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Oh Marlowe, how could I not love you?
Jan. 9th, 2009 11:11 pm*loves detectives*
I finished reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye the other day, and it was fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that it's inspired another long-winded post about how awesome it is, in the spirit of that one I wrote about "The Six Napoleons" (fear not: this one is considerably shorter). Marlowe is very different from Holmes, from the setting to the characters and everything in between (except for a distrust of the official police force, and a sense of private justice, and... hm, okay, maybe they're only superficially dissimilar) but they both give me the same kind of squeeful joy. Onward!
The Long Goodbye might be my favorite Marlowe story. It's neck and neck with Farewell, My Lovely, anyway, if only for the latter's drug hallucination scene and the "putting on my pants" scene and the whole Red incident with the hand-holding. Okay, so maybe they're a true tie. They're both generally seen as two of Raymond Chandler's best, and it's obvious that The Long Goodbye was written later. It's tied together thematically in much more developed ways, and Marlowe's even more cynical and lonely than usual. God above, is he lonely. But I'll get to that. It's also just a little bit freer with letting you know how Marlowe feels about things, which usually you have to extrapolate like you do with Watson (except, of course, on certain rare occasions, like when Marlowe tells all his fears to Red because Red's got pretty girl eyes). But since Marlowe's the focus of the stories, whereas Watson's not, it takes on a different significance. A couple of times he actually says how he feels, in narration or to another person (and it's almost always "like crap") whereas before, you'd have to glean what you can from his detached description of his own actions.
( Cut for plot and squeeing and a smidgen of analysis, and a quote of the last scene of the book, which is ohgod so good. )
I finished reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye the other day, and it was fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that it's inspired another long-winded post about how awesome it is, in the spirit of that one I wrote about "The Six Napoleons" (fear not: this one is considerably shorter). Marlowe is very different from Holmes, from the setting to the characters and everything in between (except for a distrust of the official police force, and a sense of private justice, and... hm, okay, maybe they're only superficially dissimilar) but they both give me the same kind of squeeful joy. Onward!
The Long Goodbye might be my favorite Marlowe story. It's neck and neck with Farewell, My Lovely, anyway, if only for the latter's drug hallucination scene and the "putting on my pants" scene and the whole Red incident with the hand-holding. Okay, so maybe they're a true tie. They're both generally seen as two of Raymond Chandler's best, and it's obvious that The Long Goodbye was written later. It's tied together thematically in much more developed ways, and Marlowe's even more cynical and lonely than usual. God above, is he lonely. But I'll get to that. It's also just a little bit freer with letting you know how Marlowe feels about things, which usually you have to extrapolate like you do with Watson (except, of course, on certain rare occasions, like when Marlowe tells all his fears to Red because Red's got pretty girl eyes). But since Marlowe's the focus of the stories, whereas Watson's not, it takes on a different significance. A couple of times he actually says how he feels, in narration or to another person (and it's almost always "like crap") whereas before, you'd have to glean what you can from his detached description of his own actions.
( Cut for plot and squeeing and a smidgen of analysis, and a quote of the last scene of the book, which is ohgod so good. )
