The Long Goodbye: A Novel

By Raymond Chandler

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME •  The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip 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, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 11, 2002
• ISBN: 9781400030200

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was best known as the creator of fictional detective Philip Marlowe. One of the most influential American authors of crime novels and stories, his books were considered classics of the genre, and many of them were turned into enormously popular Hollywood films, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

Reviews for The Long Goodbye

[leslie398 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I thought I had already read this so when I got my dad's paperback copy, I didn't read it right away. Well, it turns out I hadn't read it & now I am sorry I let it sit on the shelf so long! Chandler managed to surprise me with twists right up to the end. And unlike some of his earlier works, there was very little objectionable language (i.e. little to no racial slurs, etc.).

[jimmoz-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a great detective story. Kind of long, but filled with twists all the way.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another solid noir tale from Chandler.

[zenhead_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Why were Bogart, Bacall and Greenstreet in the movie? I heard their voices doing the dialog in my head. A classic of the genre.

[dasam-5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The best of Chandler's Marlowe novels.

[amerynth · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The hard-boiled detective solving crimes genre is not one I typically read, but I thought Raymond Chandler's novel "The Long Goodbye" was a good read.Philip Marlowe becomes embroiled in a mystery after befriending a drunk who turns up in his favorite haunts from time to time -- the drunk disappears and is accused of a crime. A somewhat convoluted story proceeds from there. Solving the mystery wasn't super difficult but I found the characters to be interesting enough to carry the story along nicely. I haven't read anything else by Chandler at this point, but would read another if I was in the mood for this type of book.

[tysonadams · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I keep visiting the classic genre novels and never seem to find myself loving them. This would be the third, possibly fourth, Chandler novel I've read and each time I've been disappointed. I see why they are classics, the origins of so many tropes, tones, and styles are on the page, but I guess I prefer the novels these have influenced.

[kale.dyer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another solid noir tale from Chandler.

[kardaen-358849 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Chandler's genius is really on display with this story. It's almost like two stories in one that seem to be unrelated, but it all makes sense in the end. His prose are in top form and the characters jump off the page.

[nbmars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel, written in 1953 and featuring Chandler’s famous detective Philip Marlowe, shows why Chandler is thought to be one of the best mystery writers of all time. Like The Big Sleep, its plot is more complex than I care to describe here, the problem being that if I omit one element, the story doesn’t make sense. Instead, I refer the reader to an excellent summary in Wikipedia. The plot is carefully crafted, with a surprise ending that is hinted at sufficiently for you to refrain from calling “foul,” but subtle enough that your are unlikely to have sniffed it out. That in itself makes the book worth reading.However, I enjoyed it the most for the insights it gave into the general basic assumptions readers must have had in the early 1950’s. For one thing, the Escobedo and Miranda cases had not yet been decided by the Supreme Court, and so suspects not only were not warned of their right to an attorney, they didn’t even have that right until trial. Consequently, the lawful behavior of the police would turn the stomach of a modern civil rights activist. Also, it should be noted that the Los Angeles Police Department, featured prominently in this book, had a reputation for being particularly tough on suspected “perps.”Another aspect of the 1950’s was that nearly everyone smoked. Philip Marlowe, the protagonist, constantly is lighting up either a cigarette of his pipe. But then, so is everyone else.In addition, all Hispanics (a term that had not yet gained purchase) were “Mexicans.” One of the key characters proclaims he is “Chileano,” but all the "gringos" refer to him as a Mexican. Even worse, the nightmare of nightmares for an attractive white woman is to be chased by a “big buck Negro with a butcher knife.”Finally, it is instructive to see how much price inflation has taken place since 1953, when a can of shaving cream costs 15 cents; $2 is a huge tip in a restaurant and 50 cents is more than adequate; $200 is thought to be an extremely generous retainer for a time consuming job; and a Bel Aire mansion sells for $90,000. Oh, to have my current bank account in 1953.Evaluation: It’s entertaining to go back and read an old genre classic. This one was worth it.(JAB)

[dh1writer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you enjoy a noir mystery with action, complex characters, a little philosophy and a surprising plot, you owe it yourself to read Raymond Chandler."The Long Goodbye" is the story of Philip Marlowe making a bar friend of a man married to a rich family. Along the way, there are three murders, a power broker, mobsters, hard boiled detectives, women and, of course, Marlowe.The story keeps moving. The action is believable. Something books today don't seem to have.This book kept me up for two nights in a row. I am looking forward to my next Chandler read.

