Raymond Chandler didn't start out as a "hardboiled" detective writer of the "noir" genre. He didn't start out as a detective writer at all. His first published writings were Romantic poems written when he was coming of age in England. He fell back on writing this sort of thing - the aforementioned "hardboiled" detective novel that The Long Goodbye is - when his business ventures had fallen through after his return to America. The reason for this biographical opening here is that this book reads so autobiographically to me. This is not to detract from the plot, which is quite well done and has been rehashed by all the reviewers here too often for me to need to rehash it. But I don't think I would have taken to the novel if it weren't for the autobiographical subtext - if that's quite the right word in this context - of the novel.

The novel contains two significant male characters besides Marlowe: One, like Chandler, is an alcoholic and former Englishman (disguising his original identity, as best he can, under an assumed American alias). The other, again like Chandler, is an alcoholic who writes best-selling books about which he's deeply ambiguous, to put it mildly. These two alter egos of Chandler, and Marlowe's interaction with them, proved the most interesting parts of the book for me. Marlowe himself, as is no doubt intended, remains something of a cypher.

The first, Terry Lennox, whom Marlowe saves from the drunk tank by picking him off the streets before the cops can get him, gives monologues like the following, about sex, in the early going:

"It's excitement of a high order, but it's an impure emotion - impure in the aesthetic sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it." P.23

The second, Roger Wade, writes, what for me, is the best writing of the book, while drunk, on some sheets of paper he has Marlowe destroy, but not before Chandler devotes all of Chapter Twenty-Eight to recording it. The first paragraph begins thusly:

"The moon's four days off the full and there's a square patch of moonlight on the wall and it's looking at me like a big blind milky eye, a wall eye. Joke. Goddam silly simile. Writers. Everything has to be like something else. My head is as fluffy as whipped cream but not as sweet. More similes. I could vomit just thinking about the lousy racket....." p.203

I'm giving so much space to these quotes here because, for me, the book was just as much about writing, alcoholism and fear of sex as it was about the murders that Marlowe unravels. Actually, the perpetrators come to him and the crimes unravel before him. Marlowe is curiously passive for a detective, for anyone really.

The end effect of the novel is an odd but striking sense of decay. As Wade's wife, Eileen, puts it, "Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean." P.329

So, yes, as the other reviewers write, a splendid "noir" detective novel, perhaps the best. But also, and more importantly, a semi-autobiographical character study with moral dimensions punctuated with stylistic prose. One shouldn't forget, after all, to whom the "long goodbye" is directed, why it takes so long and how sad its completion.

As Marlowe puts it, "You can never know too much about the shadow line and the people who walk it."

Terse. Fast moving. Graphic. Totally believable characters. Exciting and suspenseful. It recaptures a bygone era, but people don't change all that much. What more do you want in a mystery?

Originally copyrighted and published 1953.

Chandler talked his way out of a 5-star rating by making the Goodbye a little too long. Atmospheric tale with dark, almost fatalistic mood gets lost with too much talking and and too many false endings after the climax.

Still, beautiful workout so well crafted with so much heart I can overlook the faults.

Originally copyrighted and published 1953.

Chandler talked his way out of a 5-star rating by making the Goodbye a little too long. Atmospheric tale with dark, almost fatalistic mood gets lost with too much talking and and too many false endings after the climax.

Still, beautiful workout so well crafted with so much heart I can overlook the faults.

So read "The Long Goodbye" and you'll know why they call them "classics" - the kind of crime fiction that defined "noir", the stuff that their disciples - I'm talking about guys like Swierczynski, Bruen, Huston, Stella, McKinty, Connolly (John, not Michael) - who drank up Chandler like mother's milk and, standing on the shoulders of Chandler, Thompson, Hammett, McBain, have launched their own brand of hip, irreverent, in-your-face noir that will be the pulp fiction that our sons and daughters will revere and lionize decades from now. Stuff that was written in the 50s - those simple days before cell phones, computers, video games, or political correctness - but still relevant today and will still have you riveted to the pages as tight as Joe McCarthy chasing down the next suspected Communist pervert.

