Reviews

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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nicovreeland's review against another edition

1.0

Woof, this was a disappointment, mostly because it held such promise in the beginning. Chandler’s prose is the essence of hard-boiled noir, and some of marlowe’s initial dealings with power-mad cops and their violent overreach still feel relevant today.

But then Marlowe decides not to investigate the death of his friend, under mysterious circumstances, and instead takes the most boring PI job ever created: helping a writer to get off the sauce so he can finish his book.

Eventually he stumbles backward into a bigger case, but he never takes agency in solving it, he just kind of collects clues by accident. And the cops he hated in the beginning are somehow now his best friends and they work well together…

It’s not my favorite plot, but if that was the only problem, i would give that 3 stars or maybe even 4. The bigger issue is that marlowe’s misogyny, racism, and homophobia is just too much for the 21st century. I expected a bit of this kind of thing, but I hoped that marlowe’s initial friction toward authority figures would make him more sympathetic to the minorities of society. Instead, he gets downright vicious with racial slurs and passages equating gay men with perverts.

It’s not only repulsive to read, it turns Marlowe from a savvy character to another blustering bigot who, in the end, unreservedly accepts the benefit of the corrupt police system that he railed so hard against when it went against him. Eventually he goes against the cops again, in what’s supposed to be a noble effort to get the truth out, but by then everybody the truth would affect is dead.

There’s something to be gleaned here about the ways in which privilege and advantage unconsciously lead to bias and bigotry, and how the ones with privilege only stand up to power when they are directly threatened or else when it’s too late, but the book for damn sure doesn’t mean to be saying that.

rbixby's review against another edition

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5.0

I think this is as good if not better than The Big Sleep. I'm a Chandler fanboy and will admit to having a deep love for the snappy dialog and Marlowe's indifference to the world that hides a soft heart, so I'm willing to accept my opinion is biased.

I don't really care. This one is his best.