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The Long Goodbye
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Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Vintage
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $11.16
You Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Vintage
Average Customer Rating:
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The Long Goodbye Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780394757681
ISBN: 0394757688
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 384
Publication Date: 1988-08-12
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1988-08-12
Studio: Vintage
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780394757681
ISBN: 0394757688
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 384
Publication Date: 1988-08-12
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1988-08-12
Studio: Vintage
Editorial Review of The Long Goodbye
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, who he's divorced and re-married and who ends up dead. and now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
Customer Reviews of The Long Goodbye
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: The too-long Goodbye
Review: Originally copyrighted and published 1953.
Chandler talked his way out of a 5-star rating by making the Goodbye a little too long. Atmospheric tale with dark, almost fatalistic mood gets lost with too much talking and and too many false endings after the climax.
Still, beautiful workout so well crafted with so much heart I can overlook the faults.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Swell
Review: So read "The Long Goodbye" and you'll know why they call them "classics" - the kind of crime fiction that defined "noir", the stuff that their disciples - I'm talking about guys like Swierczynski, Bruen, Huston, Stella, McKinty, Connolly (John, not Michael) - who drank up Chandler like mother's milk and, standing on the shoulders of Chandler, Thompson, Hammett, McBain, have launched their own brand of hip, irreverent, in-your-face noir that will be the pulp fiction that our sons and daughters will revere and lionize decades from now. Stuff that was written in the 50s - those simple days before cell phones, computers, video games, or political correctness - but still relevant today and will still have you riveted to the pages as tight as Joe McCarthy chasing down the next suspected Communist pervert.
The plot - if it really matters - has tough talking, hard drinking, fast-fisted private eye Phillip Marlowe befriending a wounded war veteran, Terry Lennox, who's hooked up with a high society, high-sexed wife but is still down on his luck. When the wife ends up dead with a face beaten to hamburger, Lennox is on the run and Marlowe ends up on the wrong side of the cops and a local gangster. The story is as lean and clipped as those beautifully streamlined Adirondack wooden speedboats of the day - the days when guys cracked wise and got sore and hung out with broads and dames, when it was OK to smoke and drink gimlets and rye whiskey sours during a bona fide cocktail hour - a rare glimpse into a slice of American history you'll not find in our revisionist history books of the day. But more importantly, this is a lesson in an understanding of irony as a powerful tool when deftly twisted into words. A lesson in the impact of tension and brutality without relying on graphics or extremes - the literary equivalent of Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" shower scene. And a primer in timing, pacing, and the street smart dialog that many try to emulate today, mostly falling short and sounding more - unintentionally - like Maxwell Smart than Phillip Marlowe.
So read it for the drama, or read it for the history lesson, or read to see where the best writers of today were schooled - just read it. An American crime classic at the top of the genre, and a master of noir at the peak of his game.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Arguably Chandler's Best
Review: You don't read Raymond Chandler for the plots--you read him for the magnificent "hard boiled" prose. The Long Goodbye is probably his most complex work, full of world-weary insights and a somewhat more "tender" Marlowe. The great pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing how the main character, Philip Marlowe, reconciles his cynical view of humanity with a genuine desire to help a few unfortunates in life. The best Marlowe... classic....
Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Idle Valley
Review: Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is at the top of his game in this novel. It is the longest book that Raymond Chandler ever wrote and, sadly, it is his last completed manuscript. Subsequent books were cobbled together from fragments of unfinished books ("Poodle Springs") or screenplays ("Playback").
Chandler is one of my favorite writers and this is one of his best books. I was sorry to finish it, knowing that there was not another Philip Marlowe mystery to look forward to. I give high marks to "The Long Goodbye." I rate it as the equal of "Farewell, My Lovely" or "The Big Sleep."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: "Down these mean streets a man must go..,"
Review: This book, the penultimate novel in noir pioneer Raymond Chandler's series of novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe, is my candidate for the best American novel of the post world war 2 era. From the time he launched the Marlowe novels with the epochal The Big Sleep in 1939, it was crystal clear that Chandler viewed the detective novel as a vessel to be filled with pungent social commentary, an almost metaphysical portrait of a world gone wrong (call it Los Angeles), sharp character studies, and a fireworks display of the literary possibilities of the American vernacular. Chandler used the bits and pieces of the private eye/noir conventions as a coatrack to hang his stylistic concerns and dark worldview. He has more in common with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner than he does with contemporaries like Hammett and Cain. (and very often he is the equal of Max Perkins' big boys).
