Apparently, one of the longest detective stories ever written, The Long Goodbye takes us on a journey into the seedy side of the rich and famous with down and out, hard drinking, private detective Phillip Marlowe.
I don’t generally read detective fiction, and I thought this book could have finished a good 100 pages before it did, it seemed to ramble on long after the plot had been revealed.
Chandler creates a ‘film noir’ atmosphere with the inevitable damsels in distress, leggy “broads”, and the scarred knife carrying bad guys. Bad feeling is resolved with a “slug” to the face, or a knife in the side. That was part of the problem for me ~ the storyline was unbelievable and the characters stereotyped.
Before reading this novel I didn’t know much about Phillip Marlowe, though he does seem to be a legend in the detective genre, so I was at least pleased to make his acquaintance.
If you like the Sin City style of graphic novel, you would enjoy this as it had larger than life characters and a comic book feel to it.
Written in 1953, there is a kind of innocence to it, which doesn’t quite cater for the more sophisticated reader we have become in the 21st Century. We demand a little more reality when it comes to this genre.
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