Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is the sixth installment of a series of novels that is revolved around Private Investigator Phillip Marlowe. It starts of with Marlowe finding a drunken Terry Lennox with several scars spread across one side of his face. After the next few months, an unstable friendship is formed between the two. During one night, Lennox shows up late at Marlowe’s home in an apparent troubling situation and in need of a ride to an airport in Tijuana, in which Marlowe agree under the condition that he must not be let in on the reason behind Lennox running. During his return, Marlowe finds out that Terry’s wife, Sylvia Lennox, was murdered before Terry skipped town and he ends up being arrested on suspicion of assisting in

Marlowe initially declines but is later convinced by Roger’s wife, Eileen Wade, to find Roger. Marlowe finds Roger and returns him and accepts his payment. Throughout the story, Marlowe is constantly threatened to stop investigating Terry’s alleged suicide by several people. One night when Marlowe visited Roger, Roger gets himself drunk, so Marlowe takes a walk to the balcony. When Eileen rings the door, saying she forgot her keys, her and Marlowe both find Roger dead from an apparent suicide. Eileen accuses Marlowe of murdering Roger, which is later undermined during an interrogation. The next morning after Spencer and Marlowe pay a visit to the Wade’s, Eileen is found dead with a letter confessing to the murder of both Sylvia and Roger. Marlowe gets visited by a Mexican man claiming to be at the place where Terry committed suicide, telling him what happened to Terry, but Marlowe disagrees with the story and tells his own, leading to the Mexican man being Terry, who underwent plastic

Though romanticism ended in the early 20th century, the idea of romanticism had still influenced Chandler’s writing. In The Long Goodbye when Marlowe gets arrested on suspicion of murder, he thinks to himself, “What the hell kind of legal system lets a man be shoved in a felony tank because some cop didn't get an answer to some questions? What evidence did he have? A telephone number on a pad. And what was he trying to prove by locking me up? …You think I'm going to cry in your lap and ask you to stroke my head because I'm so awful god**m lonely in the great big jail? Come off it, Grenz. Take your drink and get human; I'm willing to assume you are doing your job. But take the brass knuckles off before you start. If you're big enough you don't need them, and if you need them you're not big enough to push me around.”(61). This shows how Marlowe belittles the police, who, in reality, people are intimidated by if not afraid of. This is a classic trait of your average detective. About three-quarters into the book, proclaims himself to be a romantic while conversing with old police friend saying, "I'm a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what's the matter. You don’t make a dime that way. You got sense, you shut your windows and turn up more sound on the TV set."(280). Not only does this quote state that Marlowe is a romantic, but also in what way he is a romantic. Chandler's sense of