DVDVRBC THE LONG GOODBYE by Raymond Chandler COMPLETED

[jaedmc]

Have at it. 

 

I have not even started yet, so we'll see if I get this fucker done in 2 weeks.

 

IMPORTANT

Let me know in the catch-all Book Club thread, NOT THIS THREAD, if you prefer dividing the book up and breaking up discussion over more than one thread. I'm still toying with it, so feedback is very much appreciated.

[Jingus]

Uh, which  catch-all thread?  We've got multiple.  (For the record, I'm five chapters in; I've read the book before and used to have my own copy, but, well, memory GONE.)  

[odessasteps]

I presume he meant

https://deathvalleydriver.com/forum/index.php?/topic/1968-dvdvr-book-club-announcements/page-2#entry191343

[jaedmc]

the announcements thread, the one that's pinned.

[Liam]

Finished it a few days ago, but have no internet outside of phone. Thoroughly enjoyed it - will offer more thoughts when I have net access.

[Beast]

I am so happy this was chosen. I had seen the film before so I was kind of not looking forward to reading the book (because I figured it would just be like watching the film again), but this book was awesome. Maybe because of all the parodies and tributes to this type of story I was always hesitant to delve into the literary noir world, but Philip Marlowe is a top all-time character in my view now. I have never read a book (or series of books) where the 1st person narration sounds so authentic, not necessarily the wording, but the emotion revealed. In either "Goodbye" or "The Little Sister" or both, there are a few passages where he explains how fearful he is when confronted with a gun that are unlike anything I've ever read in a story of this type and from a character like himself. 

 

I did take a look at the film again, but it pales so much to Chandler's version. Gould is totally miscast or at least the way the character is written is all wrong. I do love Sterling Hayden as Wade though. If only Bogart was able to make more after "The Big Sleep".

 

But yeah, so far 2 for 2 with books chosen for this guys. It's nice to have something to look forward to every month.

[JRGoldman]

I think I'm going to be able to finish it off this weekend. Hopefully. I have liked it very much, but I feel as though I haven't really had anything profound to add to the discussion, if that makes sense. 

[Matt D]

I know not everyone made it through but for those who did or who even cracked it, I'm glad that they enjoyed it so much. It's one of my favorite books ever, and like I said, it was something I read when I got to england for my year there back in 03 to remind me of home. I already said a lot of my general comments in the first note, but there are a few things I want to double back on now.

 

The first is that while so much of the charm of the book is the wordplay and the prose, I think the mystery itself is pretty strong. It's interesting, however, how it all percolates in the background. I'll get to that again in a second. When she gives her story at the end, it's believable, for the most part. You can buy that it was what happened, that Wade did do it and she was just covering up. In another book, that might have even been it. The whole thing comes full circle somehow, too. There are all these bits that you think are just extraneous, part of the mood and setting and just bits that dangle off of the lives of the characters, but they all find a way to tuck in by the end. 

 

Marlowe is a reactive protagonist, or maybe, at best, an opportunistic one. When cracks appear, not even in a story but in the world around them, he pushes upon them to see how far he can get, but I don't think he actively seeks them after a certain point. A lot of the book is him trying to stay out of everything and getting dragged back in at every point. When he sees an opening, though,he can't help but reach, even if he knows the consequence are going to be terrible. Even the ultimate comeuppance of the murderer happens because Marlowe sees an opening and he walks away and lets it play out. It's all a bit off putting though. 

 

I think the reader really shares his disappointment in Lennox in the end. I know I did. He's a character who was likable enough at the beginning of the book, but it's sort of a punch in the gut when he walks back in at the end. No good can come of it. The closure that you had in the book sort of crumbles. It's all very noir and fitting of course. Life is disappointing and it's disappointing because we're all human and we're all so very disappointing. Marlowe's whole ethos is that you can't give up and let it all drag you down though. You need to live up to your own code and maybe that'll be enough to see it all through. At least at the end of the day you can look at yourself in the mirror.

[EVA]

FINISHED. Very much enjoyed it.

Don't have much time to react to it right now, but I will say that, for me, the best mystery stories are the ones where the actual resolution of the mystery becomes secondary to what the characters are going through, and this was a really strong example of that.

[JRGoldman]

Just finished it now, and I very much enjoyed it. What a great book to finish on a lazy summer afternoon with a fan going and an early drink. It really took me to a different time and place, which is all you can really ask from a book. As I think I said in the other thread, this is a rare genre for me and my first experience with Marlowe. I'm not sure I would immediately read Chandler's other work, but I'm so glad this was something I have now been exposed to. Just a couple thoughts I remember having at various points:

I think if the story had just been what was written up until Terry's letter, it still would have been a fantastic novella/short piece. I think it's pretty unbelievable that the pace was held up for 250 more pages after that.

