The Long Goodbye

Remember Marlowe? Here he is back again, a little older, a shade or two wiser, but still man enough to draw circles around the cops, to wake up in the clink rather than rat on a pal, to get the eye from the blond dream in almost any bar.

"What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room, and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money."

Terry Lennox had a new face, new enough to include plastic surgery. He had a new problem, as he had to get over the border to Mexico and quick. He had a new load of grief as he thought, but wasn’t quite sure, that he had just murdered somebody. The small piece of money had a picture of James Madison on it, which means, in case you may not be familiar with the currency, that it was a $5000 bill. Private Eye Philip Marlowe — P.I. for short — decides to take the Lennox case, but Madison had no more to do with it than the dead moth on the desk or the pint of bourbon in the lower drawer.

Raymond Chandler's omnibus volume, The Simple Art of Murder, which brought together a group of his stories, was preceded by five fast-stepping, hard-hitting novels: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, and The Little Sister. His sixth, The Long Goodbye, has all the old punch and bounce, plus a deeper cut and a quieter overtone. Chandler is rightly described as a realist in murder who, in the opinion of Somerset Maugham, is “the most brilliant author now writing this kind of story.”

In his latest summing-up, The Vagrant Mood, Maugham continues: “Chandler maintains an unswerving line. . . . He has an admirable aptitude for that typical product of the quick American mind, the wisecrack, and his sardonic humor has an engaging spontaneity. . . . I do not see who can succeed Raymond Chandler."