politeness. Maybe that was enough. There was no reason why I should ever see him again. He was just a lost dog, like the girl said.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; Reissue edition (August 12, 1988)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 379 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0394757688
- ISBN-13 : 978-0394757681
- Item Weight : 13.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.18 x 0.79 x 7.96 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #46,552 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #373 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- #741 in Private Investigator Mysteries (Books)
- #1,040 in Amateur Sleuths
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.
Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe.
Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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I would say that in this novel more so than any of the other Marlowe’s I have read, there is less a focus on the actual plot (which does get quite a bit confusing in the second half), and more focus on the actual character of Marlowe. Within the scope of the plot, Marlowe’s commentary and cynicism is there, but also there is a bit of a more reflective, philosophical nature to him as he tries to care for a drunk friend (Lennox) and, then later, tries to solve a murder mystery that has unfolded.
I really thought Chandler’s prose through Marlowe’s point of view and perspective is so on point and sharp: “Guys with a hundred million dollars live a peculiar life, behind a screen of servants, bodyguards, secretaries, lawyers, and tame executives. Presumably, they eat, sleep, get their hair cut, and wear clothes. But you never know for sure. Everything you read or hear about them has been processed by a public relations gang of guys who are paid big money to maintain and create a usable personality….”
At one point, Marlowe becomes entangled and embroiled himself in the murder case and suspected, and, along the way, must deal with many seedy, unpredictable, and unsavory characters in the city as he tries to solve the case on his own. There are quite a few shenanigans pulled by these said characters, and it is always interesting how Marlowe tries to read them and size up the potential damage before he proceeds.
I would venture to say that, while The Long Goodbye is definitely a mystery (there is one key mystery at hand, but one could make the case that there are two or three other minor mysteries to be revealed), I think most of the emphasis is on the study of Marlowe.
The ending (or endings, as I felt like there were several “endings” here) does get a bit murky and muddled, and the finale might be a tad unbelievable, but I guess I could forgive it because over all I was just impressed with how Chandler put everything together.
There is also a film version, 1973’s “The Long Goodbye”, with Elliot Gould in the role of Marlowe, that I’m interested in viewing.
Chandler recycled the same story elements over and over again, knowing plot has nothing to do with story. All of his novels go something like this: Marlowe gets hired to help someone out of a jam, closes the case pretty quickly, but the solution has raised more questions than answered. Marlowe pursues the truth on his own, realizes his client has been concealing a past crime from him and he had initially been hired to tidy up the loose ends. Along the way he narrowly escapes seduction by a dark lady and a fair lady, is arrested and threatened by the cops, beaten up by hoods, and goes nose to nose with a fearsome but super-smart crime boss, who invariably is less corrupt than the wealthy clients or the police. At the end Marlowe solves the latent mystery behind the first one, and closure only leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. Only once did Marlowe ever kill anybody, and only once (prior to the last novel Playback, where he's yikes, engaged) does he sleep with anybody.
Marlowe himself, who narrates the books, is quite a construct. He charges 25.00 a day plus expenses, and he doesn't do divorce work. He lives alone in a shabby Hollywood rental bungalow, drinks too much, plays the tough lout but reads Flaubert secretly, plays solitary chess as a hobby. He seems to prefer to take a beating than hand one out. He hates the rich, has contempt for the cops, and loathes bullies of all stripes. He is a magnet for women, but lovemaking to him seems largely to consist of elaborate verbal dueling/repartee. His celibacy seems a choice, a means of retaining purity and honor in a corrupt world, but a choice that he is aware is pathological and self-defeating.
When Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye in the early '50's, the private eye genre had already been frozen into nostalgic cliche. The violent nihilism of Mickey Spillane had supplanted Chandler's knightly quester. Chandler perhaps felt free to expand his pallet -- while the outline of the plot follows all the conventions the earlier books did, here the length is doubled, the pace slowed down, the genre elements give way to richer characterizations and an even deeper ambivalence in the soul of Philip Marlowe. Chandler apparently knew he would be retiring Marlowe soon, so he sent him off with a full-fledged novel. I will divulge none of the specifics, except to say that The Long Goodbye takes Marlowe's singular virtues -- idealism, cynicism, loyalty, doggedness -- and submits them to deep questioning. Along the way, the reader is treated to the definitive portrait of Los Angeles as the place where people come to flee their past and change their identity -- the Great Wrong Place, and Chandler's pitch-perfect metaphor for all that's wrong with America -- the denial of history, the insane materialism, the false belief in escape-as-redemption.
Calling this a hard-boiled mystery is like calling Moby Dick a book about whaling. While The Long Goodbye is a terrific example of the genre, it's also a meditation on our culture and our failings and the impossibility of heroism in the modern world. It's no stretch to say the Chandler sought to re-create Eliot's Wasteland for mass consumption, concealed in the trappings of pulp fiction. Here he succeeds.
Top reviews from other countries



The plot has surprises, guys with guns, a sense of mystery...but it is the way he tells it that makes this book unputdownable. If Chandler didn't like the way America was going in the 50s, goodness knows what he would have made of it now. But this book - and the hero who doesn't like money and what it does to people - puts down a marker that will last a very long time. There is not enough writing like this.

Also there were less of the usual one liner quips that I have so enjoyed in the previous stories.
Didn't really care about any of the main characters in this story, including Marlowe at some points!
