The Long Goodbye

"I stared.  She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half an inch and I wasn't there anymore. But wherever I was, I was holding my breath."  You know as soon as you read it that Raymond Chandler wrote that sentence, or maybe someone aping Chandler who got the rhythm right.  The concise declaratives, the baroque similes, the dangerous blonds and the heavy air of corruption - Chandler's style has become a cliche, except when it's Chandler writing it.  Chandler took pulp style and transformed it into something much more sophisticated, but without removing the tension of impending violence and barely veiled perversity.  A half-century later, you still can't put his books down, no matter how late it's getting.

The Long Goodbye is not the best of Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels to read first, but it's my favorite.  Its flaw is also its greatest strength - it rambles.  It goes down one path, hits a dead end, and then takes the long way round bringing you back to its central plot, so it doesn't have the narrative drive of earlier Chandler novels.  But I love it because its meandering takes you down some pretty fascinating roads, where you'll meet the long cast of memorable characters - thugs, cops, dishes, quacks, drunks, and rich phonies (the worst in Marlowe's book) - that populate Chandler's amoral cesspool, Los Angeles.  And in contrast to them all stands Terry Lennox, a weak and despairing drunk who Marlowe meets accidentally and helps tragically.  In Marlowe's mind, Lennox comes to represent the pale light of honor in a dark, rotting world.  

When Lennox is killed, his reputation stained with a particularly brutal murder, Marlowe can't give up on proving his friend's innocence.  Learning what drives Marlowe to clear Lennox - even if it's only to himself - is what raises the novel above its predecessors.  Marlowe reminds me of Kurosawa's samurai - men of honor in a world where honor has lost its value, except to these few who remain committed to the code.  Lennox, like Marlowe, is one of this dying breed, and Marlowe needs to believe - to know - that he remained true to the last.  Every encounter he has in the novel, with characters increasingly perverse and corrupt, pushes Marlowe closer to despair than he has ever reached before.  Yet he endures - no Chandler hero ever really triumphs - and receives some reinforcement that his code is worth his commitment.

In a time when corruption and dishonor have driven our country to near ruin, Chandler feels more relevant than he might have a decade ago.  But don't read this for political enlightenment: Read The Long Goodbye - and read it slowly - to revel in the mastery of style and character that make Chandler the best genre writer of the past century.