Product Description

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, who he's divorced and re-married and who ends up dead. and now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15501 in Books
• Published on: 1988-08-12
• Released on: 1988-08-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Library Journal
Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period. His full canon of novels and short stories is reprinted in trade paper featuring uniform covers in Black Lizard's signature style. A handsome set for a reasonable price.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
A friend fleeing the authorities asks Philip Marlowe for help, making the detective an accessory in his wife's murder. When Marlowe receives word of the friend's death in Mexico, he begins looking into the murder and the family secrets surrounding it, unraveling a familiar noir tale of sex among the wealthy. Elliott Gould, who played Marlowe in the film version of the novel, successfully captures the essence of the hero, a mixture of toughness, intelligence, and loyalty. However, this abridgment seems too short and choppy, rushing the plot and losing much of Raymond Chandler's rich prose. Noir fans might prefer to wait for an unabridged version. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"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

Customer Reviews

The too-long Goodbye
Originally copyrighted and published 1953.

Chandler talked his way out of a 5-star rating by making the Goodbye a little too long. Atmospheric tale with dark, almost fatalistic mood gets lost with too much talking and and too many false endings after the climax.

Still, beautiful workout so well crafted with so much heart I can overlook the faults.

Swell
So read "The Long Goodbye" and you'll know why they call them "classics" - the kind of crime fiction that defined "noir", the stuff that their disciples - I'm talking about guys like Swierczynski, Bruen, Huston, Stella, McKinty, Connolly (John, not Michael) - who drank up Chandler like mother's milk and, standing on the shoulders of Chandler, Thompson, Hammett, McBain, have launched their own brand of hip, irreverent, in-your-face noir that will be the pulp fiction that our sons and daughters will revere and lionize decades from now. Stuff that was written in the 50s - those simple days before cell phones, computers, video games, or political correctness - but still relevant today and will still have you riveted to the pages as tight as Joe McCarthy chasing down the next suspected Communist pervert.

The plot - if it really matters - has tough talking, hard drinking, fast-fisted private eye Phillip Marlowe befriending a wounded war veteran, Terry Lennox, who's hooked up with a high society, high-sexed wife but is still down on his luck. When the wife ends up dead with a face beaten to hamburger, Lennox is on the run and Marlowe ends up on the wrong side of the cops and a local gangster. The story is as lean and clipped as those beautifully streamlined Adirondack wooden speedboats of the day - the days when guys cracked wise and got sore and hung out with broads and dames, when it was OK to smoke and drink gimlets and rye whiskey sours during a bona fide cocktail hour - a rare glimpse into a slice of American history you'll not find in our revisionist history books of the day. But more importantly, this is a lesson in an understanding of irony as a powerful tool when deftly twisted into words. A lesson in the impact of tension and brutality without relying on graphics or extremes - the literary equivalent of Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" shower scene. And a primer in timing, pacing, and the street smart dialog that many try to emulate today, mostly falling short and sounding more - unintentionally - like Maxwell Smart than Phillip Marlowe.

So read it for the drama, or read it for the history lesson, or read to see where the best writers of today were schooled - just read it. An American crime classic at the top of the genre, and a master of noir at the peak of his game.

Arguably Chandler's Best
You don't read Raymond Chandler for the plots--you read him for the magnificent "hard boiled" prose. The Long Goodbye is probably his most complex work, full of world-weary insights and a somewhat more "tender" Marlowe. The great pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing how the main character, Philip Marlowe, reconciles his cynical view of humanity with a genuine desire to help a few unfortunates in life. The best Marlowe... classic....

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets