"The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler

I think this is my other favorite Raymond Chandler novel, besides The Lady in the Lake.  I really love the interactions between Philip Marlowe and Terry Lennox.  Stories that revolve around a friendship often end up being favorites for me.  Two guys who might be considered losers by the world, who understand each other but don't pity each other -- no wonder they wound up friends.

Of course, then Terry had to go get himself into an awful lot of trouble and wind up dead.  And Marlowe had to just keep worrying at the edges of the mystery surrounding that trouble, which gets him into plenty of difficulties while he figures things out.  Oh, Marlowe, how I love you.

I last read this book just about ten years ago.  That was the perfect amount of time to help me forget the details, though I did remember there would be a doozy of a plot twist toward the end.  Which I looked forward to with great enthusiasm :-)

Because I'm exactly this sort of weird fangirl, I bought myself a Desert Rose coffee mug, circa the 1940s, while reading this book.  Why?  Because Marlowe mentions using a coffee mug and saucer in this pattern during the book.  I looked online to see if it was a real china patter, and after a bit of amateur sleuthing of my own, I learned this was the style of the coffee mugs in that pattern that were made before the book was written.  And I found one on eBay and bought it:

You may wonder why a hardboiled detective like Philip Marlowe would have a pretty, even somewhat whimsical, china pattern like that... in The Long Goodbye, he's renting a furnished house that belongs to an older woman who has temporarily moved away.  I assume the china is hers.  But he uses it.  So... I bought one.

Particularly Good Bits:

Very methodical guy, Marlowe.  Nothing  must interfere with his coffee technique.  Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character (p. 28).

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel (p. 82).

"I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while.  I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich.  I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business.  I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things.  The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with.  I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel the bottom has dropped out of his or her life" (p. 92).

It was the kind of morning that seems to go on forever.  I was flat and tired and dull and the passing minutes seemed to fall into a void, with a soft whirring sound, like spent rockets (p. 221).

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars (p. 273).

I went out to the kitchen to make coffee--yards of coffee.  Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved.  The life-blood of tired men (p. 319) (My personal favorite Raymond Chandler line of all time.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-16.  There are plenty of allusions to and discussions of sex, and Marlowe spends the night with a woman, but it's all remarkably tasteful and oblique, not described on-page.  There's also some bad language here and there, plus a LOT of alcohol consumption, several deaths described in not-too-gory detail, and a suicide.  Chandler isn't for kids, but he doesn't write dirty books, either.

This is my first book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list!!!