Monday, August 11, 2008

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye is part of a series of books by Raymond Chandler that features the detective Phillip Marlowe. In this book he meets Terry Lennox. Terry and he become drinking buddies. In their conversations Marlowe finds out that Terry has divorced and then remarried his very wealthy wife. One day Terry shows up at Marlowe's door asking Marlowe to take him to the Tijuana airport. Marlowe does and in time finds out the Terry's wife is murdered.

Howard Spencer and Eileen Wade try to hire Marlowe to make sure that Roger Wade does not drink ant more and finishes his book. Marlowe says no, but then Roger is missing and Mrs. Wade calls Marlowe to find him. As Marlowe is pulled into the lives of Eileen and Roger Wade he finds out that they knew the Lennox's.

I know that literary scholars say that The Long Goodbye is the consequential detective novel. I am not a literary scholar so I don't see it. The Long Goodbye says it in the title long. I felt the book would never end. It was slow and boring. I felt that it was more the day in the life of a L.A. detective. When the truth came out, I was like it was about time.

This was not my type of book. But if you like classic literature you may like it.

I read this book because it is part of One Book, One Chicago. I did not get the chance to read it in the spring. Every time I went to the library it was checked out. The fall book is The Right Stuff. I will try to read it. I loved the movie, so I hope the book will be just as good.

I chose the vintage cover over the new version because it is so cool.

2 comments:

Lezlie said...

I love reading some of this old detective stuff, because it makes me laugh everytime they actually use words like "dame". :-)

Lezlie

Pabast said...

This book did have a modern day feel, but then you read something and you area like oh yeah this book was written in the fifties.

Lissa