"The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler

Another novel that I read abridged. I will definitely stop doing that from now on, since you don't get the real thing. It is hard to recognize them on torrent sites though. But the rule of thumb is that a 300 page novel, coded in speech quality mp3 format should be between 150MB and 250MB. The version I had for this was barely 60MB, and the quality was not insufferably low, thus the small size cannot be blamed on the low quality conversion.

This novel was written while Chandler was nursing his lover, 18-years his senior, who eventually died and was a huge blow for the writer who passed away himself some years later. It has some autobiographical elements, and that is one of the reasons why it should be read in its entirety, without any abridging, when some prof or self-styled expert decides which parts are important and which can be dropped.

The novel is about Marlowe's friendship with Terry Lennox, an alcoholic married to a promiscuous heiress of great fortunes. When she is brutally killed, Terry skips to Tijuana with Marlowe's help and later kills himself leaving a confession. Marlowe doesn't buy this and is roughed up several times by some tough guys who knew Lennox and his dark history from the times when his name was Paul Marston, a british commando in WWII, captured by the Gestapo in Norway.

Another character, an alcoholic writer, comes in the story, initially looking unrelated, but eventually turning out that his wife, who kills him, and also the lady in the beginning of the story, was Marston's first wife, who thought he died in Norway. At the end Lennox/Marston comes back to Marlowe's office as a mexican, after a face-job, but Marlowe sees through him. Lennox offers the peace branch, but Marlowe refuses, saying that he thought they were friends, and apparently he was wrong, and he doesn't want anything to do with him anymore.

The novel won Chandler the Edgar Award, and some critics consider it his best novel, while others say it is not up to the quality of the first two, which I find magnificent. At the end Marlowe has a short affair with the sister of Lennox' dead wife (as all women immediately drop their panties at the mere sight of him), but this time he feels for her something he hasn't felt for any other woman. She is one of the rare fully positive female characters in Chandler's works. She proposes they marry and go to Paris but he refuses. She is significant since Marlow apparently never forgets her, and talks to her again at the end of the next novel, 'Playback' which is next to last. And in the last novel 'Poodle Springs' of which Chandler finished only the first five chapters before he died, they marry.