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On the surface, Philip Marlowe is a tough, wisecracking private investigator. He is quick to solve conflicts with his fists and has a heavy hand when it comes to pouring a drink. But he also likes to play chess and read poetry. And when an acquaintance shows up on his doorstep, asks for help to flee south of the border to Mexico and is later accused of murdering his ex-wife and later committing suicide, Marlowe goes against all the advice given him to leave the case alone and starts to uncover what really happened to his friend and his friend's wife. This is a classic detective mystery with lots of plot turns and great dialog. The writing is terse but beautifully descriptive.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a mystery with the P.I. Phllip Marlowe and it is set in California. A pretty good mystery with lots of twists and turns. A woman dies, her husband disappears and commits suicide. Marlowe can't let it lie. He gets threatened by the woman's father, the police and the mob. This is considered "hard boil" but it is a lot easier reading than some of the other crime novels on the 1001 Books ..... list. You can at least laugh reading this one. It was written in 1953 but it doesn't read as that dated.

[chris.wolak · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was the first hard boiled golden age mystery that I read and I liked all the lingo. I was surprised by Marlowe's sentimentality. It makes me wonder about his earlier books--does Marlowe grow to be sentimental or was he always like this?

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I guess the vernacular ages faster than more formal speech. The dialogue here sometimes seems like it is making fun of itself, but probably not. Especially interesting are:

Names are dropped about whom the modern reader is likely to be ignorant, e.g. Frank Merriwell and Walter Bagehot.
Long gone expressions that we now mostly know from books like this one, or the movies include: People may be a chum or a heel. You might be all wet or sore as hell [i.e. angry]. Fifty cents is called four bits. The wealthy are either the upper crust or the carriage trade. The author says of a character that She hadn't worn a hat. Would you comment that a woman wasn't wearing a hat today? The backtalk of the gangsters can be very amusing, And the next time you crack wise, be missing. Bad language like the hell with you has been almost completely replaced in modern times by a greater obscenity. The author and his genre are noted for the short odd simile. This can be successful, but it can get out of hand as in It would have depressed a laughing jackass and made it coo like a mourning dove.
There are some expressions whose meaning is clear, but that I don't recall ever hearing like He must have made plenty of the folding. so that one wonders if the author made this up. And inevitably there are some expressions that I really can't understand, e.g. some people you're a wrong gee.
=====================
By the way, the 1973 movie The Long Goodbye that revived Elliot Gould's career has made considerable plot changes. That, along with using Gould as Philip Marlowe, means that you can read the book even if you've seen the movie for a much different experience.

[bookmarque · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve attempted this book in the past and failed to engage even though I love Chandler and the Marlowe series to pieces. This time it clicked and wow, I think it might be his most personal novel in the sense of how much he evokes through Marlowe. As usual the writing is snappy, the plot is convoluted and Marlowe gets ensnared by his own emotions and sense of morality. Here are some noteworthy gems -“I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don’t read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.” p 11“Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate stranger.” p 19“I puffed the cigarette. It was one of those things with filters in them. It tasted like high fog strained through cotton wool.” p 39“And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” p 64And of course, the second paragraph -“There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn’t quite. Nothing can.” p 1It’s the longest of the Marlowe novels and the pace is less break-neck, but it still cranks along making the reader wonder how the Terry Lennox/Roger Wade situations will connect. You know they will. Readers of this type of fiction or other thrillers made after Chandler broke ground will connect the dots before he explains it, but watching Marlowe get there is half the fun. The reader doesn’t get everywhere ahead of Marlowe and his detective work, observational skills and sheer guts are spot on as usual.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler was the sixth novel to feature his private detective, Philip Marlowe. Many believe that this, his longest and most ambitious book, is also the one that is the most auto-biographical. There are two characters that appear in this story that many believe are a mashup of the author himself who led a troubled life and was known to have a fondness for alcohol that often lead to binge drinking.Although known for his straight forward plots, The Long Goodbye is a complicated and, at times, rather convoluted read. And while I didn’t like it as well as I did The Big Sleep, many critics consider this his finest work. His main character, Marlowe is a fascinating and complex character being a fast-talking, cynical tough guy who has a marshmallow centre for the underdogs in life. With it’s strong atmosphere, crisp dialogue and superb writing, this LA noir whodunit has been elevated far beyond the typical hard boiled genre. It’s hard to separate the author Raymond Chandler from his work, and knowing that he wrote this book during a time of despair in his own life as his wife was dying, allows us to understand why his main character has a deep simmering anger that runs just under the surface but appears to break out every now and again. The Long Goodbye is a stylish noir with many plot twists, lots of attitude and a thread of bitterness at the corrupt society that Marlowe must navigate through.

