The Long Goodbye

Los críticos comparan a Chandler con Dashiel Hammet, pero definitivamente me gustó más este último. Chandler es bien detallista, cosa que me gusta, pero hay algo que no termina de engranar bien. Te venís imaginando el giro que dará la historia, característica muy distinta a Hammet (que te das cuenta hasta en la última línea del capítulo). Le doy un dos porque no me terminó de convencer, pero claro la lectura es entretenida para alguien que sea fanático como yo de las novelas policíacas.

This appears to be the longest of Chandler's Marlowe novels, and is reputed in the author's opinion to be his best work. For me, it certainly gave itself space for a complex web of stories, and some twists and turns.

As a fan of Marlowe / Chandler, this marks one book closer to the end, which makes me kind of sad, so while it took me far less time to read than his others (only two part days - but being home from work with a cold, and no distractions allowed me this), I savoured the reading of this.
As we come to expect from Chandler, it was superbly crafted, brilliantly atmospheric, and inspired of narrative. It also offered more judgement, or social commentary than I was aware of in the previous books.

There are other reviews which examine the story line in more detail, so only a brief outline for me, then some quotes I enjoyed.

By chance Marlowe picks up a man off the pavement, sobers him up and puts him on a better pathway. Terry Lennox is his name, and his divorced from, then re-married to a wealthy wife. Suddenly Lennox needs help to disappear to Mexico, and Marlowe is in the felony tank, getting leaned on for his statement related to the murder of Lennox's wife. Unable to find it within himself to cooperate with the police, Marlowe is finally released when Lennox commits suicide leaving a written confession. Something feels off to Marlowe, but its not the only job he has on.

Quotes - here are a few example of the social commentary I mentioned:(FYI I didn't write them all out, I made the most of the quotes available on Goodreads)

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.-Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.-There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.-Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it.-Let the law enforcement people do their own dirty work. Let the lawyers work it out. They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there's such as a thing as law. We're up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers. How long do you think the big-shot mobsters would last if the lawyers didn't show them how to operate?-“You're a damn good cop, Bernie, but just the same you're all wet. In one way cops are all the same. They 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 someone is a car crash, stop making automobiles. If he gets pinched with a girl in a hotel room, stop sexual intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop building houses...We don't have mobs and crime syndicates and goon squads because we have crooked politicians and their stooges in City Hall and the legislatures. Crime isn't a disease, it's a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack. We're a big tough rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it, and organized crime is the price we pay for organization. We'll have it with us for a long time. Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”

These quotes are just great:

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful.-There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.-The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

Yeah, I got a bit carried away - tldr.

5 stars

Can't say I enjoyed this as much as the previous Chandler books I've read. I suppose the nastiness, racism and misogyny are hard to stomach despite the fig leaf of acceptability due to when it was written.

3 stars, rounded up to 3.5

Classic noir entertainment and a very enjoyable read. I couldn't help hearing Bogart's voice narrating the terse prose, which was fun at the beginning, but grated by the end.

I was leaning toward a rating closer to 4 stars, but Marlowe's tough guy act wore thin over the course of the novel. I never entirely connected with Marlowe. Are we expected to believe that he's a martyr to his rigid yet opaque ideals of honor and justice? He spends a lot of time and energy berating others for their shortcomings, but doesn't bat an eye when he makes a pass at or attempts to seduce married women. He feels aggrieved and misunderstood, but you never get a good feel for what makes him do the things he does.

The 50s slang hasn't always aged well, but Chandler does a great job of putting the reader into southern California in the years after WWII. Chandler's description of a landscape and city that I'm sure have now changed beyond recognition is excellent.

Interesting, and well written. However it seemed to me to drag on a bit at spots. I take it that was because of the time of writing, were I'm accustomed to a somewhat more hurried writing style.

It wasn't a bad book, it was a good who-dun-it, however, the langauge meant i longer reading time than I would have prefered for a who-dun-it.

Plot is somewhat muddled.

Seems quite a lot longer than the other Chandler I've read, but it's worth it, absolutely brilliant with a final chapter that is well worth it. Now to go and watch the Altman film with Elliot Gould as the updated (to the 70s anyway) Marlowe.