The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
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The Long Goodbye

4.4

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ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

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ISBN-10

0394757688

ISBN-13

978-0394757681

Print length

379 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

Publication date

August 11, 1988

Dimensions

5.14 x 0.8 x 7.97 inches

Item weight

10.8 ounces


Product details

ASIN :

B0CG2DZQ6K

File size :

634 KB

Text-to-speech :

Enabled

Screen reader :

Supported

Enhanced typesetting :

Enabled

X-Ray :

Not Enabled

Word wise :

Enabled


Editorial Reviews

"Raymond Chandler is a master." --The New York Times

“[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.” --The New Yorker

“Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” --Robert B. Parker, The New York Times Book Review

“Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.” --Los Angeles Times

“Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.” —The Boston Book Review

“Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler’s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.” --Literary Review

“[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.” --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” —Ross Macdonald

“Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.” --Erle Stanley Gardner

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” --Paul Auster

“[Chandler]’s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that’s like ours, but isn’t. ” --Carolyn See

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Sample

1

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.

The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.

"Look, mister," he said with an edge to his voice, "would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg into the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?"

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

A low-swung foreign speedster with no top drifted into the parking lot and a man got out of it and used the dash lighter on a long cigarette. He was wearing a pullover check shirt, yellow slacks, and riding boots. He strolled off trailing clouds of incense, not even bothering to look towards the Rolls-Royce. He probably thought it was corny. At the foot of the steps up to the terrace he paused to stick a monocle in his eye.

The girl said with a nice burst of charm: "I have a wonderful idea, darling. Why don't we just take a cab to your place and get your convertible out? It's such a wonderful night for a run up the coast to Montecito. I know some people there who are throwing a dance around the pool."

The white-haired lad said politely: "Awfully sorry, but I don't have it any more. I was compelled to sell it." From his voice and articulation you wouldn't have known he had had anything stronger than orange juice to drink.

"Sold it, darling? How do you mean?" She slid away from him along the seat but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.

"I mean I had to," he said. "For eating money."

"Oh, I see." A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now.

The attendant had the white-haired boy right where he could reach him--in a low-income bracket. "Look, buster," he said, "I've got to put a car away. See you some more some other time--maybe."

He let the door swing open. The drunk promptly slid off the seat and landed on the blacktop on the seat of his pants. So I went over and dropped my nickel. I guess it's always a mistake to interfere with a drunk. Even if he knows and likes you he is always liable to haul off and poke you in the teeth. I got him under the arms and got him up on his feet.

"Thank you so very much," he said politely.

The girl slid under the wheel. "He gets so goddam English when he's loaded," she said in a stainless-steel voice. "Thanks for catching him."

"I'll get him in the back of the car," I said.

"I'm terribly sorry. I'm late for an engagement." She let the clutch in and the Rolls started to glide. "He's just a lost dog," she added with a cool smile. "Perhaps you can find a home for him. He's housebroken--more or less."

And the Rolls ticked down the entrance driveway onto Sunset Boulevard, made a right turn, and was gone. I was looking after her when the attendant came back. And I was still holding the man up and he was now sound asleep.

"Well, that's one way of doing it," I told the white coat.

"Sure," he said cynically. "Why waste it on a lush? Them curves and all."

"You know him?"

"I heard the dame call him Terry. Otherwise I don't know him from a cow's caboose. But I only been here two weeks."

"Get my car, will you?" I gave him the ticket.

By the time he brought my Olds over I felt as if I was holding up a sack of lead. The white coat helped me get him into the front seat. The customer opened an eye and thanked us and went to sleep again.

"He's the politest drunk I ever met," I said to the white coat.

"They come all sizes and shapes and all kinds of manners," he said. "And they're all bums. Looks like this one had a plastic job one time."

"Yeah." I gave him a dollar and he thanked me. He was right about the plastic job. The right side of my new friend's face was frozen and whitish and seamed with thin fine scars. The skin had a glossy look along the scars. A plastic job and a pretty drastic one.

"Whatcha aim to do with him?"

"Take him home and sober him up enough to tell me where he lives."

