The End of The Long Goodbye

By Barbara D’Amato

This is the last of The Outfit’s postings on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Our attention to it was inspired by the Chicago Public Library’s choice of the book for their One Book One Chicago program.

After posts on Chandler himself and the book’s content, I thought it would be appropriate to ask, “How does Chandler get his effects?” And to focus this question, we could examine Chandler’s revisions of the very end of the novel, the last couple of sentences of The Long Goodbye. The changes they passed through tell something about Chandler’s thinking and demonstrate his care for his craft.

The late Hugh Holton, a police officer who wrote thrillers centered on the Chicago Police Department, was often asked at lectures how long it took him to write a book. He would say, “Six weeks,” and when the gasping stopped, would add, “And eleven months to rewrite.” Chandler’s rewrites are so meticulous, they remind me that he began his writing career as a poet.

Mark Coggins is the Shamus and Barry-nominated author of The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital and Candy from Strangers, featuring private eye August Riordan. Bleak House Books published his fourth book, Runoff, last November. In addition to writing fiction, he is a Chandler scholar, author of the article, “Writing the Long Goodbye.” In it Coggins says, “I recently had the opportunity to examine some 200 pages of original typescript with excised or rewritten scenes while visiting the special collection of Raymond Chandler papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.” What he found gives fascinating insight into how Chandler wrote.

He worked on The Long Goodbye intermittently from 1949 until May of 1952, at which point he turned it in to his agents—finished, he thought. They didn’t like it. They said Marlowe had become too sentimental.

Chandler went back to his typewriter for a couple more months.

He did, in fact, work on a typewriter, but the sheets Coggins saw were not standard typing paper. Chandler used small yellow sheets 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high. Coggins says this was to limit the amount of retyping he had to do if he revised a page. Coggins was not permitted to photocopy the pages, since he could not secure permission from the Chandler estate, but he described the pages and even made mock-ups, which can be viewed in his article.

Chandler apparently rewrote drastically, underlining on a page only the material he wanted to keep, then retyping a largely new take on the scene. Whole scenes were eliminated entirely.

But to get to my example, the book’s closing words:

Coggins compared two versions of The Long Goodbye, June 24, 1953, and July 9, 1953, and the published ending, and found four different versions.

FIRST VERSION -- June 24, 1953:

He turned quickly and walked out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going along the hall. They died. Then I just listened.

Slow curtain.

Coggins finds this too abrupt and believes in writing it this way Chandler may have been responding to his agents’ objections to Marlowe having become too soft and sentimental.

SECOND VERSION -- July 9:

He turned away quickly and went out. I watched the door close and listened to his steps going away. After a little while I couldn’t hear them, but I kept on listening.

Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t tell you.

THIRD VERSION – also July 9:

He turned and went out. I watched the door close and listened to his steps going away. Then I couldn’t hear them, but I kept on listening anyway. As if he might come back to talk me out of it. As if I hoped he would.

But he didn’t.

Coggins notes that the second July 9 version was written in pen, which Chandler did not often use. He believes this indicates the difficulty Chandler was having striking the right tone. Coggins says “After rereading this [version three], Chandler must have felt he had overcompensated. The final sentence, ‘But he didn’t’ almost comes across with a catch in the throat.”

FOURTH VERSION -- AS PUBLISHED:

He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.

I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

Coggins’s view is that the extra description in the final, published version “slows the narrative and adds weight to what is occurring. It also manages to convey an appropriate depth of feeling at the parting, while at the same time retaining Marlowe’s cynical worldview.”

Okay. What do you think of his choices? I hesitate to admit I prefer the first version. It seems clean and straightforward to me. My feeling at that point in the book would be that if the reader didn’t get it by now, tying a ribbon on it wouldn’t help.

The “don’t ask me why” in the second version has a whiff of begging for sympathy.

To me, he certainly did overcompensate in version three. It’s a bit too self-pitying.

The final version ties it up nicely, but why add the cops? A late attempt to return to the tough-guy persona?

If I’d been writing the book, I would have gone with version one. Probably that shows why I’m not Chandler. But I would be really interested to know what other people think.

A Long Hello to The Long Goodbye . . .

by Sean Chercover

"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." - Raymond Chandler

That quote always kills me. Sad as hell, and although I don’t think it is necessarily true, it was true enough about Raymond Chandler’s writing life.


THE LONG GOODBYE (TLG) is commonly regarded as Chandler’s finest work – the apex from which he descended very quickly. With this book, he’d mastered the “art or craft of fiction” . . . and after this book, it seemed that he had little else to say.