Also, this could just be me, but reading this made me realize the influence of noir on Ned's journey from the first Game of Thrones. They have this very similar drive to discover and personal moral compass that makes them react and work to discover, often at their own disadvantage. I'm not sure it was conscious on Martins part, but it's something I will always think about now in regards to influences on modern fantasy and genre work.

[Jingus]

Finished.  I don't have much to add about Chandler's style which either I already said in the first-half thread, or someone else already said here.  

 

I do think the book got a bit TOO convoluted and depressing by the end.  I totally lost track of most of the various cops and lawyers, there were too damn many of those characters and by the end nobody but Endicott stood out from the crowd for me.  The story did eventually sew up most of the obvious loose threads, although for a while it did bug me that Marlowe JUST SO HAPPENED to be hired as Wade's babysitter which just so happened to plunge him right back into the mystery.  They eventually explained that, Mrs. Wade was the one who asked the publisher to hire him, although I couldn't really tell you why (and I just finished the damn book thirty minutes ago).  

 

By the end, some of the character motivations kinda lost me too.  Why did Mendy hate Marlowe so damn much?  Why did Candy hate Marlowe so damn much?  Why did EVERYONE hate Marlowe so damn much?  Why did Marlowe and Mrs. Loring finally refuse each other?  Why were we supposed to think Lennox was some completely different person when he finally reappeared, as if he deserved the cold shoulder Marlowe gave him?  Did Wade really sleep with Mrs. Loring?  Did Mr. Loring really pull that glove-slapping shit with a bunch of other guys?  And various other nagging little issues which I'm already forgetting.  

 

But, Chandler wasn't really writing a mystery anyway.  It was almost more like his dissertation, his once-and-for-all statement on the mystery/detective/noir genre.  He'd originally invented the whole damn thing (and if not for Dashiel Hammett, one could almost say Chandler did it single-handedly) and had stuck around long enough to see it become a hard-boiled joke.  The traditional shadowy noir films were somewhat out of fashion by 1953; their legacy was found in cheap watered-down form in TV cop shows, or in bastardized violent misogynist fantasies like Mickey Spillane's terrible Mike Hammer novels.  The days when Bogie dominated pop culture with a fedora and a cigarette were dead and gone; he was spending the final years of his career mostly doing comedies and romances.  As the noir genre faded gently into the sunrise of a new era, Chandler stood up and said "HELL NO.  Goddammit, I will rage against the dying of the dark.  I will show them something they've never seen before.  I will prove it's art."  After this, he was basically done with this setting; his subsequent works never again set the bulk of any Marlowe stories in Los Angeles.  

 

I remember practically nothing from having read the novel at least once or twice a long time ago.  You know what I do remember?  Big Willie Magoon.  A guy who shows up on a grand total of one page, and is only even mentioned by other characters two or three times later on.  He was such a believable person, such a fleshed-out human being in his tiny cameo, I still remembered that guy when the entire rest of the novel had discretely evaporated into fog.  

 

 

Once more, I ask: to the people who've seen the Altman movie, is it any good?  I really can't imagine that creative team doing a really good & faithful adaptation of this book, Altman seems to prefer goofy noir parodies over the real thing.  And seriously, Elliot Fucking Gould?!  Even clean-shaven and with less of a giant jewfro than he usually had at that time, I just can't imagine him succeeding in this part.  Especially since this was right in between Marlowe being played by James Garner and Robert Mitchum in other, much more street-credible movies.  (There was also a made-for-TV adaptation of The Long Goodbye in the 50s, with Dick Powell reprising his Murder, My Sweet role as the shamus in question.)  

 

Although, the Altman version does have one tremendous asset: screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who cowrote the script for Bogart's Big Sleep.  (And also The Empire Strikes Back, of all damn things.)  She worked for years with Howard Hawks, even writing several John Wayne pictures; didya know that Rio Bravo and El Dorado were written by a GIRL?  So weird, that such an infamous boys-treehouse-dweller like Hawks would ever allow a mere skirt to be the creative force behind half a dozen of his biggest movies.  So maybe she managed to turn in a Long Goodbye script which even Altman couldn't alter and Gould couldn't fuck up.  

 

 

 

Reading the wikipedia entry about Chandler himself made a few things make more sense: apparently, Chandler was nothing like Marlowe (except for both men's absolute inability to ever stop hurling wisecracks and insults at practically everyone).  In fact, he was more like a pastiche between Wade and Lennox; he spent most of his teens and some of his twenties in England, a far cry from the gritty streets he obsessively wrote about.  Raymond was a cat-loving literary dandy; and a lifelong raging alcoholic, which is no surprise, considering the sheer amount of drinking that happens in his books.  He was also reportedly a virgin until his 30s, which sheds a bit of light on why Marlowe is always such a damn choirboy whenever various dames are trying to seduce him.  There are at least two recorded incidents where Raymond either threatened or attempted to commit suicide.  No wonder Marlowe had such damn little respect or pity for Wade or Lennox; clearly, Chandler himself was quite the self-loather.  