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 Proust and 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.
Review Summary: The too-long Goodbye
Review: Originally copyrighted and published 1953.
Chandler talked his way out of a 5-star rating by making the Goodbye a little too long. Atmospheric tale with dark, almost fatalistic mood gets lost with too much talking and and too many false endings after the climax.
Still, beautiful workout so well crafted with so much heart I can overlook the faults.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Swell
Review: So read "The Long Goodbye" and you'll know why they call them "classics" - the kind of crime fiction that defined "noir", the stuff that their disciples - I'm talking about guys like Swierczynski, Bruen, Huston, Stella, McKinty, Connolly (John, not Michael) - who drank up Chandler like mother's milk and, standing on the shoulders of Chandler, Thompson, Hammett, McBain, have launched their own brand of hip, irreverent, in-your-face noir that will be the pulp fiction that our sons and daughters will revere and lionize decades from now. Stuff that was written in the 50s - those simple days before cell phones, computers, video games, or political correctness - but still relevant today and will still have you riveted to the pages as tight as Joe McCarthy chasing down the next suspected Communist pervert.
The plot - if it really matters - has tough talking, hard drinking, fast-fisted private eye Phillip Marlowe befriending a wounded war veteran, Terry Lennox, who's hooked up with a high society, high-sexed wife but is still down on his luck. When the wife ends up dead with a face beaten to hamburger, Lennox is on the run and Marlowe ends up on the wrong side of the cops and a local gangster. The story is as lean and clipped as those beautifully streamlined Adirondack wooden speedboats of the day - the days when guys cracked wise and got sore and hung out with broads and dames, when it was OK to smoke and drink gimlets and rye whiskey sours during a bona fide cocktail hour - a rare glimpse into a slice of American history you'll not find in our revisionist history books of the day. But more importantly, this is a lesson in an understanding of irony as a powerful tool when deftly twisted into words. A lesson in the impact of tension and brutality without relying on graphics or extremes - the literary equivalent of Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" shower scene. And a primer in timing, pacing, and the street smart dialog that many try to emulate today, mostly falling short and sounding more - unintentionally - like Maxwell Smart than Phillip Marlowe.
So read it for the drama, or read it for the history lesson, or read to see where the best writers of today were schooled - just read it. An American crime classic at the top of the genre, and a master of noir at the peak of his game.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Arguably Chandler's Best
Review: You don't read Raymond Chandler for the plots--you read him for the magnificent "hard boiled" prose. The Long Goodbye is probably his most complex work, full of world-weary insights and a somewhat more "tender" Marlowe. The great pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing how the main character, Philip Marlowe, reconciles his cynical view of humanity with a genuine desire to help a few unfortunates in life. The best Marlowe... classic....
Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Idle Valley
Review: Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is at the top of his game in this novel. It is the longest book that Raymond Chandler ever wrote and, sadly, it is his last completed manuscript. Subsequent books were cobbled together from fragments of unfinished books ("Poodle Springs") or screenplays ("Playback").
Chandler is one of my favorite writers and this is one of his best books. I was sorry to finish it, knowing that there was not another Philip Marlowe mystery to look forward to. I give high marks to "The Long Goodbye." I rate it as the equal of "Farewell, My Lovely" or "The Big Sleep."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: "Down these mean streets a man must go..,"
Review: This book, the penultimate novel in noir pioneer Raymond Chandler's series of novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe, is my candidate for the best American novel of the post world war 2 era. From the time he launched the Marlowe novels with the epochal The Big Sleep in 1939, it was crystal clear that Chandler viewed the detective novel as a vessel to be filled with pungent social commentary, an almost metaphysical portrait of a world gone wrong (call it Los Angeles), sharp character studies, and a fireworks display of the literary possibilities of the American vernacular. Chandler used the bits and pieces of the private eye/noir conventions as a coatrack to hang his stylistic concerns and dark worldview. He has more in common with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner than he does with contemporaries like Hammett and Cain. (and very often he is the equal of Max Perkins' big boys).
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 Proust and 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.