I first came to Raymond Chandler as a teenager. Already a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, it was Chandler’s use of language that first knocked me back on my heels. Those magic similes; those perfect observational paragraphs. Upon later readings, I was taken by the strident (and often prescient) social commentary.

And those preeminent qualities still jump off the page and grab me by the throat . . .

But THE LONG GOODBYE now also moves me as a novel of naked self-assessment. Not only was it Chandler’s last great work, but it foretold his sad decline.

Much has been made of TLG’s value as a work of social criticism, and I do think that is where its major strength lies. (I also recommend Chandler’s previous novel, THE LITTLE SISTER in this context.) The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister both take on the big issues that previously had been almost exclusively the domain of literary fiction.

And both books display Chandler’s breathtaking use of language, at a time when his skills were at their peak. The masterful similes and perfect paragraphs that have been noted in previous Outfit posts (scroll down for more on this).

No, plots were not Chandler’s forte (to put it very mildly). And I agree that he did not write women well. But damn, did he ever give us a couple of complex and damaged men in The Long Goodbye.

It is clear that two of the major characters – Terry Lennox and Roger Wade – are Chandler himself, at different points of his life.

Terry Lennox is a damaged war veteran, drinks too much and doesn’t like himself much at all. He is pathetic and ineffectual, but he hasn’t given up, not completely . . . and despite the wreck that his life has become, he is still looking for a chance at reinvention. We like him for that, and Philip Marlowe does too. Marlowe is uncharacteristically sentimental about Lennox and sacrifices a great deal, to support the man Lennox could’ve been / should’ve been / could’ve become.

Like Terry Lennox, Chandler was a veteran of WWI, left scarred and insecure by his war experiences, who lived the high society life of big money and fancy cars and marital infidelity . . . before he burned out and lost his job in the oil industry and reinvented himself as a writer of hardboiled detective fiction.

The other major autobiographical character, Roger Wade is a bestselling novelist struggling to finish his latest novel, struggling with alcoholism . . . and losing. Marlowe bristles at Wade’s ego and self-pity.

Chandler, like Roger Wade, had become a bestselling novelist who felt that he deserved more respect than he got. Like Wade, he had a complicated marriage, no children, many readers, and a growing problem with booze.

Philip Marlowe is the lens through which we see these very different self-portraits. Marlowe clearly favors Terry Lennox – Chandler’s younger self – and who wouldn’t? But he also comes to acknowledge a redemptive quality about Roger Wade.

To Eileen Wade, Marlowe says, “Your husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”

Reading THE LONG GOODBYE, one might say the same thing of Chandler.

If THE LONG GOODBYE is Chandler’s last great work, it is also his most complex, and it rewards multiple readings. Every time you read this book, it reveals more of itself. This may be, in the end, what marks it as literature.

CHANDLER AND THE FAIRER SEX

by Libby Hellmann


Raymond Chandler is perhaps one of our finest prose poets, and his talents are on full display in THE LONG GOODBYE. Not only is his prose elegant, rhythmic and supple, but he can imbue a simple description of a person or place with such a philosophical or sociological perspective that you will never again think of that person or place the same way. Add in his plot twists, one-of-a-kind characters, and noble themes that sneak up on you unawares, and you have a master not just of crime fiction, but of modern American literature.

So it may seem harsh, even petty, to bring up what some consider his Achilles' heel. And I hope I do this in a wry but affectionate way. But the fact is that Chandler was not a woman’s man. A man of his time, he portrayed women as either victims, sex objects, or evil temptresses. True -- other crime fiction authors of the era were more misogynist, but Chandler doesn’t redeem himself much in this regard.

One passage in THE LONG GOODBYE, in which Chandler riffs on blondes, is especially noteworthy. Reading it still feels a little like nails against a blackboard, but I’ve reprinted (most of) it below.

All blondes have their points…. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review.

There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and… very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because… she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

With the acute realization that I’m not even close to Chandler’s skill level, I nevertheless decided to have some fun at his expense. Here’s my attempt to turn the tables by re-writing the passage from a woman of today's POV.

All men have their points…. There is the guy with the cute ass who struts and swaggers, and the deltoid-rich hunk who checks you out with a dull, vacuous stare. There is the stud who gives you a charming smile full of attitude and reeks of Opium and opens doors for you but is always very very tired when you get back to your place. He flashes you a sad but slightly smug look and tells you he has an early morning meeting and you want to slug him except that you are glad you found out about the meeting before you invested too much time and money and hope in him. Because the meetings will always come first, and the commitment won’t, and you’ll be sitting at home alone with a pound of chocolate and a bottle of wine wondering what you did wrong.

