The Long Goodbye

Sometimes I wonder if Vraie Fiction should not be renamed Crime Fiction. Anyway, I recently finished a novel which I wanted to recommend to my readers: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. His longest novel, his most autobiographical, maybe the most literary, maybe also the most existentialist.It was also the one Chandler considered to be his best. In it, private eye Philip Marlowe befriends Terry Lennox, alcoholic married to the daughter of a media mogul and reluctantly helps failed writer Roger Wade, also alcoholic. Both plots intertwine and merges seamlessly, death and violence abound, in the end the dead have little to envy the living, who manage to survive but at a heavy price. They are wounded, scarred, both emotionally and physically. It's more than four hundred pages, but it never feels like it, in fact you would wish the story to last a little longer, so as not to say goodbye too early.