The plot - if it really matters - has tough talking, hard drinking, fast-fisted private eye Phillip Marlowe befriending a wounded war veteran, Terry Lennox, who's hooked up with a high society, high-sexed wife but is still down on his luck. When the wife ends up dead with a face beaten to hamburger, Lennox is on the run and Marlowe ends up on the wrong side of the cops and a local gangster. The story is as lean and clipped as those beautifully streamlined Adirondack wooden speedboats of the day - the days when guys cracked wise and got sore and hung out with broads and dames, when it was OK to smoke and drink gimlets and rye whiskey sours during a bona fide cocktail hour - a rare glimpse into a slice of American history you'll not find in our revisionist history books of the day. But more importantly, this is a lesson in an understanding of irony as a powerful tool when deftly twisted into words. A lesson in the impact of tension and brutality without relying on graphics or extremes - the literary equivalent of Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" shower scene. And a primer in timing, pacing, and the street smart dialog that many try to emulate today, mostly falling short and sounding more - unintentionally - like Maxwell Smart than Phillip Marlowe.

So read it for the drama, or read it for the history lesson, or read to see where the best writers of today were schooled - just read it. An American crime classic at the top of the genre, and a master of noir at the peak of his game.

You don't read Raymond Chandler for the plots--you read him for the magnificent "hard boiled" prose. The Long Goodbye is probably his most complex work, full of world-weary insights and a somewhat more "tender" Marlowe. The great pleasure of The Long Goodbye is seeing how the main character, Philip Marlowe, reconciles his cynical view of humanity with a genuine desire to help a few unfortunates in life. The best Marlowe... classic....

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets

Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is at the top of his game in this novel. It is the longest book that Raymond Chandler ever wrote and, sadly, it is his last completed manuscript. Subsequent books were cobbled together from fragments of unfinished books ("Poodle Springs") or screenplays ("Playback").

Chandler is one of my favorite writers and this is one of his best books. I was sorry to finish it, knowing that there was not another Philip Marlowe mystery to look forward to. I give high marks to "The Long Goodbye." I rate it as the equal of "Farewell, My Lovely" or "The Big Sleep."

This book, the penultimate novel in noir pioneer Raymond Chandler's series of novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe, is my candidate for the best American novel of the post world war 2 era. From the time he launched the Marlowe novels with the epochal The Big Sleep in 1939, it was crystal clear that Chandler viewed the detective novel as a vessel to be filled with pungent social commentary, an almost metaphysical portrait of a world gone wrong (call it Los Angeles), sharp character studies, and a fireworks display of the literary possibilities of the American vernacular. Chandler used the bits and pieces of the private eye/noir conventions as a coatrack to hang his stylistic concerns and dark worldview. He has more in common with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner than he does with contemporaries like Hammett and Cain. (and very often he is the equal of Max Perkins' big boys).

Chandler recycled the same story elements over and over again, knowing plot has nothing to do with story. All of his novels go something like this: Marlowe gets hired to help someone out of a jam, closes the case pretty quickly, but the solution has raised more questions than answered. Marlowe pursues the truth on his own, realizes his client has been concealing a past crime from him and he had initially been hired to tidy up the loose ends. Along the way he narrowly escapes seduction by a dark lady and a fair lady, is arrested and threatened by the cops, beaten up by hoods, and goes nose to nose with a fearsome but super-smart crime boss, who invariably is less corrupt than the wealthy clients or the police. At the end Marlowe solves the latent mystery behind the first one, and closure only leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. Only once did Marlowe ever kill anybody, and only once (prior to the last novel Playback, where he's yikes, engaged) does he sleep with anybody.

Marlowe himself, who narrates the books, is quite a construct. He charges 25.00 a day plus expenses, and he doesn't do divorce work. He lives alone in a shabby Hollywood rental bungalow, drinks too much, plays the tough lout but reads Proust and Flaubert secretly, plays solitary chess as a hobby. He seems to prefer to take a beating than hand one out. He hates the rich, has contempt for the cops, and loathes bullies of all stripes. He is a magnet for women, but lovemaking to him seems largely to consist of elaborate verbal dueling/repartee. His celibacy seems a choice, a means of retaining purity and honor in a corrupt world, but a choice that he is aware is pathological and self-defeating.

When Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye in the early '50's, the private eye genre had already been frozen into nostalgic cliche. The violent nihilism of Mickey Spillane had supplanted Chandler's knightly quester. Chandler perhaps felt free to expand his pallet -- while the outline of the plot follows all the conventions the earlier books did, here the length is doubled, the pace slowed down, the genre elements give way to richer characterizations and an even deeper ambivalence in the soul of Philip Marlowe. Chandler apparently knew he would be retiring Marlowe soon, so he sent him off with a full-fledged novel. I will divulge none of the specifics, except to say that The Long Goodbye takes Marlowe's singular virtues -- idealism, cynicism, loyalty, doggedness -- and submits them to deep questioning. Along the way, the reader is treated to the definitive portrait of Los Angeles as the place where people come to flee their past and change their identity -- the Great Wrong Place, and Chandler's pitch-perfect metaphor for all that's wrong with America -- the denial of history, the insane materialism, the false belief in escape-as-redemption.