There is the drunk who doesn’t care what he drives as long as it’s your car, or where he goes as long as it’s a bar and there is plenty of booze. There is the friendly glad-handler who is your pal but wants you to pay your own way and knows everything there is to know about men and women and relationships and has a black belt in Tae Kwan Do and is your best friend until someone prettier or richer or smarter and can recite Hank Aaron’s at-bat stats walks into the room.

There is the pale, pale man who looks like Truman Capote with a dark suit and silk scarf and he speaks softly and you can’t touch him because he knows everyone and their personal peccadillos too. He reads The Waste Land or Dante or Kafka or Kierkegaard – in their original language – and he’s studying Chinese. He’s into rock and when the Stones come to town, he will have front row seats and will tell you exactly when Keith Richards comes in a quarter of a beat too late. They say Elton John does that too. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the young Richard Gere look-alike who will outlast his girlfriends and then marry an older wealthy woman and end up with a ski chalet in Gstaad, a beach house in the Grand Caymans, a Lear Jet complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of Arabians (both equine and human), all of whom he will treat with the diffidence of a patron in a white tablecloth restaurant nodding to the busboy.

So, what do you think? (Be kind...)

Anyone else want to give it a try?

PS. It's probably fitting that I'll be guest blogging on The Lipstick Chronicles tomorrow. Check it out.

What a Lovely Way To Burn

By Kevin Guilfoile

The first time I laid eyes on a Raymond Chandler novel it was late at night in an old country house after my sister tried to poison me.

I was twenty-five and the whole family was back home in Cooperstown for Thanksgiving. The cozy Cape Cod in which I had grown up was overrun with toddling nieces and nephews so I was sleeping around the corner at my friend Nort's house, a beautiful 150-year-old Victorian mansion that, after we graduated, Norton's parents had converted into a stunning bed and breakfast.

Saturday night my sister Ann made lasagna and it was delicious enough that I had seconds and thirds. But she must have picked up some bad garlic at the Great American and around midnight I was sending it all back in one of the Overlook's spacious second-floor bathrooms.

After an hour or more of retching I finally returned to my room but I had the sweaty shakes and my stomach was still spinning around the uneven bars and there was no way I was going back to sleep. There was a shelf with a generous selection of old books and, surely seduced by the title, I picked up a musty hardcover of Chandler's first and most famous novel. I spent the next five or six hours until sunup transfixed and confused and awed and bewildered.

Now as even the most fervent Chandler admirer knows, his plots are a mess. If I spent the next few paragraphs telling you as plainly as I could what The Big Sleep is about (or The Long Goodbye) you would probably reread it six or seven times and then surrender with a chuckle. In fact, there's a famous story about the making of the movie The Big Sleep that I shared at a workshop Marcus and I taught at the Chicago Public Library. (I've heard several versions of the tale and don't know which one is true, but I told the most entertaining one and trust that Chandler scholars will now correct me in the comments.)

The movie starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and was directed by the great (Goshen, Indiana native) Howard Hawks and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner. During filming, Hawks realized that the screenplay never revealed who murdered General Sternwood's chauffeur and he asked Faulkner to fix that in the script. Faulkner went back to the book and couldn't figure it out so he cabled Chandler. Chandler replied angrily that it's all in the novel and Faulkner should just look it up and see. When Faulkner persisted, Chandler went back to the book and realized, to his shock, that he had just forgotten to resolve the storyline. With the book having gone through several printings, Hawks's question--Who killed Owen Taylor?--was now an unknowable mystery. In six years, no other reader or editor or critic had even noticed.

After I told that story one of the directors of the One Book, One Chicago Program approached with a grin. She told me the library had ordered hundreds of copies of The Long Goodbye in advance of the event. It turns out that due to a binding error one of the several editions sent to the CPL was missing more than thirty pages. Dozens of these inelegantly abridged books had been in circulation for weeks before anyone even noticed.

But the marvelous sting of Chandler's voice, like good whiskey on the nose, is the real reason to read him. He didn't just invent the modern detective novel, he reinvented the first-person narrator. He has been imitated so often that many of the writers influenced by Chandler have never even read him. In fact one of the pleasures of reading Chandler for the first time is how much of it seems familiar. Some sour critics have claimed this has dated the writer, that his style has been so thoroughly appropriated it's rendered his novels irrelevant. Retroactively hack. But to suggest that is to ignore the rhythm and snap of Chandler's prose. There are many authors I admire who have written terrific novels that contain not a single individual sentence that would knock you on your ass. Chandler often has two or three of those a page.