[samsattler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Raymond Chandler is the master, the guy who pretty much created the pattern for most of the fictional, tough-guy detectives that would follow Chandler's own Philip Marlowe. Written in 1953 (while his wife was dying of a terminal illness), The Long Goodbye is my favorite of all the Philip Marlowe novels because of how much it reveals about Marlowe's character and core beliefs. Marlowe is a cynic with a good heart, a man attracted to the down and out characters he so often finds on the streets of Los Angeles. He still believes that he can help them, even though more times than not, he fails to do so.One of those whom Marlowe tries to help is a hopeless drunk by the name of Terry Lennox. Marlowe and Lennox meet late one night when a woman angrily drives away and leaves the appallingly drunk Lennox standing alongside Marlowe outside a restaurant. After Marlowe takes the man home with him so that he can safely sleep off his drunk, the two men become friends of a sort. Things get interesting a few months later when Lennox comes to Marlowe looking for a quick ride to the Tijuana airport. Marlowe, hoping to avoid incriminating himself, refuses to listen to the reason for the sudden trip but decides to drive his friend to Mexico despite his suspicions that Lennox is in trouble. Upon his return to Los Angeles, Marlowe learns two things: Lennox's wife was murdered just before the man left town, and the cops know that Marlowe helped him flee the city. Chandler, never one to shy away from using coincidence to move his story along, uses the device effectively several times in The Long Goodbye to keep Marlowe involved in Lennox's problems long after their late night drive to Tijuana. For instance, when a New York publisher asks Marlowe to help find missing writer Roger Wade, another out-of-control drunk, the detective (only after the man's wife personally asks for his help) reluctantly agrees to take the job. As it turns out, there are connections - several of them - between Terry Lennox and the Wades, and what Marlowe learns about those connections keeps him hanging around the Wades a whole lot longer than he ever intended to.Probably because of what he and his wife were going through at the time he was writing The Long Goodbye, the novel has a more serious tone than what Marlowe fans had come to expect from Chandler. Marlowe is presented here as a cynic trying to get by, a hard man with a soft side who values friendship but has few friends because he understands that he lives in an every-man-for-himself world where he is all too often the odd man out. This aspect of Marlowe's character not only makes Chandler's writing a little different from most of the detective fiction of his day, it is one of the chief influences on the writers who followed him. Philip Marlowe is the granddaddy of all the fictional detectives working the streets today, and Raymond Chandler deserves to be read and appreciated for his tremendous contribution to what is still one of the most popular literary genres in publishing.

[vesper1931 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Terry Lennox, married to Sylvia, daughter of a multimillionaire needs help to escape to Mexico. He calls upon friend Marlowe for help. It seems his wife has died, and he is the assumed guilty party. But when Lennox is found dead, Marlowe is drawn into discovering the truth.
Excellent, well-written, a delightful re-read.

[burritapal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Chandler was exceedingly good at his mystery craft. I never saw those endings coming. But he leaves much to be desired with other things, like gender and race relations. Some will say"Sign of the times." (The 1950s.) But words printed on paper don't go away, and even I, as a child, back in the 50s and 60s, knew it was wrong to speak a certain way about POC. And he's inconsistent; he'll make a racist remark, and later say something to contradict that.