Calling this a hard-boiled mystery is like calling Moby Dick a book about whaling. While The Long Goodbye is a terrific example of the genre, it's also a meditation on our culture and our failings and the impossibility of heroism in the modern world. It's no stretch to say the Chandler sought to re-create Eliot's Wasteland for mass consumption, concealed in the trappings of pulp fiction. Here he succeeds.

This is the one, the master's masterpiece. The story is heart-wrenching in its sad inevitability; the characters are unforgettable, the style honed to perfection. It also represents the perfect realization of the vision for noir fiction which Chandler articulated in "The Simple Art of Murder." Marlowe is as noble as it gets in a decidedly ignoble world and few of the other characters deserve to be on stage with him. The setting is palpable. You taste the smog and feel it against your skin, just as you taste the gimlets at Victor's. This is the writer's guidebook and the greatest pain comes from the fact that Chandler makes it look so easy. This is exhibit A for the art of writing. It's not using strange words. It's using everyday words in new ways. Here he does it on nearly every page.

Detective Philip Marlowe, looking into the death of casual drinking buddy Terry Dexter, finds that what few answers emerge merely raise more questions. It's like peeling back the layers of an onion. Dexter flees to Mexico after his wife is brutally murdered, and there kills himself under cloudy circumstances. His death too neatly disposes of the potentially scandalous murder, his wife having been the wild daughter of a secretive, Hearst-like newspaper magnate. And too many people benefit. Marlowe doesn't buy it, and when arrested on suspicion of having aided Dexter's escape, refuses to talk.

By coincidence he is then drawn into the sad marriage of a wealthy, alcoholic writer and his to-die-for wife, who happen to be neighbors and friends of Dexter's in-laws. What happens there leads him back, again and again, to the Dexter case.

When I first read this, I thought it the best detective novel ever. Rereading it years later, I'm less sure.

Lately I find detective-novel conventions tiring. The loner detective. All that hardboiledness. The hard-to-explain intergrity. The pursuit of cases with no client and no paycheck. "Because they are there" may work for mountain-climbing, but not for unsolved mysteries. Mid-century novels like this one are dated by all those fedoras and martinis, although I suppose the willing readers convert those into retro-chic charm.

What I find most implausible, though, is this: Everyone sitting still for a private eye's persistent questioning. Suspects may think they can better allay suspicion by talking than by clamming up, either because there's scant evidence or because they have powerful allies. The innocent witnesses, meanwhile, invariably hold back the truth, which conveniently allows a plot to continue that otherwise would end. The private eye always reaps great benefits from finding some hole in the story's fabric. No matter how tiny it is, enough unravels for him to move his case ahead, but never (until the end) enough to finish it.

But, really, would you talk to a private eye about a murder? Especially one to which you might be tied? That tough guys either talk to Marlowe at all, or rough him up (how quaint all those fists seem) but don't kill him, leaving him alive to snoop another day, is equally problematic. And if you were innocent, wouldn't you occasionally tell it all, having decided to talk to a private eye at all?

"The Long Goodbye", I hate to say it, drags. One drawing room scene follows another, more than usual because the plot is so complex. Marlowe talks to people in bars, diners, and offices as well as drawing rooms, parlors and porches. There's precious little action.

So, that's what's wrong with it. What's right with it?

Much. Chandler and Dashiell Hammett invented the 20th century American private eye. When Chandler wrote this, the genre was hardly 20 years old. Novels like this created archetypes that were not yet stereotypes, and can't be blamed for a half century of subsequent overuse.

I find merits in it, but different ones from back in the day, when I couldn't stop turning the pages.

Chandler's leisurely writing job contains less action, but yields great character development, set in the ennui of wealthy suburbia - at the novel's writing around 1950, still a new phenomenon. He finds in the boozy cocktail parties, unhappy marriages and wandering spouses deeper evidence of its rot.

The more we learn about the enigmatic Terry Dexter, the less we understand him. Ditto the writer Roger Wade and his wife Eileen. Marlowe's lonely integrity is what holds the plot together: no one else cares about all the parts, and anyone whose interest were material might have been put off when one part was declared solved. Chandler does pull off the delicate job of maintaining Marlowe's involvement and interest in a non-case case in which he has no interest and continually mulls dropping while frequently being warned off it by the usual criminal or rich bullies.

