Literary Landscapes by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

LOS ANGELES, USA

RAYMOND CHANDLER

THE LONG GOODBYE (1953)

In postwar Los Angeles, private detective Phillip Marlowe’s search for justice sets him against crooked cops, brutal racketeers, and the entire might of a corrupt city government.

Like the city in which it takes place, The Long Goodbye is a peculiar, rambling novel, filled with unexpected digressions and strange interludes. It is the story of Phillip Marlowe, a two-bit private detective with a dingy office in downtown Los Angeles, a few hundred in the bank, and an unbreakable code of ethics, one which stands in unforgiving contrast to the loose morals of post-war America. Incorruptible, antisocial, caring nothing for money and little more for sex, Marlowe’s sole vice—albeit one which proves as ruinous as liquor or dope—is for lost causes, the weak and the foolish and the misbegotten. His quest to clear the name of a dead friend sees him exploring a Los Angeles reflecting the dark side of the American dream, in which love is a commodity like any other, and money can buy everything but happiness.

As Los Angeles is the anti-city, a hundred diverse communities stuck against one another into a sprawling metropolis, so is The Long Goodbye the anti-crime novel. Peculiarly for an author who all but defined the genre, Chandler had few of the skills generally associated with writers of pulp fiction, and readers used to the cheap, violent thrills of Chandler’s imitators will likely come away bored. For that matter, the through-line at the heart of the classic mystery—a stolen necklace, a butler murdered in the study—is nowhere to be found. In its place is a work full of odd asides, of side plots that go nowhere, of characters that appear and then disappear, of loose ends that a competent editor would almost certainly have strangled. While the final sting remains as sharp as anything in fiction, it is precluded by 50 pages that could be cut without affecting the work in any significant way.

And yet, in the half-century since it was written, The Long Goodbye has become widely recognized as the defining example of what is the only truly American literary form. Chandler’s great and abiding genius resides in two areas; first, a talent for language that is shared by few twentieth-century writers, irrespective of genre; and second, a profound sense of place, a vision of Los Angeles that has defined the city in the minds of millions of readers. It is, on the surface at least, an unkindly depiction. Chandler’s Los Angeles is a city of gamblers and dope addicts, of decent men rendered amoral by time and misfortune, of woman lost to drink and lust and sadness, of unjust police officers and titans of industry unconcerned with the brutal effects of their wealth. Its great natural beauty is ever at contrast with the sins and vices of its inhabitants, and the sunny optimism that was the hallmark of the 1950s America seems a sick joke.

Visitors to Los Angeles often find themselves agreeing with Chandler’s estimation. For those

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