"Just visions of what might be happening in the Wade residence and not very pleasant visions.....she was running down a moonlit road barefoot and a big buck Negro with a meat cleaver was chasing her." (189) "Yes, Mrs. Lauren. May I ask Mr. Marlowe a question?" "Certainly, Amos." He put the overnight case down inside the door and she went in past me and left us. " 'I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' "What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?" "Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good." He smiled. "That is from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' "Here's another one. 'In the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo.' "Does that suggest anything to you, sir?" "Yeah-- it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women." "My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot very much." "Did you say nonetheless?" "Why, yes I did. Mr. Marlowe. Is that incorrect?" "No, but don't say it in front of a millionaire. He might think you were giving him the hot foot."...."Amos is a graduate of Howard University,"she said. (356)

"That would buy a whole busload of wetbacks like you." "I don't get called a son of a whore by the help, greaseball." (217)
They had done a wonderful job on him in Mexico City, but why not? Their doctors, technicians, hospitals, painters, architects are as good as ours. Sometimes a little better in. A Mexican cop invented the paraffin test for powder nitrates. (375)

"If she had to die, it was the best possible time for her to die. In another 10 years you would have seen a sex-ridden hag like some of these frightful women you see at Hollywood parties, or used to a few years back. The dregs of the international set." (165)

And you will witness weird scenes like doctors smoking in their examining rooms:
Dr. Vukanich leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. He was giving me time. He blew smoke and looked at it.

[ritaer_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

blackmail leads to murder as does craziness

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this book read by Eliot Gould who did a good job I thought. However, I wasn't really taken by the story which involved two suspicious deaths and a lot of drinking. Chandler apparently said it was his best book and, since I haven't read any others by him, I'll take his word for it. Maybe it just doesn't translate well into the twenty-first century.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was introduced to Chandler through my father, who had a collection of his books in Penguin paperbacks from the 1960s. Chandler has always been there for me as an early writer of crime fiction, certainly more so than Dorothy L Sayers or Nicholas Blake or Margery Allingham. So my knowledge of early crime fiction is more California noir than English aristocratic sleuths. The Long Good-bye is a well-known title by Chandler, as well as a movie set in the 1970s starring Elliott Gould. I like Chandler’s fiction. I think he’s over-rated – or rather, I think his influence on the genre is greater than he deserved. But I do like his books. One of the things I like is his certitude. Chandler was certain about everything he wrote and how he wrote it. I’m amused by the fact he despised Philo Vance of SS Van Dine’s hugely successful novels, and can only imagine his ire was stoked by Vance, and by extension Van Dine, clearly being gay. Marlowe was, of course, famously a womaniser, and all of Chandler’s novels are predicated on Chandler’s relationship with a woman. Which is not, surprisingly, how The Long Good-bye opens. Marlowe makes friends with a man, and helps the man escape justice when he brutally murders his wife. But then the murderer is murdered in Mexico… But Marlowe never believed he was guilty, and never believed the account of his suicide was legit. Throw in a California millionaire (what would be a billionaire now), a literary writer who found success as a writer of historical best-sellers but despises himself and has hit the bottle big time, and the writer’s manipulative wife… This is classic Chandler, but it’s also a book that doesn’t go where you expect it to. If you have to read a Chandler novel, it’s a good one to choose. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s especially typical of the Marlowe novels. You might as well read a couple of them. You won’t regret it.

[comfypants · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A private detective's friend is a murder suspect.2.5/4 (Okay).Chandler tries to be literary. His last couple books had already been gradually losing energy and humor. Here he seems to actively shun being entertaining, presumably because he thinks he has Serious Things To Say.

[unclebob53703 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The best of his novels, and a classic of its kind.

