Sat 21 Mar 2020
A 1001 Midnights PI Review: RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Long Goodbye.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[6] Comments
by Marcia Muller
RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe #6. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1954. Pocket #1044, paperback, 1955. Reprinted many time, both in paperback and hardcover. TV adaptation: “The Long Goodbye” on Climax, 07 Oct 1954. with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. Film: United Artists, 1973, with Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe.
The title of this novel is apt. It is a long book and a complex one, and its detractors say they wish Chandler had said goodbye two-thirds of the way through. What these critics fail to understand is that the novel is one of the most realistic looks into the day-to-day life of a private investigator, and the central plot element, that of Philip Marlowe’s friendship for the mostly undeserving Terry Lennox, is a compelling unifying element. In it we also see a different side of Marlowe than in Chandler’s other novels: the man who is as honorable in his personal relationships as he is in his professional ones.
The story begins when Marlowe first sees Terry Lennox, dissolute man-about-town: he is “drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers,†a ritzy L.A. nightspot, with a redheaded girl beside him whose blue mink “almost made the Rolls Royce look like just another automobile.” The girl leaves Terry, Good Samaritan Marlowe takes over, and a friendship begins.
It is a friendship that Marlowe himself questions, but it persists nonetheless. Marlowe tells Lennox he has a feeling Terry will end up in worse trouble than Marlowe will be able to extricate him from. and in due course this proves true. The redhead, Terry’s ex-wife, whom he admittedly married for her money, is murdered in the guesthouse at their Encino spread and the trouble that Marlowe sensed begins.
Lennox runs to Mexico, and it is reported that he made a written confession and shot himself in his hotel room. But something feels wrong: The Lennox case is being hushed up, and Marlowe begins to wonder if his friend really did kill his ex-wife. A letter that arrives with a “portrait of Madison” – a $5000 bill that Terry had once promised Marlowe – convinces him his suspicions are justified.
He tells himself it is over and done with, but he isn’t able to forget. The matter plagues him while he is working a case involving an alcoholic writer of best sellers in wealthy Idle Valley (where, he says, “I belonged … like a pearl onion on a banana split”). It begins to plague him even more when Sylvia Lennox’s sister, Linda Loring, appears and plants additional suspicions in his mind. The suspicions spur him onward, and finally his current case and the Lennox case come together in a shattering climax.
At the end Chandler neatly ties off all the strands of this complicated story, and provides more than a few surprises. An excellent novel with a moving ending.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
March 21st, 2020 at 10:45 pm
The television adaptation of The Long Goodbye, in addition to Dick Powell, featured Teresa Wright and Cesar Romero, with Tom Drake as Terry Lennox. It is also memorable as the broadcast in which an actor, playing dead, arose and walked off. Early live television; Tristram Coffin was the guy.
March 22nd, 2020 at 5:57 am
You have an interesting discusssion of Altman’s film of The Long Goodbye here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=61145
Altman would have loved the idea of a corpse rising and walking off the set. Presumably he missed the TV version or surely he’d have used it.
March 22nd, 2020 at 8:51 am
Thanks for the link, Roger, one I’d quite forgotten about.
An even more relevant link to follow is this one:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=44580
in which Dan Stumpf specifically compares and contrasts the book with the Altman film, with lots of comments in response.
PS. I’ve edited both posts so the images show up. It will take quite a while for me to do that with all several thousand that still need work, but I’m working on them, one at a time.
March 22nd, 2020 at 7:24 pm
The Gould version is awful because of him, and the directing. I’d love to see the Powell version, I wish he’d made all of the Chandler films.
March 22nd, 2020 at 9:39 pm
I’ve learned to live with the movie.I’ve seen it several times, and each time I see more in it that I like. Elliott Gould is a huge stumbling block, though. There’s no doubt about it.
March 22nd, 2020 at 8:16 pm
Chandler often said his ideal was to write escapism that could be read for the same reasons as literature, and this is the book where he best fulfilled that goal. Perhaps only Stanley Ellin’s THE EIGHTH CIRCLE works anywhere near as well as a novel about a private detective and not just a private detective novel.
It isn’t my favorite Marlowe novel, but it is the one where Chandler clearly achieved his end.