The Long Goodbye

⚖The case for it

Marlowe befriends a drunk outside a nightclub, and that friendship rather than a client is what starts the book. Readers say this Marlowe is older and wearier and better company for it, and a fair number call the result “Chandler’s best, and it’s not close.” The prose is the pleasure whatever the case is doing, “brisk, acidic prose that spares no one,” as in “there’s nothing around here but one great big suntanned hangover.” The swipes at money and Hollywood and the courts add up to what readers call a “savage indictment of post-war America.” Barely a detective story, and its admirers count that as the point.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The middle goes slack across long stretches of drinking and calls at wealthy houses where nothing advances, and Marlowe “wanders somewhat aimlessly around annoying people till they punch him.” He is oddly passive here next to the earlier books. The editorialising runs to “repetitive dialogue and occasional mini-essays,” and even admirers notice the “sentences feeling too handled.” The women are written “purely as sexual beings,” worse in this book than in Chandler’s others, and the Mexican characters carry a period racism modern readers stop on. The resolution then arrives on information the book never surfaced.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings