The long goodbye

Mass Market Paperback, 312 pages

English language

Published Oct. 29, 1971 by Ballantine Books.

ISBN:
978-0-345-25734-5
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OCLC Number:
5792592

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4 stars (4 reviews)

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

30 editions

Review of 'The long goodbye' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I guess the vernacular ages faster than more formal speech. The dialogue here sometimes seems like it is making fun of itself, but probably not. Especially interesting are:

Names are dropped about whom the modern reader is likely to be ignorant, e.g. Frank Merriwell and Walter Bagehot.
Long gone expressions that we now mostly know from books like this one, or the movies include: People may be a chum or a heel. You might be all wet or sore as hell [i.e. angry]. Fifty cents is called four bits. The wealthy are either the upper crust or the carriage trade. The author says of a character that She hadn't worn a hat. Would you comment that a woman wasn't wearing a hat today? The backtalk of the gangsters can be very amusing, And the next time you crack wise, be missing. Bad language like the hell with …

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Subjects

  • Detective and mystery stories, American