“The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should, by the rules, be dated.” Raymond Chandler wrote that two years before his death in 1959, and a few years after the publication of what many say is his best work and the epitome of noir: The Long Goodbye. He could have added that after you read him again, you see features you didn’t fully appreciate the first time around. The Long Goodbye is now 70 years old. And timeless as literary crime fiction.
A whodunit thriller about murder, identity, class, underclass, ethnicity, and all manner of corruption in Los Angeles, it’s also a passionate, morally ambiguous, dark comic look at hardboiled private investigator Philip Marlowe and, by way of other characters, a sublimated reflection of Chandler’s views on life and writing – its values, his disappointments. With its witty, critical take on a post-war culture largely defined by money, alcohol, and drugs, it’s literature as much as noir. But not even Chandler’s own cinematic adaptations of his novels for Hollywood can impress as much as the originality of his prose, dialogue, and musings that include some of the most fanciful expressions in contemporary fiction, along with cool, blunt humor: “He hooked me with a neat left and crossed it. Bells rang, but not for dinner.”
Some lines are iconic, Chandler at his most monosyllabic, concise: “A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.” And some, sly jabs at pretention: “He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.”
And then there are his extraordinary extended simple-word descriptions – of faces, rooms, bars, lawns, high end residences and low life lock-ups, full of smells, sounds, tastes, and comparisons of Americans, Mexicans and poseurs. Add now Marlowe’s keen observations, intuitions, longings, some belonging to the author by way of a major character in the book, a popular novelist, who sees himself as a failed writer and you have Raymond Chandler.
Chicago born, young Raymond lived in England from 1895 to 1912 with his divorced mother, where he got a first-class classical education. Later, he served in World War I and honed his dislike of pomp and artifice.
It shows in The Long Goodbye. It’s 3:00 a.m. Marlowe’s in his cheap L.A. apartment and can’t sleep. Stuff on his mind, but he’s also listening to “Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.”
A chance encounter outside a bar leads off the narrative. Marlowe sees a guy tossed out of an expensive car. Drunk, facedown, out of it. Something compassionate moves in him, and he takes the guy home and hears his tale of woe. A vet married to a rich nymphomaniac who soon after is found viciously murdered. Marlowe’s new friend, the main suspect, escapes to Mexico, but Marlowe is convinced he didn’t do it. And the twisty plot is on in Chandler prose.
Chandler was proud of his “beautiful American vernacular,” cold, hard, clean. No surprise. He admired Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett and was admired by many fine writers, among them T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Ian Fleming.
The shifts in point of view alone are worth noting --how Chandler moves seamlessly from first-person comments on, for example, wealthy Encino residents where everyone has everything “nice” --homes, cars, horses, dogs, “possibly even nice children.” To a new line, a paragraph unto itself: “But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast.”
The Long Goodbye evidences more than memorable structure style and compelling content, however. In a way it can be said to be Chandler’s “long goodbye” to the tranquil mind, when the death of his wife and recurring descents into alcoholism led him to believe he could not compete in an “adolescent” marketplace or sustain “intensity of artistic performance.” This melancholy, despairing resignation haunts The Long Goodbye. And gives it a complex, knowing grace.