 

During the writing of The Long Goodbye, Chandler's elderly wife Cissy was losing an unfairly long, horrifyingly painful battle with lung fibrosis, and it was certain that she didn't have much time left.  In a letter, Chandler wrote bitterly about how difficult and uncomfortable it was to write "my best book" during this miserable period.  Cissy finally died the year after the book's publication.  After her death, Chandler was so devastated (and constantly inebriated) that he forgot to have his wife's ashes interred; they stayed in a storage locker in a mausoleum basement for decades.  Totally lost without his wife, Raymond essentially remained permanently drunk 24/7 for the rest of his life; that time period ended up being less than three years, before his ravaged body quickly succumbed to pneumonia.  During that time, he only managed to finish one more book, the completely-forgotten Playback.  He'd completely forgotten to record his last wishes, which were to be cremated and interred with his wife; so instead he was just buried in a completely different location.  His funeral was attended by a grand total of seventeen people.  

 

 

 

 

If after reading all that you're now so depressed that you want to make your OWN damn suicide attempt: well, there is a surprisingly emotional postscript. In 2011, Chandler fans managed to have Cissy's remains properly interred on top of Raymond's coffin under a new dual marker, as the couple had originally wished. This time, a celebrity-filled crowd of over a hundred people tearfully witnessed the ceremony, delivering tribute speeches and reading aloud from Chandler's works. The final shared headstone quotes The Big Sleep: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."

[Beast]

Brackett and Altman changed a lot with updating the setting to the Seventies actually the least of the insults. Brackett apparently didn't think much of the book and considered it full of cliches. The movie works a lot better if you aren't familiar with what Marlowe is actually supposed to be like.

[Matt D]

I've never made it through it.

[odessasteps]

The Altman movie is good, but its a different experience than the book.

Im not a fan of the swerve at the end.

Also, the love scene seems superfluous and more apropos for a pulp dime novel.

[S.K.o.S.]

Will post more later, but I wanted to say that I was giving a lot of credence to the idea that Marlowe was the one responsible for Roger Wade's death.  It certainly wouldn't have been out of line with his personality to say "I've decided I'm sick of you, here's your gun."  Of course the fact that Marlowe is a recurring character makes it less likely that he'd do a full heel turn, but if I'd known this was the last Marlowe book, I would have been 100% expecting that's how it would turn out (and that he would have gotten away with it).

 

I like the swerve ending in that it makes everything sort of bittersweet.  Not sure I buy all the details (the non-fatal head wound, being drugged in the morgue or whatever), but also not sure that the details are what's important.

[EVA]

I watched the Altman film a few months back, and I really enjoyed it, but it's so different, it's really more like they used the characters and some of the plot points to make a commentary on stories 50's era noir like The Long Goodbye than an actual adaptation of The Long Goodbye. Some folks might take that personal, but it seems like fair play to me. I can enjoy a certain type of story while also acknowledging the tropes and "articles of faith" innate to those stories.

That said, I guess there's an argument to be made that Chandler didn't deserve to be the butt of this particular joke. It's not his fault he was so awesome that everybody else wanted to write his stories.

[EVA]

I'm a huge Elmore Leonard fan. And after reading my first Raymond Chandler book here, it seems impossible to me that Leonard himself wasn't a fan of Chandler. Chandler's snappy dialogue and rhythmic prose seems like an obvious antecedent to Leonard's style.

[Jingus]

I'd imagine EVERYONE who writes hard-boiled crime fiction must be a fan of Chandler. Hammett may have done the style first, but Chandler did it best. I can't imagine actually disliking his work on the whole (aside from goes-with-the-time-period caveats like "gee, why is everyone who isn't a WASP male treated even worse than the WASP males are?" and such). It would be as dumb as someone who writes historical plays set in England, but they claim to not be a fan of Shakespeare.

I'm still kinda ambivalent on the final swerve myself. On the one hand, it seems awfully contrived (as SKoS pointed out) from a practical sense. And having a murder mystery end with "whoops, no murder happened, he's alive and well! LOLLOLLOL" does sound like the douchiest thing in the world. But then again, I've toyed with ideas for at least a couple different stories which were catalyzed by fake murders in the first place, so it's not like I'm not guilty of wanting to do the exact same thing. (Although at least one of mine ended with the detective anti-hero actually murdering the person whose "death" they were investigating in the first place, which is arguably even worse.)

 

Of course the fact that Marlowe is a recurring character makes it less likely that he'd do a full heel turn, but if I'd known this was the last Marlowe book, I would have been 100% expecting that's how it would turn out (and that he would have gotten away with it).

