The Long Goodbye

If Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade served as the model for most private detective protagonists in American books (and movies), Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe offered a fascinating, inside-out variation. Marlowe—especially in this book, which I love as Chandler’s best—seems more analytical than Spade, more passionate than Spade, but just not quite as cool by today’s standards. 

That little loss doesn’t hurt him or this classic, however, which provides the best plot with the most expressive prose of this top 5 private detective novels. Marlowe’s war-torn pal disappears, the guy’s oversexed wife gets murdered, and Marlowe naturally becomes police… show more.

The Long Goodbye, the sixth novel in Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe series, is a classic noir with gritty gangsters, brutal cops, femme fatales, and plenty of cocktails.

Marlowe drinks his way through the novel on his quest to find out who killed his friend’s wife. In one scene, a character instructs the bartender how to make a proper gimlet using only gin and Rose’s lime juice, leaving you to wonder what bitter truths the man is trying to dilute with the overly sweet concoction.

As you ponder the forces of good and evil in American society, you can look forward to… show more.

The Long Goodbye is a weird book and I like weird books. Although it’s cloaked as genre fiction, it is clearly influenced by the non-linear, experimental fiction of the modernist period. The book is full of carnivalesque characters who seem to loom out of the shadows, spinning Chandler’s hard-boiled detective Marlowe around and sending him off in new directions, characters that echo each other like multiplied images in a funhouse mirror, and bizarre detours where tangled subplots weave into the narrative, then unravel as Marlowe is sent caroming off again. In the end, I’m always left wondering how much of… show more.

Of all the Philip Marlowe books, this is for me the absolute best. It is one I can return to and read with love and admiration for a master writer. The story is intricate, plaiting various plots together seamlessly. At its heart is World War 2 and the effect it has on its main characters, which is why it slots into my historical crime category.

No noir list can be complete without including Raymond Chandler and his unsung hero detective Philip Marlowe. Tough-as-nails, the very definition of gritty, melancholic, and makes you want to pour a glass along with him. The film is also Robert Altman in peak form. This is later-stage Marlowe so he’s grown tougher and sadder, but more honorable as well. All of Chandler’s books are amazing, but this one is likely his best. 

I fell in love with Raymond Chandler’s writing in my teens after reading his novel The High Window. That started a search for his other books and the films he authored. His writing is peppered with punchy dialogue, two-fisted action, and imbued with a sense of humor as tangible as his rich descriptions and cynical asides. I treasure his books, with The Long Goodbye being the most complete presentation of his famous Philip Marlowe character. The hard-boiled detective genre that Chandler defined is ambiguous by nature, and so becomes the home turf for the antihero in literature. This novel… show more.