You can also live well without being rich, which is the basic and best reason people swarm there. In Los Angeles, you can live any way you want (except the urban way) it’s the fantasy-brothel, where you can live the fantasy of your choice. The movie isn’t just Altman’s private-eye movie - it’s his Hollywood movie, set in the mixed-up world of movie-influenced life that is L.A. Altman, who probably works closer to his unconscious than any other American director, tells a detective story, all right, but he does it through a spree - a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies and that Los Angeles sickness. The movie is set in the same city twenty years later this isn’t just a matter of the private-detective hero’s prices going from twenty-five dollars a day to fifty - it’s a matter of rethinking the book and the genre. But Robert Altman does, in The Long Goodbye, based on Chandler’s 1953 Los Angeles-set novel. It fails to justify the excitement produced by the picturesque and sinister happenings, and I cannot help feeling cheated.” Locked in the conventions of pulp writing, Raymond Chandler never found a way of dealing with that malaise.

It is only when I get to the end that I feel my old crime-story depression descending upon me again - because here again, as is so often the case, the explanation of the mysteries, when it comes, is neither interesting nor plausible enough. Edmund Wilson summed up Raymond Chandler convincingly in a 1945 when he said of Farewell, My Lovely, “It is not simply a question here of a puzzle which has been put together but of a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy which is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms.

The long goodbye chandler