[zoes_human · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

... in which a man drinks adult beverages and pisses people off until the crime is solved.CONTENT WARNING: casual racism, sexism, and homophobia à la 1953

[keishont-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The appeal of Chandler eludes me. My reading of this book was mixed bag. It was overly long and the story kind of wondered all over the place. Yet, there were moments of excellent prose and atmospheric scenes. This reading was a mixed bag for me.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I re-read this purely for research purposes: so that I could make a fair comparison between Chandler and Benjamin Black's 'tribute' novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde. Only trouble is, I'm now also slightly disappointed by Chandler's classic. Don't get me wrong, I love Chandler - I think he's an amazing word-smith, and his books are funny, sexy and shrewd. I just think The Long Goodbye is slightly too miserable to really enjoy again and again. Marlowe spends most of the story moping on the hopelessness of the human race, particularly rich people who live in Hollywood, whereas the admittedly still very clever mystery is solved in about the length of a decent novella. I'm with the miserable shamus on the 'nanny state' mentality of passing the buck, however: 'They all blame the wrong things. If a guy loses his pay-cheque at a crap table, stop gambling. If he gets drunk, stop liquor. If he kills somebody in a car crash, stop making automobiles'. I think that rant still applies today! Black's derivative mystery novel, based just after The Long Goodbye, will undoubtedly fail to hold a candle to the original, but that said, I didn't really fall in love with Marlowe all over again either. No modern author - Rex Stout came fairly close, with Archie Goodwin - will ever match Chandler's distinctive narrative, and probably shouldn't try.

[vicki_weisfeld · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This hardboiled detective story from 1953 is one of Chandler’s last featuring detective Philip Marlowe, and all the usual appeal is here—Los Angeles riffraff, a complex plot, and the sly, ironic first-person tone of wiseass Marlowe, who narrates. Although the prose conjures the voice of the ultimate Marlowe interpreter, Humphrey Bogart, the movie version was on ice for two decades, awaiting the deft touch of Robert Altman, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. Lots of alcohol gets sloshed in this story, written at a period when Chandler—an alcoholic himself—was at a serious low point (his wife was dying) and discouraged about his writing. It was late in his career, and he wanted to be taken more seriously. A few plot elements don’t quite hang together, and “the Madison” (a $5000 bill a client sent him) is not the unbelievable windfall it was in 1950, yet the writing propels you forward from sentence one: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.” Keep reading, and you’re rewarded with thrilling descriptions (“His eyebrows waved gently, like the antennae of some suspicious insect.” “On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.” A metaphor that probably says as much about how Chandler—and Marlowe—were feeling at that moment as it does about how the fictional bee may have felt.) Of course, Chandler was equally observant and precise in his descriptions of people: “There was the usual light scattering of compulsive drinkers getting tuned up at the bar . . ., the kind that reach very slowly for the first one and watch their hands so they won’t knock anything over.” Oh yeah.In a crime fiction anthology published in 1995, mystery writer Bill Pronzini called The Long Goodbye “a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery.” Contemporary novelist Paul Auster wrote, “Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” A pity Chandler didn’t anticipate that the critics’ unwavering praise of him ultimately would extend beyond genre borders.

[john.cooper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book by Raymond Chandler, which means that it is excellent. Many reviewers (and there are a lot of perceptive reviews of this book on Goodreads) believe that it's Chandler's masterpiece, but I disagree. The structure throws me. Chandler is the master of the perfect, punchy, assertive sentence, yet his hero Philip Marlowe strolls passively through hundreds of pages until the mystery is resolved, almost despite him, at the end. Marlowe is manipulated, used, beaten, even spat upon without throwing a punch. He doesn't want to be involved in what he's involved in, but he allows himself to be pushed and pulled out of vague feelings of personal obligation. One plot seems to end a third of the way through. When a new story takes its place, we wait a very long time to find out how they connect.

I love a lot of things about this novel--and make no mistake, this is a real novel, not just a pulp thriller. The heat and technicolor seediness of southern California, circa 1953, is vividly rendered. The book doesn't shy away from the ugly, which includes the easy racial slurs flung about by the hero, but neither does it make the mistake, so common to this type of fiction, of denying the existence of the beautiful. If the world looks cheap and worn through Marlowe's eyes, it's because of the part of it he makes his way through. The dialogue, of course, is a joy and endlessly quotable, as is much of the description. "I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string." "There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican. This guy was one of the hard boys..."

I wouldn't mind reading this again, knowing more about it going in, and I'd be happy to revise my opinion. But as it stands, I prefer Chandler's books to be as compact and tightly structured as his prose. And I like Philip Marlowe a little better when he's more in charge of his own direction. This is, probably by design, a sad book at it center, lacking the exhilaration found earlier in the series.