Keeping at the truth - through all those layers of the onion - are what make this book great, in addition to Marlowe's ultimately believable pursuit of it. Chandler keeps you guessing until the last page. The end's ambivalence and murk fit well with the LA smog just then beginning to become a Southern California fixture.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid? The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."
-- Raymond Chandler from `The Simple Art of Murder' (an essay)

Philip Marlowe is cult pulp fiction at its best. His characters are intertwined and Marlowe deals with all of `em with his cool temperament and a style that can be created only by Raymond Chandler.

Raymond's stories may not be as complex and extraordinary as those of established genius detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Poirot. But his tales have emotions and noir elements that are instantly attractive and captivating.

The friend who is dead, the rich woman's known escapades, the drunk author, the rich reclusive father-in-law to the dead friend, the various characters that hit Marlowe and us in a well-crafted detective fiction is beautiful and worthy or re-reading just to relive the moments described so wonderfully.

This was the first Chandler fiction I read and have now collected a few others as well. These are a prized collection from an author who has class, style and worldly wit.

We all sometimes wish we could permanently step into the world of a book and live there. The world presented here would be one of my top choices. It's not the happiest, the safest, but it's got style, class, hot dames, and action. The way he describes Los Angeles back then makes me nostalgic for an LA that was long gone before I was even born. This is a fantastic read on so many levels. One of the best writers of the last 100 years.

Raymond Chandler's characters in THE LONG GOODBYE (1953) have become archetypes that now inhabit countless Noir movies. These include the dogged private investigator with a hard-to-explain integrity, the tough cop on the edge of the law, the spoiled manipulative rich girl, the suave and distant crime boss, and the ruthless tycoon. I don't know if these were mystery archetypes when Chandler used them in TLG. But now, they fit into cinematic boxes and serve as familiar types in a downbeat story, where the hero's idiosyncratic integrity survives in the face of brutality, deception, and murder.

As a result, a fair way to judge Chandler is to consider his craftsmanship, not just his overly familiar characters. This, in my opinion, is superior in TLG, since there is not a vague personality or needless scene in its 350+ pages. This is tight and disciplined work. Chandler definitely knew what he was doing.

Nonetheless, TLG struck me as sheer entertainment. Perhaps Chandler realized this and wanted something, shall we say, more profound. This might explain why Marlowe calls another character a "moral defeatist" in the last chapter. Implicitly, this explains Marlowe's perseverance in TLG as he searches for the truth about Terry Lennox, his occasional drinking buddy. Looking back on the book, it's credible to view Marlowe as fighting back against such weakness, which was certainly a profound position in the year's following World War II. Further, this makes him more than a relentless and humorless wise guy, which is how everyone but Terry reacts to him. Poor Marlowe really needs a friend.

Incidentally, an element in TLG that I enjoyed immensely was Chandler's insider comments on the publishing scene and writing. These came to me as complete and delightful surprises. Perhaps the popularity of Noir movies has robbed the equivalent element of surprise from his characters.

Raymond Chandler is a lot of fun to read. Part social commentary part biography, `The Long Goodbye' is nicely structured prose. Take a look at what Chandler has Marlowe say about being a Private Investigator. He says, "So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money." That is just one of many well structured descriptive paragraphs that makes for great reading.

This is more than just a murder mystery. It is good literature. Well worth adding to the reading list

Raymond Chandler is a lot of fun to read. Part social commentary part biography, `The Long Goodbye' is nicely structured prose. Take a look at what Chandler has Marlowe say about being a Private Investigator. He says, "So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money." That is just one of many well structured paragraphs that makes for great reading.

This is more than just a murder mystery. It is good literature. Well worth adding to the reading list

The basics are detective Phillip Marlowe befriends a rich drunk. A short while later he helps the man escape to Mexico when he shows up on Marlowe's doorstep because something terrible has happened. Marlowe then ends up helping a man and wife who he finds out ran in the same circles as his friend and ultimately are involved in everything.

I wanted to read this book because of its classic status in American literature and wanted to like it more than I did. Chandler is obviously a talented writer, but for some reason this book moved too slowly for me. I wasn't bored, but also wasn't completely enthralled.

When I read "The Big Sleep", I thought I was reading junky pulp until I got to the last paragraph, when I suddenly understood what Chandler was doing. No problem like that with "The Long Goodbye". It's a character study. Chandler observes what might happen to a certain kind of person if he got into a certain kind of situation, and what effect his character has on the people around him. It's a tour de force.

