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The Long Goodbye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigatorPhilip Marlowe. Some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but others rank it as the best of his work.^[1] Chandler, in a letter to a friend, called the novel 'my best book'.^[2]

The novel is notable for using hard-boiled detective fiction as a vehicle for social criticism and for including autobiographical elements from Chandler's life. In 1955, the novel received the Edgar Award for Best Novel. It was later adapted as a 1973 film of the same name, updated to 1970s Los Angeles and starring Elliott Gould.

Plot summary[edit]

1. Best of RonanKeating: here: video by Ronan Keating performing The Long Goodbye. (C) 2002 Polydor Lt.
2. The Long Goodbye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe.Some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but others rank it as the best of his work.

The novel opens outside a club called the Dancers. It is late October or early November. No year is given for the events but internal evidence and the publication date of the novel place them between 1950 and 1952. Philip Marlowe meets a drunk named Terry Lennox, a man with scars on one side of his face. They forge an uneasy friendship over the next few months. In June, Lennox shows up late one night at Marlowe's home in 'a great deal of trouble' and needing a ride to the airport across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Marlowe agrees as long as Lennox does not tell him any details of why he is running.

On his return to Los Angeles, Marlowe learns that Lennox's wife was found dead in her guest house and that she died before Lennox fled. Marlowe is arrested on suspicion of murder after refusing to co-operate with investigators, who want him to confess that he helped Lennox flee. After three days of antagonizing his interrogators, Marlowe is released, the police explaining that Lennox has been reported to have committed suicide in Otatoclán with a written confession by his side. Marlowe gets home to find a cryptic note from Lennox containing a 'portrait of Madison' (a $5,000 bill).

Marlowe gets a call from Howard Spencer, a New York publisher, who asks him to investigate a case. One of Spencer's best writers, Roger Wade, has a drinking problem and has been missing for three days. Initially Marlowe refuses but after Wade's wife, Eileen, also asks for Marlowe's help, he consents. Marlowe finds Wade in a makeshift detox facility in an isolated and soon to be abandoned ranch. He takes his fee but the Wades' stories do not match.

The Wades each try to convince Marlowe to stay at their house to keep Roger writing instead of drinking and though he refuses, he ends up making further trips to the house at their behest. On one such trip, he finds Wade passed out in the grass with a cut on his head and Mrs. Wade oddly disinterested in her husband's welfare. Once Roger comes to, he begs Marlowe to remove and destroy typewritten pages in his study he wrote while drunk, not wanting his wife to read them. Marlowe does so but reads the pages, finding a cryptic self-analysis by Wade which hints at repressed trauma he doesn't quite understand, alongside a clear statement that once 'a good man died' for him.

Another time, after being called by a drunk and disoriented Roger, Marlowe arrives to find the couple struggling over a gun in Roger's bedroom, which goes off as Marlowe is trying to separate them. The shot goes harmlessly into the ceiling. Marlowe sits with Roger until the latter has taken a couple of sleeping pills. As he's leaving, a distraught Eileen enters a sort of trance and attempts to seduce Marlowe, thinking him to be a former lover of hers who died ten years earlier in the Second World War. Marlowe refuses with difficulty and crashes on the couch downstairs, getting completely drunk so he passes out instead of being tempted to go back to Eileen's room. The next morning Eileen behaves normally and Marlowe leaves.

Marlowe is repeatedly threatened to cease his continued investigation of the Lennox case, first by a friend of Lennox's named Mendy Menendez, who is a Las Vegas gangster, then by Lennox's wealthy father-in-law, his old friend Bernie Ohls from the LAPD, the Wades' servant (a Chilean named Candy) and Mrs. Wade. Through his own hunches and inquiries, Marlowe also learns that Terry Lennox had previously lived as Paul Marston, who had married and lived for a time in England.

