A review by robnobody
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Man, I was really into Raymond Chandler in my late teens/early twenties. Hell, I STILL have MarlowePI as my usual forum name. Anyway, this was Chandler's second-to-last completed novel, and generally agreed to be his last good one. It's a little more meandering and philosophical than his earlier Marlowe novels, showing a little more of the day-to-day life of being a private eye that doesn't involve the Big Cases, with character digressions on consumerism, mass production, the nature of crime and the police, alcoholism, writing, alcoholic writers, and the different types of blondes (...Chandler was paid by the word.) There's the cringey sexism, racism, and homophobia endemic to the time period and the genre, though it's a little hard to tell if they reflect more on the character narrator (as sort of comes across with the racism) or on the author (as really seems the case with the other two), or if there's any difference. This was also Chandler's most personal novel, dealing heavily with two different alcoholics and their effects on the people around them. Of course, the real draw is Chandler's patented snappy tough-guy sarcasm, with this one including some of my favorites lines, like “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back," and "He had short red hair and a face like a collapsed lung."

Ray Porter on the whole does a great job with the narration, bringing the appropriate level of weary, cynical snarkiness to Marlowe, and bringing a startling amount of variation to the many males voices. It was just a little disappointing, then, for the only two major female characters to have basically the same breathy falsetto.