Yes, some of the language dates this, yet it is easily his greatest work and at risk of offending most literary types who disdain mystery novels, one of my choices as the "Great American Novel."

It has all the essential elements; lust, greed, guilt, corruption, the insularity of the idle rich and the uses and abuses of friendship, all pricelessly narrated by the cynically observant Philip Marlowe.

Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's classic noir hard-boiled private detective forever literarily associated with Los Angeles and its means streets is right at home here in his search, at the request of a friend, for the inevitable `missing woman' (`dame' for the non-politically correct types) who 'conveniently' turns up dead. There is plenty of sparse but functional dialogue, physical action and a couple of plot twists, particularly around the identity of the above-mentioned `dame' and the motives behind the involvement of the various wealthy California parties. Have no fear however the intrepid Marlowe will figure it out in the end and some kind of 'rough' justice will prevail. At this point in the Chandler Marlowe series our shamus has been around the block more than a few times but he still is punching away at the 'bad guys' and the absurdity of the modern world. How does this one compare with the other Marlowe volumes? Give me those background oil derricks churning out the wealth while looking for General Sternwood's Rusty Regan in Big Sleep or the run down stucco flats in some shady places in pursuit of Moose's Velma in Farewell, My Lovely any day. Nevertheless, as always with Chandler, you get high literature in a plebian package. Read on.

Raymond Chandler spent more time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood than as a novelist. His skill at dialogue is shown in many films ("How fast was I going" from `Double Indemnity'). Chandler did not have the varied background of a trial lawyer or private investigator.

Chapter 1 tells how Philip Marlowe first met Terry Lennox, a drunk with polite manners. Months later he found him on the street. But Marlowe thinks Terry is due for worse trouble (Chapter 2). Then early one morning Terry shows up to ask for a ride to an airport (Chapter 5). When Marlowe returns home he finds police detectives from Homicide waiting for him! Terry's wife was murdered and the police are looking for him (Chapter 6). They know Terry wrote down Marlowe's phone number. Marlowe meets the Captain of Homicide and gets a lucky break (Chapter 7). Marlowe is held in jail, then somebody paid a lawyer to represent him (Chapter 8). There was little in the newspapers. Marlowe is released after a shocking surprise (Chapter 9). A reporter explains how the newspaper business works, and how a story can be suppressed (Chapter 10).

Marlowe wonders if Terry could kill in such a brutal manner. If not, was he just a fall guy? "Dead men don't contradict the official story" said Oswald. Marlowe learns more about Terry (Chapter 11). Next he gets a letter from Terry with a $5,000 bill in it. They were rare even in those days (Chapter 12). [When Nixon devalued the currency in 1971 all bills over $100 were banned. The other dollar figures date this story.] Marlowe gets a job offer to investigate a successful author who can't finish a book because of drinking and other problems. (A self-parody?) Mrs Roger Wade visits Marlowe at home; her husband has been missing for 3 days (Chapter 14). Marlowe uses his one clue and begins investigating (Chapter 15, 16). Marlowe uses his charm (Chapters 17,18) to find Roger Wade (Chapter 19). Chapter 20 tells of another missing person case. The next chapters tell of Marlowe's visits to the rich neighborhood of Idle Valley.

Over a week later Marlowe gets a late night call for help from Roger Wade (Chapter 25). Chapter 28 has the thoughts of a drunken writer. Then a gun is fired. Roger Wade is having a nightmare (Chapter 29). Chapter 32 has a description of the mansion where Marlowe meets Harlan Potter and hears his views on things. Marlowe learns a new fact about Sylvia Lennox. Is there any clean way to make a hundred million dollars (Chapter 39)? Marlowe decides to use a private enquiry in London (Chapter 40). The surprising facts come out (Chapter 42). A reporter tells Marlowe how things work (Chapter 45). Chapter 48 explains why gambling is as corrupting as drugs. Can horse races be fixed anytime somebody wants to do it? [Is this ending just too perfect?]

This must be the longest novel of Chandler. I think its plot is quite clever, especially the ending. [Does it echo an earlier story?] The final chapter seems implausible. [The term "British Army" seems like an euphemism.]

A beautiful but unpleasant woman appears, and before long Marlowe finds himself downing gimlets at Victor's with an odd fellow he finds in a parking lot. Marlowe senses something needs his attention, and he finds himself caught up in a whirlpool of murder, infidelity and drugs. He knows that his newfound gimletting companion is somehow an essential piece the puzzle. Who is really responsible for the violence which ensues? Marlowe follows his instincts to uncover the truth behind the nightmare of corruption, and downs a few more gimlets in the bargain.

