She had an iron smile and eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet.

Recently I was poking around Amazon Prime for a movie to watch, and I hit on the old 1973 film adaptation of The Long Goodbye. I hadn’t seen it in many years, and watched it again just to see if I liked it any better than I did in my youth. I found I did not. It’s a Robert Altman vehicle, meaning Raymond Chandler’s story is mostly subsumed in Altman’s improvisations, and Elliott Gould is not Philip Marlowe by any stretch of the imagination. (I must confess the movie did the story no harm by simplifying the plot, though.)

Anyway, I figured I might as well re-read the book (first published 1953) and see how it compared. As I expected, I liked it a whole lot better than the movie, though it’s not without flaws.

Terry Lennox is sporadically one of Philip Marlowe’s few friends. He’s a wounded war veteran with interesting facial scars, and Marlowe encounters him sometimes in evening clothes with rich women on his arm, and sometimes drunk in the gutter. Terry has been married to an heiress named Sylvia, been divorced by her, and then remarried again. Now and then he and Marlowe get together for a drink.

One night Terry shows up asking Marlowe to drive him across the border to Mexico. Marlowe does this, with some misgivings. Once back, he learns the news – Terry’s wife has been murdered, and the police are looking for him. Marlowe gets arrested and subjected to some third degree… and then the whole business is dropped. Word is that Terry has killed himself in Mexico. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a letter from Terry, apparently posted just before his death. Tucked in the envelope is a $5,000 bill, which Marlowe puts away in his office safe because he’s uncomfortable about how he earned it.

Through his connection with Terry, Marlowe gets an inquiry from the publisher of Roger Wade, a bestselling author of historical thrillers. Roger has a serious drinking problem and writer’s block. The publisher has the idea that Marlowe might be the man to nursemaid Wade, dry him out and keep him working. Marlowe is not interested, even after a personal appeal from Wade’s stunningly beautiful wife, Eileen. But that doesn’t stop her appealing to him to find Wade after he disappears on a bender. Marlowe tracks him down at a seedy health spa and drags him home. He forms a prickly friendship with the man, while still refusing the babysitting job.

That’s enough to explain how things start out. The plot progresses in what seems to me a somewhat uneven, lurching fashion, as if Chandler was describing his own difficulties writing it through the creative travails of Roger Wade. The final conclusion is (to my mind) a little unsatisfying – but not as weird as the climax they gave us in the movie.

Critics, I understand, are divided concerning The Long Goodbye. Some consider it Chandler’s best work. Others judge it one of the weakest in the series. I myself enjoyed reading it, but found it a little claustrophobic. The story was, after all, somewhat crowded with author’s surrogates. Both Terry Lennox, the shell-shocked, psychologically broken war veteran, and Roger Wade, the bibulous, self-loathing author, are expressions of Chandler’s own self-image. And almost all narrator characters – including Philip Marlowe – are alter egos of their creators.

Also, the book features a series of “solutions,” each replacing the other as if the author couldn’t make up his mind.

But it’s worth reading. I enjoyed it all in all. Also, there’s references to the war in Norway.

The Kindle link I’m using here is for the edition I read, which is the only ebook edition I can find that’s not part of an omnibus. If you can find a different edition, I advise you to buy that, because this one (published in Ukraine) is laden with OCR errors. The “illustrations” advertised are just old paperback cover art, unrelated to the story.

I find, on searching our archives, that I’ve already reviewed this book here once. I need to review more Philip Marlowe novels, and have set about reading another.