The Long Goodbye

I know I’ve said it before when reading stuff by Eric Ambler, but I’m such a fan of film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction.  It makes me feel like such a bad feminist too, because it is mostly men telling women what to do and shooting at each other.  In fact, film noir’s all about the suppression of female power and sexuality (or it was in its early days in any case).  But I love it.  I love the writing style and the ridiculously complicated plots that bear so little resemblance to reality or to a crime anyone could ever hope to get away with.  The Long Goodbye is most definitely one of these, but it is so much more than this too.

It’s book six in the Philip Marlowe series by hard-boiled granddaddy Raymond Chandler.  It’s been a few years, but I have read The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, the first two books in the same series, as well.  And while nothing Chandler wrote could ever live up to the former, The Long Goodbye is still pretty damn good. 

The part of the Wikipedia article that summarises the plot is pushing 700 words, so I won’t even really try here.  Essentially, Marlowe is asked to investigate the murder of a friend’s wife, it looks like his friend did it especially when said friend flees to Mexico and kills himself.  Things get complicated. 

Anyway, one of the main things that I like about the book is that it does actually acknowledge male weakness and the trauma of war.  Most the main mystery is linked to the back story of three soldiers who became friends while fighting in World War Two and the injuries one of them sustained while fighting.  One of the central messages of the book seems to be, as one character puts it, “the tragedy of life… is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.”  The only reason the whole mess happens is because the men come back from war and they come back changed.  Even Marlowe doesn’t escape.  He is less assured that in earlier books, more prone to doubt.  Vulnerabilities show that don’t crop up in The Big Sleep.  He is no longer a young man, he is aging and years of alcoholism have taken their toll mentally and physically.  More than this, he has a home now, a mailbox and a front yard.  He isn’t just a detective; he is a man who has a mortgage to pay off.

I enjoyed this book.  It is dark as all hell.  Chandler’s descriptions of Marlowe’s experiences of as an alcoholic are disturbing on a visceral level.  It somehow manages to weave phrases like, “Don’t push me.  Give me time.  The worms in my solar plexus crawl and crawl and crawl,” together with a mystery that, in all honesty, has a fairly sill resolution.  And it works.  There is no way it should work, but it does.  Chandler was always one of those writers who had a real understanding of the dark poetry of lowlife.  That’s why I love hard-boiled fiction so much.  It takes something shabby and beautifies it through the prism of a well turned phrase.  The Long Goodbye ultimately made me want to go back and reread Chandler’s early work to see if I can see the cracks in Marlowe’s façade and it’s that addictive quality that really makes his works great.

Next time: Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head.