While the writing isn't as sharp as Raymond Chandler's earlier works, The Long Goodbye tells a more complicated story, one that takes longer to uncoil. An older Philip Marlowe has grown more cynical and has seen too much of Los Angeles, of police and high society, and of America, as evidenced by his numerous diatribes against big business and the government littering the novel. Marlowe especially sounds more like a conspiracy theorist than a private eye as he explains how the legal system is used to perpetuate organized crime.

Still smart, resourceful and above all patient, Marlowe winds up in jail under suspicion of aiding the accused uxoricidal murderer Terry Lennox—a man he barely knows—flee to Mexico. After Lennox's highly suspicious suicide, Marlowe is propositioned by the publisher of a famous writer, and then the writer's wife, to keep the writer sober long enough to finish his latest book while also being warned not to investigate the death of Lennox's wife. On the way to that final, surprising goodbye, several more people will die and Marlowe will prove himself the match of the powerful people he rails against.

Several things in the novel feel Gatsby-influenced: the cocktail party where the rich congregate, the beautiful women whose affections turn out badly for the men subjected to them. Unlike Fitzgerald, Chandler does not imbue these events and characters with romantic auras; instead, everyone involved is tainted or destroyed.

The Long Goodbye is a well-paced tale of violence and corruption populated by hard-drinking men and the beautiful women that supposedly love them. A highly enjoyable read. ( )

A very fast read at the beginning, but it begins to bog down in the middle.
I came into this with certain expectations of hard-boiled crime and the noir films they inspired: that they were a consciously created genre following rigid narrative rules. An anti-hero in an unjust world navigating a set of common plot devices and stock characters as archetypical to the American psyche as anything out of Plato or Jung. Perhaps this is true of neo-noir aping the past, but original noir was entirely spontaneous. Nobody intended to go out and make a new genre. The crime novelists and experimental filmmakers who created these works were already cynical people, fascinated by the cracks on the surface of postwar American prosperity and by the kinds of people who fell into them. These movies and books were produced independently of each other and only later someone happened to notice that they shared similar themes and styles. This is evident reading The Long Goodbye, which seems designed as an outlet for Raymond Chandler to complain about everything wrong with society. I found the actual murder mystery was much less interesting then the bizarre and contemptible characters who the PI protagonist, a clear author stand-in, would interact with on his way to solving the case. These characters seemed to be oversized and overstated caricatures of practices the author didn't approve of, people the author didn't like, and professions the author was deeply cynical about. Cops are all violent and corrupt, newspaper journalists are opportunists and liars, nobody ever became wealthy honestly, etc etc. Such a tell-it-like-it-is narrative always runs the risk of spouting some awful misogyny or racism, but beyond a handful of stereotypes this was barely present at all.
This book also taught me how to make a gimlet, and now it's my favorite drink. ( )

3.5 stars. It played with the noir PI format a bit but I didn't finish it thinking it was special. ( )

Reading a Raymond Chandler novel is probably like taking a ride along the coast to Montecito on a warm evening in 1950, in a convertible with your best girl riding shotgun. The sweet smell of the ocean blowing through her hair, and the the smile she flashes back at you every time you look it her, telling you she wouldn't rather be anywhere else, or with anyone else. "The Long Goodbye" has it all. Superb novel. ( )

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.
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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. ( )