THE LONG GOODBYE

By RAYMOND CHANDLER

While several members were unable to attend they kindly sent emails letting us know, and several took a moment to note how much they had enjoyed our first classic, Raymond Chandler's THE LONG GOODBYE. There was no doubt that has been one of our favorite reads. It was clear that Raymond Chandler was from a different time. His novel meanders through the story, sometimes even seeming to have left the plot line, however his staccato similes and metaphors describing Los Angeles and its characters in the early nineteen-fifties is always present. It was a book you could roll around in your mouth and taste before swallowing.

Chandler was born in Chicago in the U.S., but re-located to Britain when he was 8 years old. He attended school in England and spent time in Paris in Munich. He returned to the States in 1912 eventually finding himself in Los Angeles, where he strung tennis rackets, picked fruit, scrimping for a long time. He enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and was in training as a pilot at war end. After a checkered affair with a married woman, whom he eventually married, and a failure as an executive for an Oil Syndicate, began writing pulp fiction in 1933. His wife, Cissy Chandler, died after a long illness while we was writing THE LONG GOODBYE.

One of the most interesting insights came from Barbara who noted that Chandler writes Philip Marlowe in first person yet never narrates, or explains what Marlowe is thinking. We have to determinate by watching Marlowe's actions and listening to his words what he is up to, not usually the case in first person narrative. Glenn also noted that Marlowe's black and white adherence to his own sense of truth is a pervasive feature of novels of this time, even including James Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye as similarly motivated. If there was one criticism mentioned, it was the loss of a sense of place sometimes. Chandler doesn't really describe as much of the specific streets and locales as we have become used to by more recent writers who write novels set in Los Angeles, like Crais and Connelly.

But who can for get Marlowe's take on blondes ...

"All blondes have their points…. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review.

There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and… very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because… she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler."

3-1/2 STARS