Roger calls Marlowe again, asking him to come by to have lunch with him. After indulging in self-pity over his writing difficulties, he posits that he's an alcoholic because he's trying to find answers to the trauma in his past, then proceeds to drink himself into a stupor. Marlowe asks him if he ever knew someone named Paul Marston, and with an effort Roger says no. Marlowe takes a walk outside. When he returns, Eileen is ringing the doorbell, having forgotten her key. Marlowe finds Roger dead on the couch, apparently from suicide, but Eileen accuses Marlowe of killing her husband. Candy fabricates a story to implicate Marlowe, believing him to be guilty but his claims are undermined in an interrogation.

Marlowe receives a call from Spencer regarding Wade's death and bullies Spencer into taking him to see Mrs. Wade. Once there, Marlowe grills her on the death of Terry Lennox's wife. Eileen first tries to blame it all on Roger but Marlowe pokes holes in her story and argues that she killed both Mrs. Lennox and Roger Wade, and that Lennox was her first husband, presumed killed in action with the British Special Air Service during the war. Eileen Wade leaves with no response. The next morning, Marlowe learns that she has killed herself, overdosing on sleeping pills, leaving a note describing the affair Mrs. Lennox was having with her husband and confessing to killing them both.

Marlowe refuses to let the story lie, and when the authorities decide to forgo an inquest because it will show them up, he steals a photostat of Eileen's confession from the police. Marlowe contacts a reporter he knows in order to make sure the confession is printed, even though the reporter warns him that he'll make numerous enemies by doing so. Marlowe replies that he has been trying to say goodbye to Terry Lennox for 'a long, long time.' A few days later, Marlowe is assaulted by Menendez, who is then arrested by Ohls in a setup arranged by a police commissioner who served with Menendez and Lennox during the war. Ohls explains that Marlowe was intentionally left in a position to steal a photostat, because the police commissioner wanted to trap Menendez in a felony, and Ohls knew Marlowe's scruples and stubbornness would lead him to do the best he could to clear Lennox's name.

After Marlowe contacts this commissioner and hints that he knows the full story has still not been told, he is visited by a Mexican man who claims to have been present when Lennox was killed in his hotel room. Marlowe listens to his story but rejects it and offers his own version, ending with the revelation the Mexican man is none other than Lennox, who has had cosmetic surgery. Lennox attempts to make amends for the trouble he has caused Marlowe but is rebuffed, with Marlowe claiming that while he doesn't judge him for what he did, he returns the $5,000 bill and says Lennox is 'not here anymore.' Lennox is hurt by this and leaves after saying goodbye. The novel ends with Marlowe listening to Lennox leave and faintly hoping he might return but instead explaining that he never saw him again.

The Long Goodbye Cat

Background[edit]

The Long Goodbye is Chandler's most personal novel. He wrote it as his wife was dying. Her illness and death had a profound effect on him, driving him into fits of melancholy and leading him to talk of and even to attempt suicide. Two characters in the novel are based on Chandler; both of them highlight Chandler's awareness of his flaws—his alcoholism and his doubts about the value of his writing.^[3]

The character most clearly based on Chandler is the usually drunken writer Roger Wade. Like Chandler, Wade had a string of successful novels behind him, but as he grew older he found it more difficult to write. Also, like Chandler, Wade had written novels (romantic fiction) that were viewed by many as not real literature, whereas Wade wants to be thought of as a serious author. Wade also stands in for Chandler in discussions about literature, as in his praise of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The other Chandler stand-in is Terry Lennox. Like Chandler, Lennox is an alcoholic. Also like Chandler, he had fought in a war which left emotional scars. For Lennox, it was the Second World War; for Chandler, it was the First. Lennox is a Canadian citizen but he had spent a great deal of time in England and retained the restrained and formal attitude of an English gentleman. This made him somewhat of an anomaly in the fast-paced and more informal world of wealthy Los Angeles, which he inhabited because of his wife's money. Chandler was also raised in England and received a classical education there. Chandler also retained a great love for the English and what he viewed as their more civilised way of life compared to the shallowness and superficiality of Los Angeles. This frequently put him at odds with screenwriting collaborators, such as Billy Wilder, and with most of Los Angeles and Hollywood society.^[4][5]

