The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

First published: 1953

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of plot: Early 1950’s

Locale: Los Angeles

Principal characters

• Philip Marlowe, a forty-two-year-old private detective
• Terry Lennox (Paul Marston), an alcoholic, Marlowe’s friend
• Roger Wade, an alcoholic popular novelist
• Eileen Wade, Roger Wade’s wife
• Howard Spencer, Roger Wade’s New York publisher
• Bernie Ohls, a police detective in the homicide division
• Harlan Potter, a wealthy magnate whose daughter has been murdered
• Linda Loring, Potter’s daughter
• Mendy Menendez, a gangster and wartime friend of Terry Lennox

The Story:

Private detective Philip Marlowe encounters the alcoholic Terry Lennox, a World War II veteran who had been wounded and who had spent time as a prisoner of war. Lennox is married to the incredibly wealthy Sylvia Lennox, daughter of multimillionaire Harlan Potter. When Marlowe first meets Lennox, Lennox’s wife Sylvia dumps him from her car for being too drunk. Marlowe helps Lennox, and a sort of friendship ensues; the two of them meet occasionally for gimlets at a bar called Victor’s.

One night, Lennox appears at Marlowe’s house, asking him for a ride to the airport in Tijuana, just across the Mexican border. Marlowe realizes that something drastic has happened but will not let Lennox implicate him as an accessory by telling his story. Marlowe drives Lennox to Tijuana and is arrested upon his return to Los Angeles, where he spends several days in jail. He learns that Lennox has been accused of savagely killing his wife. Despite harsh treatment by the police, Marlowe refuses to divulge any information about Lennox. Before long, Marlowe is released. He finds that Lennox has presumably killed himself in a small town in Mexico, leaving behind a confession. A gangster named Mendy Menendez warns him not to pursue the Lennox case. Upon returning home, Marlowe finds a letter from Lennox waiting for him, written before his confession. It also requests that Marlowe not investigate the case, and it contains a five-thousand-dollar bill.

Before long, Marlowe is contacted by publisher Howard Spencer and Eileen Wade, the wife of Roger Wade, a writer of popular historical swashbuckler novels. Wade, not for the first time, has disappeared in an alcoholic haze; Eileen and Howard Spencer wish to hire Marlowe to find Wade and bring him back. Marlowe is at first reluctant but finally takes the case. Marlowe soon discovers that Wade has been in the care of a shady physician, Dr. Verringer, who exorts monery from the alcoholics and drug addicts whom he treats.

Marlowe brings Wade home, and before long Spencer and Wade have another proposition for him: They will hire him to stay keep Wade sober until he can finish his current novel. Marlowe is reluctant to take the job. From his perspective, Wade is a grown man who can see to himself; additionally, if Wade is intent upon getting drunk, sooner or later he will find a way to do so. Nevertheless, Marlowe spends time with the Wades. Before long, he learns that Roger seems to be drinking to assuage a sense of guilt and that Wade turns bitter and mean when he is drinking. Additionally, after meeting Sylvia Lennox’s sister Linda Loring and finding that she knows the Wades, Marlowe wonders whether Roger Wade had an affair with the notoriously promiscuous Lennox before she died. At the same time, Eileen Wade seems to be mentally unstable. She seeks a lover whom she lost in the war; once, she even mistakes Marlowe for that lost lover and asks him to take her to bed.

During his time helping the Wades, Marlowe is warned off the case by magnate Harlan Potter, the father of Linda and Sylvia, making him recall the warning he received from Mendy Menendez. The various warnings pique Marlowe’s curiosity, as do the inconsistent details of Terry Lennox’s death. Threats by Menendez, Potter, and the police do not deter Marlowe, and he continues to pursue evidence to support what his instincts have told him: that Terry Lennox is innocent and that Roger and Eileen Wade are involved somehow with the murder of Sylvia Lennox. Before Marlowe can follow up his instincts with Wade, he finds the author dead, having seemingly killed himself with his pistol. Although Eileen Wade initially accuses Marlowe of killing Wade, he is soon exonerated.

As the police use Marlowe as bait for Menendez, Marlowe puzzles out the mystery. Eileen Wade and Terry Lennox had been married in England during the war; thinking Terry had died, Eileen married Wade, preserving Lennox—whose real name was Paul Marston—in her mind as her perfect, lost younger lover. When Terry appeared in California as the husband of Sylvia Lennox, Eileen’s nostalgic view of him was crushed. Consumed by jealousy, she killed Sylvia Lennox. Later, suspecting that her husband was drinking because he knew of her actions, she killed him as well. She hired Marlowe to help her husband in part because of Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox.

Bringing publisher Howard Spencer along as a witness, Marlowe confronts Eileen Wade with the facts. Later, rather than face the police, she kills herself. Her death leaves one central mystery: Why did Lennox confess to a crime he did not commit? Was Lennox murdered? Marlowe unravels this central question, too, and the novel ends with Marlowe’s final confrontation: His friend Terry Lennox is still alive, having faked his murder with the help of Menendez and other criminals. Marlowe rebuffs Lennox, telling him that his actions caused the death of Wade and even endangered Marlowe’s life.

Bibliography

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. A landmark discussion of genre and popular literatures, with extended chapters on hard-boiled detective literature and Chandler’s development of the form.

Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” In Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. Chandler’s famous essay on how the hard-boiled detective style swerved from the classical English style of writers such as Agatha Christie and S. S. Van Dine, including his famous commentary on how he views his heroes.

Eburne, Jonathan Paul. “Chandler’s Waste Land.” Studies in the Novel 35, no. 3 (2003): 366-382. A consideration of the Los Angeles milieu of Chandler’s novel and the wounded nature of Marlowe; focuses on the novel’s recurring references to poet T. S. Eliot, author of the landmark post-World War I poem The Waste Land (1922).

Geherin, David. The American Private Eye. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. A history of the private eye character in detective fiction, with a chapter on Philip Marlowe. The chapter is particularly interesting for its discussion of how Marlowe breaks ranks with previous characters and establishes new paradigms.

Marling, William. The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. An excellent consideration of the development of literary noir fiction (called roman noir), with a lengthy section on Chandler’s life, growth as an artist, and contributions to detective fiction.

Routledge, Christopher. “A Matter of Disguise: Locating the Self in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 94-107. Interesting consideration of the various disguises and character reversals in two of Chandler’s novels, as well as a thorough examination of Marlowe’s growth from the first novel (The Big Sleep, 1939) to The Long Goodbye.