Posts tagged The Long Goodbye

Happy 124th birthday to Raymond Chandler!  In honor of the hardboiled master scribe, enjoy these quotes—and feel free to add your own! “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.” “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.” “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

Happy 124th birthday to Raymond Chandler!  In honor of the hardboiled master scribe, enjoy these quotes—and feel free to add your own!

  • “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
  • “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
  • “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
  • “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”
  • “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
  • “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
  • “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
  • “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

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As promised, here are some of the books I found at the recent treasure hunt/book sale.  This will take a number of posts, but there’s no such thing as too much literature porn.   That being the case, Hammett and Chandler are always a good place to start.  I found three Hammett classics: The Thin Man, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.  Raymond Chandler contributed the aforementioned movie tie-in edition of The Long Goodbye.  Spenser scribe Robert B. Parker finished Chandler’s Poodle Springs manuscript.  And Joe Gores wrote a fictional treatment of the legendary Hammett’s career as a P.I. (Gores’ novel was the basis for the 1982 Wim Wenders film of the same name). And that’s the first batch.  Much more to come. 

As promised, here are some of the books I found at the recent treasure hunt/book sale.  This will take a number of posts, but there’s no such thing as too much literature porn.  

That being the case, Hammett and Chandler are always a good place to start.  I found three Hammett classics: The Thin Man, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.  Raymond Chandler contributed the aforementioned movie tie-in edition of The Long Goodbye.  Spenser scribe Robert B. Parker finished Chandler’s Poodle Springs manuscript.  And Joe Gores wrote a fictional treatment of the legendary Hammett’s career as a P.I. (Gores’ novel was the basis for the 1982 Wim Wenders film of the same name).

And that’s the first batch.  Much more to come. 

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Last night was the Tony Awards, which is longer on talent and shorter on self-congratulations than most award shows.  When I watch awards shows with the moll, we have a drink or two.  It was martinis for the Oscars.  But last night I let Raymond Chandler and Robert Altman pick the cocktails.   Chandler’s description of a gimlet in The Long Goodbye is famous the world over:   “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.” In the 1973 film, Robert Altman and Elliott Gould transform Marlowe into a more self-aware private dick for The Seventies.  In the film version of The Long Goodbye, Marlowe orders a CC and ginger.  Technically, this is a highball and not a cocktail—and should be in a different glass.   But let’s not split hairs.  Both are simple to make and delicious to drink.  And Raymond Chandler would never turn up his nose at that.

Last night was the Tony Awards, which is longer on talent and shorter on self-congratulations than most award shows.  When I watch awards shows with the moll, we have a drink or two.  It was martinis for the Oscars.  But last night I let Raymond Chandler and Robert Altman pick the cocktails.  

Chandler’s description of a gimlet in The Long Goodbye is famous the world over:  

“They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

In the 1973 film, Robert Altman and Elliott Gould transform Marlowe into a more self-aware private dick for The Seventies.  In the film version of The Long Goodbye, Marlowe orders a CC and ginger.  Technically, this is a highball and not a cocktail—and should be in a different glass.  

But let’s not split hairs.  Both are simple to make and delicious to drink.  And Raymond Chandler would never turn up his nose at that.

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detailedcheeseplant asked: Hey thanks for following! I love noir, and your blog is the bees knees. Currently I'm trying to read through all of Chandler's books. Do you have a favorite Chandler novel?

It is hard to choose.  Chandler was a brilliant writer, and I love his novels, short stories, everything. 

I would recommend Chandler’s essay first, actually.  “The Simple Art of Murder” has been published as part of a short story anthology.  But it’s also available to read online, and it is both a scathing indictment of Golden Age detective stories and an outline of Chandler’s own view of crime and crime fiction.

It’s hard to choose a favorite Chandler novel.  The Big Sleep, Chandler’s first novel, is absolutely essential.  Chandler considered The Long Goodbye to be his best—though I think some regard it as too long.  The Lady in the Lake has some of his best descriptive prose.  Ultimately, I think The Big Sleep is the most influential, despite some unraveled plot threads.  It’s hard to choose my own favorite, but I think it is one of these.

What are you favorite Chandler novels, tumblchums?

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This Robert Mitchum vehicle seems to be inspired by the same line of reasoning that produced the 1997 12 Angry Men telefilm starring Jack Lemmon: gee, our lead would have been great in this role 30 years ago.  It aims to be more to eliminate the prefix from neo-noir—unlike The Long Goodbye (made two years earlier).

The Long Goodbye is, I think, a better novel than Farewell, My Lovely—which may explain some of the films’ difference in quality.  But more than that, Farewell, My Lovely is just plain uninspired.  The film is a little tarted up from the Chandler novel, but little value is added.  Robert Mitchum delivers his voiceovers with stony expertise, but his acting seems indifferent.  

If you’re a Chandler completist, see this film.  If not, see Murder, My Sweet instead.  It is a far superior filmed version of Chandler’s novel.

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Charles Frazier chooses five of the best hardboiled novels

Frazier isn’t exactly a hardboiled novelist, so I’m not sure why he was asked to compile the list.  Nonetheless, it’s a damn good list, even if the authors appearing on it are somewhat predictable.  Frazier gives us two hardboiled authors (Hammet, Chandler) and two authors from hardboiled’s offshoot, noir (Cain, Thompson).  Woodrell’s novel is the only item on the list that isn’t very predictable.

Gould’s Philip Marlowe grew on me during the course of the film.  His addled muttering at the beginning was definitely more Altman than Chandler.  But Gould was able to synthesize the two over the course of the movie to portray an updated hardboiled hero, yes, but one still rooted in Chandler’s novel.

Gould’s Philip Marlowe grew on me during the course of the film.  His addled muttering at the beginning was definitely more Altman than Chandler.  But Gould was able to synthesize the two over the course of the movie to portray an updated hardboiled hero, yes, but one still rooted in Chandler’s novel.

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