Film, television and radio adaptations[edit]

This novel was dramatised for television in 1954 for the anthology series Climax!, with Dick Powell playing Marlowe, as he had a decade earlier in the film Murder, My Sweet. The episode, which was broadcast live, was known for supposedly containing a scene where actor Tris Coffin, who was playing a corpse in a morgue, got up off a stretcher in full view of the camera. However, in a later interview, Coffin debunked this as a rumor; while the blanket over his body was partially removed before he was out of frame, he did not walk off set in full view of the camera.^[6]

In 1973, Robert Altman filmed an adaptation set in contemporary Los Angeles, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe.

An adaptation of the novel was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 16 January 1978, with Ed Bishop as Marlowe, and again on 1 October 2011, with Toby Stephens as Marlowe as part of its Classic Chandler series. Japanese broadcaster NHK aired five episodes of a Japanese adaptation of the novel in 2014.

Filming locations[edit]

Raymond Chandler used 2178 High Tower Drive as Phillip Marlowe’s residence. This location was featured prominently in many Chandler novels, most notably in The Long Goodbye directed by Robert Altman. The complex is a prime location in the 1973 film version starring Elliott Gould.

Broadview Terrace Apartments is a Los Angeles apartment complex located in the Hollywood Heights, Los Angeles neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills. Its most prominent feature is a campanile bell tower, called High Tower, that conceals an elevator, and was designed by Carl Kay in the 1920s. Between 1935 and 1956, Kay and Frank Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the remainder of the Streamline Moderne courtyard terrace that makes up the complex.

Appearances in other works[edit]

The Long Goodbye has been referred to in other works of fiction. Greg Iles referred to Chandler and the novel's title in his own novel The Quiet Game, in which one character is named Marston.^[7] It has been featured in the Japanese tokusatsu drama Kamen Rider W, in which the main character constantly reads from a Japanese version of the book. His partner's name is Philip.^{[citation needed]}Michael Connelly refers to the novel's title and quotes from it in his own novel The Black Ice. There are flashbacks to the events in this novel in the hommage Marlowe novel The Black-Eyed Blonde.

The novel's title has been alluded to in the titles of other works of fiction with a hardboiled, noir, detective or gangster theme, including the British gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980), an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled 'The Big Goodbye' (1988), and Frank Miller's graphic novelThe Hard Goodbye (1991–92), the first volume in the Sin City series.

In music, crime novelist Matt Rees's band Poisonville, which is named after the fictitious location of the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest, released a song about The Long Goodbye on its first album. Rees described the novel as 'a creepier book than people think.'^[8]

The Long Goodbye Cast

References[edit]

1. ^Review of The Long Goodbye, New York Times, April 25, 1954.
2. ^Chandler, Raymond (2000). The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959 (Paperback ed.). Grove Press Books. p. 228. ISBN0-8021-3946-9.
3. ^Spender, Natasha (1978). 'Chapter 11: His Own Long Goodbye'. In Gross, Miriam (ed.). The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W Publishers. pp. (128–150). ISBN978-0-89479-016-4.
4. ^Houseman, John (1978). 'Chapter 5: Lost Fortnight'. In Gross, Miriam (ed.). The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W Publishers. pp. (55). ISBN978-0-89479-016-4.
5. ^Wilder, Billy (1978). 'Chapter 4: On the Fourth Floor at Paramount'. In Gross, Miriam (ed.). The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W Publishers. p. (46). ISBN978-0-89479-016-4.
6. ^'Climax!' The Long Goodbye (TV Episode 1954) - IMDb, retrieved 4 March 2021
7. ^The Quiet Game, paperback edition, pp. 34, 102.
8. ^Matt Rees, http://www.mattrees.net/2012/05/03/2708/Archived 21 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine

External links[edit]

The Long Goodbye Meaning

• The Long Goodbye at Faded Page (Canada)