The funniest thing I read today was Mitch Berg’s dramatic memoir about one unforgettable day in Bosnia. He “misspeaks” over at Shot In the Dark.

We’ve been talking about classic hard-boiled detectives in the Comments section lately, so I might as well review Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which I re-read last week. So I still have some vague memory of it, in spite of my advancing age. (I also read The High Window, but I have more to say bout this one.)

It’s my understanding that The Long Goodbye is generally considered the last “good” Philip Marlowe novel. It was written in 1953. Chandler finished another one, Playback, a little later, but it’s not much liked. When he died in 1959, he was working on Poodle Springs, which was finished by Robert B. Parker and published just a few years ago. I’ve never read Parker’s extension. I used to be a big fan of Parker’s Spenser mysteries, until Spenser became utterly wussified, the perfect Brother Tom. I figure any Chandler story finished by Parker would have to include a scene where Marlowe gets all weepy and apologizes to Linda Loring for his male insensitivity.

Anyway, The Long Goodbye centers on Marlowe’s on-and-off friendship with a burned out case named Terry Lennox, a scarred veteran of World War II. When Marlowe first meets him he’s the drunken, kept husband of a rich woman named Sylvia. When he next meets him the marriage has broken up, but later they get together again. Occasionally Marlowe and Terry meet for drinks. One day Terry asks him to drive him to Mexico, no questions asked. Marlowe does this, and finds himself in trouble when he returns home. Sylvia Lennox has been murdered, and Marlowe is charged with aiding and abetting. He endures the third degree at the hands of a bad cop, and spends a few days in jail before being suddenly released. Terry Lennox, he is told, has committed suicide in Mexico. The case is closed.

Marlowe is unsatisfied by the whole business, but there’s little to be done about it. His connection with Lennox, however, gets him an offer of work from the wife of one of Lennox’s neighbors, a successful author of historical romances named Roger Wade. At the wife’s request, Marlowe locates Wade, an alcoholic, who has put himself into the care of a shady doctor. Marlowe gets the man home. He’s offered a job as a sort of muscle-nanny, but turns it down. Nevertheless, he and Roger become friends after a fashion.

Wade is an interesting character, in part because he’s clearly autobiographical. Like Wade, Chandler himself was a successful genre writer with a drinking problem, on his way down personally and professionally, unable to get a handle on his life. Although Wade is a generally sympathetic character, Chandler doesn’t cut him any slack. The man’s self-pity, self-destructiveness and occasional cruelty to those who care about him are painted in uncompromising colors.

Eventually there is more murder (of course) and secrets connected to Terry Lennox come to light.

Chandler isn’t the kind of writer who simply sets up a problem and then leads you through to the solution. (A famous example is The Big Sleep, where the chauffeur is murdered, and Chandler himself was unable to say who killed him.) His mysteries are about human passions and moral dilemmas, competing loyalties and the tension between law and morality. Marlowe picks his way through the bodies, trying to keep his integrity as clean as possible under the circumstances, often paying a high price for doing what he considers right. The endings of the books are never entirely satisfying from a puzzle-solving perspective, or from the perspective of abstract justice. Chandler’s message seems to be that pure justice is unattainable in this world, but that a decent man like Marlowe can make some small difference, and try to come out of it all with his soul as unpolluted as possible.

The Philip Marlowe books aren’t as much fun as many mysteries, but they’re right at the top of the genre in terms of craftsmanship and character depiction. If you’re interested in hard-boiled mysteries, you need to read Chandler.

Tags: Raymond Chandler, hard boiled detective, The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe, classic

I write this review in deep sorrow. I’ve been a fan and booster of Robert K. Tanenbaum for some years now. But that’s all done, now that I’ve read Malice. Tanenbaum has lost my imprimatur. He’s become an author I can no longer support.

What hurts most is that I’m certain it’s my own fault.

If you’re an old timer here, you may recall my history with Tanenbaum. I discovered his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi books back in the ’80s, and enjoyed them for their vivid characters and Rabelaisian humor. But then I felt his books were getting a little raunchy for my taste, especially in terms of language, and I dropped him.

In the late ’90s I picked him up again, and it seemed to me he’d grown a great deal as an author and thinker. By this time Butch and Marlene (he’s a New York District Attorney; she’s a former lawyer, later a personal security specialist, now an independently wealthy hobby artist and dog breeder) had gotten married and were raising a family. Of particular interest was their daughter Lucie, who was both a language prodigy and a devout, practicing Catholic. Tanenbaum (like Butch Karp) is clearly Jewish himself, but he showed unusual sensitivity to Christianity in his portrayal of Lucie.

I was especially impressed with the novel True Justice, in which Karp dealt with the issues of abortion and infanticide. Although it understandably attempted to square the circle and present all sides, it depicted (through Lucie) an understanding of the pro-life position, without caricature, hard to find in contemporary literature. I was so pleased that I wrote a fan letter to Tanenbaum, telling him how much I valued his effort.

This, I’m confident, spoiled everything.

Tanenbaum, no doubt, checked out my web page, discovered what sort of a right-wing yahoo I am, and vowed on the spot to drive me, and everyone like me, away.

Not immediately. Not right off. But gradually. By stages.

First of all, he gave Lucie a boyfriend, an Arizona cowboy. And sent her happily to bed with him, without benefit of clergy. Without even any Catholic guilt.

Secondly, he introduced the character of John Jojola, a Taos Navajo reservation policeman and Native American shaman. He has led Lucie into a “deeper” spiritual understanding through his Ancient Wisdom.

And now, for the coup de grace, the first time we see Lucie in Malice, she’s taking a trip on peyote, under John Jojola’s supervision.

OK, Mr. Tanenbaum. I get the message.

The plot of this book centers on a sort of busman’s holiday for Butch Karp. On medical leave from the DA’s office (he got shot at the end of the last book), Butch is asked to help out the brother of an old teammate from his basketball playing days, a college baseball coach who’s been wrongly suspended by his college and the league.

But that’s tied to the action back in New York, where Butch’s colleagues and friends are discovering evidence of massive, world-wide criminal conspiracy. An Ancient Secret Society, a Shadow Government, an Unseen Hand behind world events.

A rip-off of The DaVinci Code, to be honest. Tanenbaum has apparently figured out that paranoia fiction is where the money is these days. Gone are the days when Butch Karp hunted down ordinary criminals and corrupt politicians. Now he’s pulling back the veil that covers the True, Occult History of the World.

You think our biggest danger today is Islamic terrorism? Ha! You’re a dupe!

The real danger is… wait for it… MANXMEN! That is, guys from the Isle of Man. (Because, I suppose, God forbid there should be any evil in the world that doesn’t spring from white males.) Islamic terrorism is just a sideshow that the Manxmen have orchestrated, to allow their puppets in the government to trample on our civil rights through the Patriot Act. (There are many references to “the loss of our civil rights” under the Patriot Act. Oddly, what rights we’ve lost is never explained.)

In other words, Tanenbaum has completely buckled to contemporary liberal dogma. Oh, he concedes, in a talky and poorly written epilogue, that the war on terror is a serious matter, but the plot as a whole gives no support to that view.

I’d probably be willing to forgive all that, because it’s still a Tanenbaum book and therefore a lot of fun.

But putting peyote into Our Lucie’s mouth?

That, sir, I cannot forgive.