"The Long Goodbye", by Raymond Chandler

Books are the way I make small escapes out of the dreary monotony of the daily grind.  At coffee breaks and lunch I typically have a book on hand, the fifteen odd minutes it takes to slurp down scalding coffee at 10 and three and the half hour I have at lunch are filled to capacity with reading.  I read from most every genre but have found a collection of authors that suit my scattershot reading schedule to a tea.  Authors like Ivan Doig and David Mitchell and Sebastian Faulks and Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy write engaging, occasionally powerful, stories that can be taken in small doses.  But occasionally I need a bit of pulp.  Not trash, smut, or hollow baseless filth.  But gritty, abrasive life.  Recently I've gotten my fill of pulp from Raymond Chandler.

Chandlers books center on a blue collar private eye, Phillip Marlowe, who works out problems for a white collar crowd.  He drinks, smokes, carries a gun and generally associates with loose women and tough thugs.  But there is something redemptive about Chandlers work and as he fleshes out Marlowe there is a bit of human decency that filters through the cracks and no amount of papering can cover it completely.

The latest of his books I have read is "The Long Goodbye".  Typically he starts off writing about one mystery, diverts to another, and brings them together in the end.  In "The Long Goodbye" Marlowe befriends a British war hero cum alcoholic and "lap dog" for a spoiled, rich, wife:  Terry Lennox.  As the novels unfolds Lennox's wife is found dead, Lennox flees the country, and the case is closed by the influence of the dead wife's father.  Marlowe goes about his business of taking on clients, pestering the police, and generally not minding his own business.

I will confess that the stories, while not exactly predictable, follow a fairly obvious pattern and Marlowe, for his gruff, gritty lifestyle, is a little too tidy as a character.  But Chandler is perfectly candid and authentic as an author bringing out the street language of L.A., a call it how i see it portrait of racial and gender roles of the time, vivid sociall paradox, and the rugged, enduring condition of the human spirit to survive.

A person could do much, much worse than taking a gamble on Raymond Chandler for a bit of escapist reading.