The white coat grinned at me. "Okay, sucker. If it was me, I'd just drop him in the gutter and keep going. Them booze hounds just make a man a lot of trouble for no fun. I got a philosophy about them things. The way the competition is nowadays a guy has to save his strength to protect hisself in the clinches."

"I can see you've made a big success out of it," I said.

He looked puzzled and then he started to get mad, but by that time I was in the car and moving.

He was partly right of course. Terry Lennox made me plenty of trouble. But after all that's my line of work.

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About the authors

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe.

Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

4,625 global ratings

JZS

JZS

5

If you read only one noir mystery let it be this one

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2015

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I first discovered noir/hard boiled detective novels over twenty years ago. In a marathon of reading it was Chandler who resonated with me. Not only was he a great writer by any standard, in my opinion his detective Philip Marlowe is one of the strongest characters in fiction. Many "hard boiled" detective characters seem to be almost caricatures of the "knight in tarnished armor" trope but Marlowe exists as a decent and believable human being.

Over many years the details faded but "The Long Goodbye" stayed with me as one of the best- and saddest- books that I had read in any genre. Not the sadness of "Old Yeller" or "Sophie's Choice" but of disillusionment and betrayal. I was very hesitant to pick it up again. There is a quote in John Knowles' "A Stolen Past" that expressed my thoughts perfectly: "The past was a treasure and a fragile one. I would no more read "The Great Gatsby" again than take up hang gliding; what if turned out not to be the perfect novel that I remembered?" Exactly. But a friend had mentioned that the kindle version of TLG was on sale and although I had both hard bound and paperback versions, I couldn't resist. Constantly seeing it on my kindle carousel was too much for me :) And with the first page I was hooked again.

In many ways "The Long Goodbye" would seem to be a typical "hard boiled" detective novel- low rent detective up against the corrupt rich and powerful in the big city. But Chandler leaves the stereotype behind. The mystery in this book is created solely by Marlowe's relentless need for the truth. At any point he could walk away and by most standards be better off. I especially like that Chandler never carries the common themes too far. Sure there are corrupt police and politicians. This is 1950s LA after all, but there are also honest (by their standard), hard working police. The rich are powerful and gangsters dangerous but not overwhelming. And, thankfully, the ethnic slurs so common in the genre (1950s, again) are less frequent than most books of the time. There are also thoughts expressed that struck me as being ahead of their time. One character discusses the concept of planned obsolescence in manufacturing and another refers to addiction as a disease. That seemed very insightful for 1950s pulp.

Since I remembered the broad strokes if not the details, the book had less emotional impact on me than my first read. But I had forgotten enough that it kept me riveted, reading in every spare moment until I finished it. "The Long Goodbye" remains one of my all time favorite books and I strongly recommend it to anyone, not just fans of the genre.

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3 people found this helpful

Julian Semilian

Julian Semilian

5

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2024

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The book itself is great. The transfer to digital is awful. Somebody should have read it after the transfer. A few mangled words on each page. For instance, close is always dose. I recommend reading it in its proper paper form.

Phillip Parotti

Phillip Parotti

5

A brilliant mystery

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2024

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The book offers stunning proof of the fact that Raymond Chandler was a master of his craft.

Pencilman

Pencilman

4

Classic Chandler, Shabby Editing

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2024

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This is a classic Raymond Chandler tale that throughly evokes the Noir atmosphere of the period. Some great turns of phrase, but I found the plot to be a bit convoluted and not fully believable. Worst was the many typos on nearly every page. Chandler is a classic and the work deserves a lot more respect than the publisher gave it. I would like to think that someone in the process had enough respect for the work to proofread it at least once. Not the case. The editors/publisher should be ashamed of themselves.

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Anthony Davidson

Anthony Davidson

3

Typos on Every Page

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2024

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This Kindle edition is a mess. "I closed the door" becomes "I dosed teh door." "Clean" becomes "dean" twice in one page. These endless typo distractions on almost every page interfere with reading the story and becomes annoying as you have to decipher what word was intended. Does Kindle make any attempt at quality control? Don't know how to rate it--the story is a typical, well-written Chandler thriller, but impossible to ignore the poor Kindle quality.

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