It doesn't include any of Chandler's famous one liners ("She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.") but here's perhaps my favorite passage from The Long Goodbye:

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar--that's wonderful.

I have opened a lot of taverns in the last twenty years and I promise you no writer--certainly no Chandler imitator--has ever described five o'clock better than that. And if you're up with a bad-garlic fever and you're looking for someone to help you through a long night in an old house full of its own unknowable mysteries, Phillip Marlowe is the guy you want between covers.

If there are a few pages missing, or thirty, it won't even matter.

Chandler, "One Book, One Chicago" and The Outfit

by Libby Hellmann



Last Friday Mayor Daley held a press conference to announce the Chicago Public Library’s spring selection for the One Book,One Chicago program. For the first time since the program’s inception the choice was a crime fiction novel: Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE. Combined with the National Endowment of the Arts selection of THE MALTESE FALCON as their "book to read", this is a very good year for crime fiction, no?


The Outfit will take part in the THE LONG GOODBYE program by blogging about the book and Chandler for two weeks starting Monday, April 14. In addition to the seven of us, some "friends of the Outfit" will be joining us. We’re pretty excited, and we hope you’ll want to be part of the discussion too.

For now – although we’re not officially starting yet – I wanted to share with you the eloquent comments Sean Chercover made at the press conference. BTw, Sean wanted me to make sure I mentioned that Marcus and Sara contributed to the speech as well.

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On behalf of my fellow members of the Outfit Collection: Libby Fischer Hellmann, Sara Paretsky, Barbara D’Amato, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Kevin Guilfoile, and Marcus Sakey, I’d like to thank Mayor Daley, Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey, the Chicago Public Library Foundation for their strong support of the One Book, One Chicago program. And to the dedicated librarians across Chicago who works so hard to make it a reality. We are truly in your debt.

We came together as The Outfit Collective, in part, to raise awareness about Chicago’s growing reputation as a hotbed for contemporary crime fiction. So we were thrilled to learn that, for the first time, a classic crime novel has been chosen as the featured book.

I think the entire city is in for a treat.

It is often said that crime fiction has taken up the mantle once held by the Victorian Social Novel, and later the American Industrial Novel. That crime fiction offers the best opportunity for writers and readers to examine the society in which we live… to address its ills and take note of its blessings.

Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE was one of the first detective novels to embrace that lofty goal. Here we find the place where genre fiction and literary fiction meet. The crossroads.

Chandler owned Los Angeles like Nelson Algren owned Chicago. Long-time readers of Algren will find much to love the THE LONG GOODBYE. It is Chandler’s most ambitious, most political novel, and it has inspired generations of crime writers to boldly take on the bigger issues.

Ross MacDonald said that Chandler “wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” And it’s true. Chandler’s stories resonate with a gritty kind of romanticism. And he did write like an angel. He told stories that make you think, and used language that makes you feel.

What sets this book apart, what makes it important, are the difficult truths it tells us about the world. The world then and the world now.

Chandler is at his best when he’s talking about social issues, taking on politics, society, religion, commercialism. Hypocrisy and corruption were Chandler’s favorite targets and he went after them relentlessly, no matter where he found them.

Chandler was a firebrand and his words still burn.

On America’s increased commercialism, he writes, “We make the finest packages in the world… the stuff inside is mostly junk.” He calls a situation “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.” He writes, “There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.:

The issues he raises, and the anger behind them, are as relevant today as they were then. Maybe more so.

Chandler came from the hard-boiled school and wrote hard-boiled stories, but he never succumbed to nihilism. He believed in things like justice and honor and loyalty. Above all, loyalty. And although those vales did not always triumph in his stories, he believed they were values worth fighting for.

In private eye Philip Marlowe, Chandler gave us a modern and complex her. A man not always heroic by society’s standards, and who sometimes fails even by his own standards. Marlowe sees what’s wrong in our world, and he forces himself – and us – to look at it squarely, even when he can’t change it. Marlowe pays a high price for this knowledge, but Chandler insists that the cost of willful blindness would be ever higher still.

Putting all the highfallutin’ stuff aside, THE LONG GOODBYE is a hell of a great read. It’s an enormous amount of fun, filled with twists and tension and action that will keep you up way past bedtime.

Over the coming months, members of the Outfit Collective will be participating in the One Book One Chicago program. We’ll be blogging, conducting workshops, and appearing at libraries across the Chicago area. We hope to share some of our passion for the work of Raymond Chandler.

So dive in, Chicago, and enjoy the ride.

Stay tuned... we'll have more in a few weeks. And Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone.