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The Long Good-bye
Introduction by - Jeffrey Deaver
Penguin
Paperback : 30 Jun 1988
£8.99
Synopsis
To begin with he was another good time drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. A little later he turned up as a vagrant on Hollywood Boulevard. For no reason other than curiosity Philip Marlowe came to the rescue. Then he brought Terry Lennox a drink. Which may be why he finds himself driving Lennox to Tijuana on the same night his very rich wife is found with her brains all over the floor. Murderer or no murderer, Terry Lennox is shaping up to cause plenty of trouble. And trouble just happens to be Marlowe's line of work ...
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Philip Marlowe stalked the tawdry neon wilderness of Southern California. There Raymond Chandler's creation became the most famous fictional detective since Sherlock Holmes; often imitated, never bettered. Read the complete Marlowe novels in Penguin paperback.
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Jeffrey Deaver on how Chandler's most ambitious novel transcends its genre
Categorizing fiction – like buttonholing autos by horsepower and food by fat content – has its place. There's a certain comfort knowing exactly what one will be getting in a book. This certainly is convenient for us readers, who might, on a chilly Sunday, be in the mood for a nice gentle whodunit and, on the following Tuesday, crave a roller-coaster of a read that'll keep us up till the wee hours. But there's a danger in reductive labeling. For instance, consider Raymond Chandler. Readers unfamiliar with or casually aware of his writing assume he represents a mere continuation of the work of his groundbreaking predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, Sam Spade's creator, who wrote in the 1920s and '30s. Hammett and Chandler are the great cornerstones of American detective fiction and it's not unreasonable to drop them both into the slot of hard-boiled or noir fiction. Yes, there are elements of this classic genre in Chandler's books. His world is L.A.'s underbelly (which incorporates, of course, the tony side of town, as well as the tawdry). His protagonist is none other than Philip Marlowe, the epitome of a wise-cracking, bottle-loving private eye. There are snide cops and leggy blondes, and the inevitable dead bodies, which pop up at inconvenient and unexpected moments. The style is Hemingway-esque. There is a mystery to unravel.
Yet Chandler is far more than the label 'hard-boiled' would suggest. His few novels (he published his first at 51 and produced only seven full-length works) carried the crime novel into entirely new territory. The stories move leisurely and are not filled with rapid-fire, contrived reversals, as current suspense film-makers frequently do to compensate for a tepid story. Chandler once offered to aspiring writers, 'When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.' And yet one can't help but wonder if that advice was delivered in the same wry vein as an edgy rejoinder tossed off by Marlowe to some clueless cop. In fact, very little of his writing is about guys coming through the door with guns. It's about a thoughtful, solitary man making his way through a difficult world. Weaponry may appear, but the body count is low. There are conflicts aplenty in Philip Marlowe's world, but they're usually not the sort that can be solved with a bullet from a .38 or a roundhouse punch to a thug's chin.
By stepping back from the genre, ironically, Raymond Chandler stepped beyond it. He turned down heat in his plots and concentrated instead on strong, self-contained scenes (he was famously contemptuous of overplotting), allowing these moments of human drama to drive his stories forward. This by no means denigrates his own plots; they move in elegant and unexpected ways and he stays true to the conventions of solid storytelling (never shy about judging fellow writers, Chandler once said, 'At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable'). His skill in creating atmosphere remains a model for writers today, and, oh, what lines ('It was a blond. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window').
But where Chandler transcends the genre is his approach to his characters – Philip Marlowe foremost, a brooding, cynical private eye, who still manages to exude decency and honor as he pursues his missions large and small through the jungles of Los Angeles, or wherever the job takes him. Marlowe's a hard-drinking man, sure. But he's also a hard-thinking one. And it's the observations about and interactions with the other characters in Chandler's books that give the stories their intensity and emotional reach.
In a page or two you're about to meet a character who's central to The Long Good-bye. He's introduced in this brilliant way:
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young face but his hair was bone white.
In those few words, Chandler both defines Terry, a complex, tragic and magnetic character, and sets the tone of the book to come.
It is characters such as this and the conflicts that arise among them that give Chandler's stories their intensity and draw us back again and again (they're completely rereadable, since the books' appeal is only partly in unraveling the mystery). Marlowe is dark, he's wry, he's troubled, but he's always spot on. It's telling that the protagonist's surname most likely derives not from the mean streets of America but from Marlowe House at Dulwich College in England, where Chandler was educated and where he was steeped in the literary experience of other such socially observant storytellers as Dickens and Shakespeare (the original title of Farewell, My Lovely was The Second Murderer, an allusion to Richard III).
It's impossible to call any one of Chandler's books his best, but The Long Good-bye certainly is his most ambitious and the novel that best illustrates my premise that Chandler transcends genre; dare I say, it's his most literary work (not to mention one of the longest detective novels ever written, weighing in at more than 125,000 words). In his earlier books Chandler examined the dark sides of social climbing and sex; here, he aims higher – at the rich, gambling, lawyers, big business and their pernicious effects on the average guy and gal. As one character in the book observes: 'Money tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own.' It's clear how Marlowe and Chandler both feel about that type of conscience.
The Long Good-bye is also Chandler's most autobiographical novel; you'll meet a character in the book, an author, who represents Chandler's older, used-up (as he saw it) persona, while Philip Marlow, for all his cynicism, is the voice of Chandler's younger self, steadfastly clinging to the ideals of morality and fidelity. (It's not many of us who'd spot a drunken Terry Lennox and take him under our wing for no reason other than that he was a guy on the outs with life. And it's not many novelists who'd let the relationship between Lennox and Marlowe proceed on its own honest legs without clubbing us over the head with messages and warmed-over psychological 'insights').
From that initial, fateful meeting at The Dancers Club, the novel unfolds at its slow, steady pace, taking Marlowe from Los Angeles to Mexico and back again, meeting along the way jealous husbands, conniving magnates, slick lawyers, beautiful women, and plenty of other carefully observed characters. We see teetering relationships and copious drinking. There's some gunplay too, of course. But that's almost beside the point. What makes Philip Marlowe so appealing to us, and so unique in crime fiction, is that he's a man less likely to turn his revolver on someone than to aim his keen, skeptical and querying eye on his (and Raymond Chandler's) real enemies: pretension, betrayal and greed.