I think this is probably Chandlers' strongest work in terms of plotting. For long stretches, I know exactly what is happening, but, as always, it it his sublime use of the English language that thrills, enthralls and entraps us. I am caught in the web of words that he spins so smoothly, and I thank God that he gave us the gift of his hard-won art.

I must admit that I am generally not an aficianado of fiction, but a friend recommended that I read Chandler because being originally from Southern California, I could relate to the locales that he describes, and I am a fan of "The Rockford Files" television series whose protagonist and style of writing were strongly influenced by Chandler (although Jim Rockford is different that Philip Marlowe in some ways, not being as tough or as quick to resort to his fists in the event of receiving some insult.).
Chandler came from an era in which a man's character was considered important and Marlowe is always looking for character. Chandler himself saw the horrors of World War I so we must understand this in seeing why Marlowe puts himself out for Terry Lennox (a World War II commando), a man he barely knows, which I frankly think is inexplicable to someone raised in our post-Modern era. I looked up Chandler in the Encylopedia
Britannica and they stated there that opinions are divided on whether this particular novel is one of his best or not, because many critics find that Marlowe's passivity and seeming disinterest in the monetary aspects of his work are not realistic for a private investigator, but as other reviewers have pointed out, that is not the main part of the story. I would not classify this work as a "page turner" because the plot is not the most engrossing part of the story and is actually somewhat confusing. It is Marlowe's (and Chandler's) observations and descriptions of the "Sun-Baked Sodom" of Southern California (many of whose locales I am familiar with) and its denizens that make the book interesting, in addition to his barbs and humor. A good example is Marlowe replaying a famous chess-match from a book which he describes as "a bloodless battle and the biggest waste of human intelligence since the invention of the advertising agency". Chandler's jaundiced view of the society around him: television (which by the time the book was written in 1953 had become a major pastime for most people), advertising, novelists, the police, the media, the wealthy, the politicians and other "movers and shakers" still holds more than a half-century later and speak strongly to me (although we can be grateful to the "Warren Court" of the 1960's for curbing a lot of the violence and abuses of the police) telling me that Chandler is an astute observer of the human condition and the society around him. But not only this, we see that he is an honest critic of himself, as portrayed in the alcoholic pulp fiction writer Roger Wade character. This encourages me to read more of his books, which I can't wait to do, even though as I said, I am not a big fan of fiction.

I must admit that I am generally not an aficianado of fiction, but a friend recommended that I read Chandler because being originally from Southern California, I could relate to the locales that he describes, and I am a fan of "The Rockford Files" television series whose protagonist and style of writing were strongly influenced by Chandler (although Jim Rockford is different that Philip Marlowe in some ways, not being as tough or as quick to resort to his fists in the event of receiving some insult.).
Chandler came from an era in which a man's character was considered important and Marlowe is always looking for character. Chandler himself saw the horrors of World War I so we must understand this in seeing why Marlowe puts himself out for Terry Lennox (a World War II commando), a man he barely knows, which I frankly think is inexplicable to someone raised in our post-Modern era. I looked up Chandler in the Encylopedia
Britannica and they stated there that opinions are divided on whether this particular novel is one of his best or not, because many critics find that Marlowe's passivity and seeming disinterest in the monetary aspects of his work are not realistic for a private investigator, but as other reviewers have pointed out, that is not the main part of the story. I would not classify this work as a "page turner" because the plot is not the most engrossing part of the story and is actually somewhat confusing. It is Marlowe's (and Chandler's) observations and descriptions of the "Sun-Baked Sodom" of Southern California (many of whose locales I am familiar with) and its denizens that make the book interesting, in addition to his barbs and humor. A good example is Marlowe replaying a famous chess-match from a book which he describes as "a bloodless battle and the biggest waste of human intelligence since the invention of the advertising agency". Chandler's jaundiced view of the society around him: television (which by the time the book was written in 1953 had become a major pastime for most people), advertising, novelists, the police, the media, the wealthy, the politicians and other "movers and shakers" still holds more than a half-century later and speak strongly to me (although we can be grateful to the "Warren Court" of the 1960's for curbing a lot of the violence and abuses of the police) telling me that Chandler is an astute observer of the human condition and the society around him. But not only this, we see that he is an honest critic of himself, as portrayed in the alcoholic pulp fiction writer Roger Wade character. This encourages me to read more of his books, which I can't wait to do, even though as I said, I am not a big fan of fiction.