The Long Goodbye

For several years – a few decades – I have been getting around to reading Raymond Chandler. Once, in 1998, I was flying home on leave from the army and I had chosen one of his novels to read on the long flight from Seoul to Denver. At Kimpo Airport I gave my sister a call to let her know I was on my way. During our short conversation (my prepaid phone card was about to expire – I was a poor soldier at the time) she broke the news to me that our mother had had a massive stroke the day before and probably wouldn’t live much longer. I hung up the phone and returned to my seat to await my departure. I pulled the novel out of my bag. It was The Big Sleep, the novel that marked the first appearance of private detective Philip Marlowe. I started to read it in the airport, started to read it again on the plane, but I never got past the first chapter. 

In the years since then I have read many testimonials to the quality of Raymond Chandler’s prose. Readers of detective fiction (I am not one of them) have always been proprietary of writers like Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie and some others. I never once thought there was something I was missing – or enough to actually read any of it. To me such books have always offered nothing but detours from what I was after. They reduce life to a puzzle and human beings to pieces in the puzzle that needs to be solved by the final chapter. 

There are several puzzles in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the next-to-last of his Philip Marlowe novels. The puzzles are other people as Marlowe struggles to figure them out. The solutions Chandler comes up with are never quite satisfying. And just when you thought the story of one of the characters is at an end (because he’s supposed to be dead), he turns up again, in disguise, in the final chapters. Chandler subtly shows his hand, leading the reader to the solution to the two central mysteries of the novel, so the suspense is downgraded to curiosity – a condition much more conducive to the novel’s emotional impact. The reason I picked up the novel was because I had read a book co-edited by Colm Tóibín called The Modern Library, in which he stated, 

Chandler’s importance and influence are more than a matter of his taut writing style. His genius lies behind the personas of the great Hollywood film stars – Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck and others – who portrayed the characters he invented. Chandler’s novels originated Hollywood film noir, not the other way around. In this, the sixth of his seven Marlowe novels, his immortal private eye engages with murder and betrayal in his meanest and most moving crusade.

Chandler was able to create, from an accumulation of grim commentary, an acutely fatalistic and menacing atmosphere. The worst thing about Chandler is his association with Hollywood and the Hollywoodization of his books. He may have invented movie noir – with Los Angeles as his setting. It’s why his books have translated so easily into a string of mediocre movies. (I’m having a go at the Robert Altman adaptation of The Long Goodbye next, dear reader.) 

But Chandler’s prose is considerably better than what Hollywood did with it. I never once, while reading Philip Marlowe’s narration, saw the faces or heard the voices of the men who’ve played him on the screen. Dick Powell played the role first, in Murder, My Sweet – aka Farewell, My Lovely, and it’s probably the best of the Marlowe movies. 

The details of the universe that Chandler chooses to italicize are sometimes alluringly strange and sometimes astonishing. They are panoptic in how they suggest greater depths or encompass a broader meaning. His metaphors are legendary, like “Off to my left there was an empty swimming pool, and nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool.” But some of them are so elaborate they take on a life of their own: “And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don’t because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection.” 

The truth is Philip Marlowe is a romantic – there is nothing more quixotic than when he agrees to take on a case. He is so romantic that he likes to pretend that he isn’t. In a late chapter of The Long Goodbye he comes close to a summing up of himself and his world: 

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. 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. 

Still, Chandler is occasionally guilty of a slick line – the kind for which he is famous. Lines like “He hooked me with a neat left and crossed it. Bells rang, but not for dinner.” And “He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.” Then there are exquisite lines that come out of left field: “Outside on the road I could hear the dull thump of a folded newspaper hit the driveway, then the light inaccurate whistling of a boy wheeling away on his bicycle.” 

All of the novel’s observations simply pile up – they don’t cohere into a whole. The characters have attitudes rather than traits. The women are unreal, over-idealized, and they are all dolls – Sylvia Lennox, Eileen Wade, Linda Loring. (Incidentally, two out of three of them die.) The love scenes, if you could call them that, are oddly affected and fail to ignite – and not for want of interest. Marlowe is either too much of a gentleman or Chandler is trying – quite unnecessarily for a 20th-centiry writer – to be discreet. It makes one wonder at the level of maturity that the writing implies or at which the writing is aimed. It is certainly not as “adult” as Chandler’s reputation would suggest. 

Reading a great novel through to its last page brings with it a sense of a greater ending. You read the last sentence and close your eyes, letting the moment spread through your consciousness. By the time I read the last line of The Long Goodbye (and it, too, is just another of Chandler’s slick lines), it was exactly what I expected and I wasn’t disappointed. It would’ve been so much better if I had.