It wasn't the last Marlowe book. Chandler followed it with Playback, and was writing another one called Poodle Springs when he died (which was finally finished up by Robert B. Parker and published a few years ago).

[EVA]

Oh, the final swerve is 100% contrived. Almost downright silly. I don't think we need to sit the fence on that one. But the reason you don't laugh it off the page is because it absolutely works as the final insult heaped on Marlowe. The guy spends the whole novel struggling against powers greater than him, getting caught up in the schemes of cops and crooks and the wealthy and the powerful, all of them seemingly conspiring to their own ends against his simple quest to grant his friend some dignity in death...only to find out that his friend had been playing him false the whole time, too.

Really, I think it was clear by at least halfway through that whatever answer Marlowe got for Lennox's death, it wasn't going to be the satisfactory resolution he wanted. But finding out that his friend was really no different than the sort of people he had been fighting the whole time was probably the bleakest possible outcome.

In some ways, I think it could be taken as the final straw, the death of however much idealisim Marlowe had left in him. Marlowe saw Lennox as a kindred spirit, a generally decent guy who found himself mixed up in the machinations of the rich and the crooked. (This is what Marlowe turning down Mrs. Loring at the end was about, for whoever was talking about it earlier.) Finding out Lennox was yet another in a long line of shysters had to be a real gut punch.

[S.K.o.S.]

 Of course the fact that Marlowe is a recurring character makes it less likely that he'd do a full heel turn, but if I'd known this was the last Marlowe book, I would have been 100% expecting that's how it would turn out (and that he would have gotten away with it).

It wasn't the last Marlowe book. Chandler followed it with Playback, and was writing another one called Poodle Springs when he died (which was finally finished up by Robert B. Parker and published a few years ago).

 

 

Oops.  I actually got the idea that it was the last Marlowe book from your earlier, longer post, but reading more carefully now, you just said that it was the last one set in Los Angeles.

[Matt D]

I never actually read Playback. I got a used copy once but it was a LITTLE too yellowing. 

 

I have read a pretty good Chandler biography though.

 

And someday I want to pick this up and read it:

[username]

I haven't really had much to say about this as I really didn't have much to add beyond echoing "Good book, loved all the snazzy dialogue!"  The one thing that did stick out to me a bit is that you do get a sense of Chandler's history as a short story writer here in how things progress.  You have the initial little tale of Marlowe and Lennox, then a focus on Marlowe's legal troubles followed by the initial investigation and resolution of Roger Wade's disappearance.  While the first two are a bit connected one can (well at least I can) glimpse a different world where they were perhaps a bit more fleshed out standalone tales.  

 

I don't mean this as a criticism, just as something that struck me as I made my way through the first chunks of this novel.  Once things progress beyond this point and connections start to form between the various parties it becomes more traditionally "novel" in its execution.

 

The final twist was probably one too far, but everything else was so well executed that I think it is more than forgivable.

[Jingus]

The one thing that did stick out to me a bit is that you do get a sense of Chandler's history as a short story writer here in how things progress.  You have the initial little tale of Marlowe and Lennox, then a focus on Marlowe's legal troubles followed by the initial investigation and resolution of Roger Wade's disappearance.  While the first two are a bit connected one can (well at least I can) glimpse a different world where they were perhaps a bit more fleshed out standalone tales.  

 

I don't mean this as a criticism, just as something that struck me as I made my way through the first chunks of this novel.  Once things progress beyond this point and connections start to form between the various parties it becomes more traditionally "novel" in its execution.

That's a great point, actually. At one point I almost felt like it was a serialized novel, told in installments like Dickens' books in magazines. "This shit happened, thin THIS shit happened, then some other shit happened which didn't seem related but turned out to be completely relevant." The vast majority of it isn't tied together until the last ten chapters or so.

[EVA]

Also, the love scene seems superfluous and more apropos for a pulp dime novel.

Here's the first edition cover:

Like most genre writers, he was not held in the highest esteem in his own time. His work was considered pulp.

[S.K.o.S.]

It seemed superfluous to me because the mystery had been solved.  Maybe I'm a little too narrow-minded about this genre (EVA in post #19 goes more deeply into things than I would), but I have the idea that the book is about solving the mystery, and when that's done, then the book is pretty much over.  After Wade's wife's suicide and confession, we were led into the Menendez stuff, which was fine because it happened very quickly and that thread needed to be tied off anyway.  But after that, there were still 30 or 40 pages to go, and I was thinking "Shouldn't this book be over now?"

 

In retrospect, I understand that you need a bit of down time before Lennox shows up again.  I guess it also helped that Lennox's confession and suicide were not entirely as they seemed, so it was possible that there was something going on with the second confession and suicide too.