The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler
Summary
Philip Marlowe befriends a drunk. Terry Lennox, white haired, scarred, courteous in ruin, keeps turning up in Marlowe's life until the night he turns up asking for a ride to Tijuana, no questions, and Marlowe, who has already decided what he thinks of the man, drives him. Behind them, it emerges, is Terry's wife Sylvia, dead in the guest house with her face beaten in, and when word comes back from Mexico that Lennox has confessed in writing and shot himself, the case is closed to everyone's satisfaction except the one man who liked him.
What follows is the least hurried and most personal of the Marlowe novels. The detective is hired, in the official plot, to mind Roger Wade, a bestselling historical novelist drowning in whiskey and self contempt, whose wife is beautiful and whose blackouts may contain something worse than lost weekends; the Wade marriage and the Lennox case are, of course, one story, and Marlowe walks the connecting corridor for four hundred pages, insulted by cops, gangsters and the rich with a regularity that has become the book's music. Chandler uses the mystery as armature for everything he had left to say, about money, about Los Angeles, about writing for a living, and about friendship betrayed, which is the novel's true crime.
The famous last movement, Lennox's return in a new face, ends on the coldest goodbye in the genre.
Three hundred and twenty pages in its first edition, unusually long for a detective story of its day.
Best for readers who want the hardboiled novel at its most novelistic, the book where the genre's greatest stylist wrote his own elegy.
Historical Context & Significance
The Long Goodbye won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1955, the only one of Chandler's novels so honoured, the prize arriving in time to crown the career rather than launch it: he wrote the book in the early 1950s while his wife Cissy was dying, and said plainly that Roger Wade's alcoholic self disgust and the book's grief were his own. He called it his best, and the critical consensus has slowly come around to agreeing, the novel now routinely placed among the great American fiction of its decade without the genre qualifier.
Robert Altman's 1973 film, with Elliott Gould shambling through a seventies Los Angeles that has stopped pretending, enraged purists and became a classic of exactly the revisionism Chandler's melancholy licensed.
The Edgar itself has a period charm: the Best Novel prize was barely a year old, and the organisation crowned the man whose essays had already defined what the genre thought it was for. Marlowe's seventy year afterlife in pastiche, sequel and homage needed no assistance.