Beautiful copy of the first edition
CHANDLER, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1954.
8vo. Original brown cloth boards with silver lettering and original illustrated price-clipped dust wrapper with design by Fritz Wegner; pp. 319, [1]; wrapper with spine very expertly repaired, a little wear at extremities and one small crease to back panel, otherwise a very good copy.
First edition.
The Long Goodbye is Raymond Chandler's longest and sixth novel featuring the famous detective Phillip Marlowe. Although opinion has been divided over its ranking compared to Chandler's earlier works, Raymond himself wrote in a letter to a friend that The Long Goodbye was his "best book" and it is undeniably his most personal novel, written as his wife Cissie was dying. The Long Goodbye is ambitious in its use of exposing autobiographical context to drive the detective fiction with two characters in the book hypothetically structured around Chandler's character; the troubled writer Roger Wade, who raises questions about the value of writing and what should be considered 'real' literature, as well as the alcoholic Terry Lennox, who, like Chandler, had a cherished background in England that often ostracized him from Californian life.
Robert Altman adapted the book into a 1973 film starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe and featuring an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger. Poorly received at the time, the movie has been rehabilited and , according to the Rotten Tomatoes website: "An ice-cold noir that retains Robert Altman's idiosyncratic sensibilities… it ranks among the smartest and most satisfying Marlowe mysteries".
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