The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6)

by Raymond Chandler

You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won’t even like most of them, and they won’t like you too well.”

My kind of pride is different. It’s the pride of a man who has nothing else.

I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don’t read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.

It’s no real fun but the rich don’t know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else’s wife and that’s a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber’s wife wants new curtains for the living room.”

I liked him better drunk, down and out, hungry and beaten and proud. Or did I? Maybe I just liked being top man.

“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

I’m a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn’t gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.”

Why did I go into such detail? Because the charged atmosphere made every little thing stand out as a performance, a movement distinct and vastly important. It was one of those hypersensitive moments when all your automatic movements, however long established, however habitual, become separate acts of will. You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all.

His partner was tall, good-looking, neat, and had a precise nastiness about him, a goon with an education. They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops’ eyes. They get them at the passing-out parade at the police school.

“He’s not going to tell you, Sergeant,” Dayton said acidly. “He read that law book. Like a lot of people that read a law book he thinks the law is in it.”

Green crossed to the phone and lifted it slowly, his plain face creased with the long slow thankless grind. That’s the trouble with cops. You’re all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.

The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine.

There ain’t a police force in the country could do its job with a law book.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there.

The life in a jail is in suspension, without purpose or meaning.

The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

“I get so tired of it,” I said. “Tired of what?” he snapped. “Hard little men in hard little offices talking hard little words that don’t mean a goddam thing.

You can always tell when a man is writing his own name. He has a special way of moving.

A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.

He was like somebody you meet on board ship and get to know very well and never really know at all.

His surprise was as thin as the gold on a weekend wedding ring.

He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

thigh. She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn’t hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.

They were young, dark, eager and full of vitality. They put as much muscular activity into a telephone conversation as I would put into carrying a fat man up four flights of stairs.

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

It never pays to let the customer make all the rules.

“Who was it said that beyond a certain point all dangers are equal?”

The air began to be spattered with darlings and crimson fingernails.

It was exclusive in the only remaining sense of the word that doesn’t mean merely expensive.

I replaced the phone thinking that an honest cop with a bad conscience always acts tough. So does a dishonest cop. So does almost anyone, including me.

It was loaded with doctors, dentists, Christian Science practitioners not doing too good, the kind of lawyers you hope the other fellow has, the kind of doctors and dentists who just scrape along.

The sun had set in Dr. Varley’s manner. It was getting to be a chilly evening.

supported by fried onion rings and one of those mixed up salads which men will eat with complete docility in restaurants, although they would probably start yelling if their wives tried to feed them one at home.

When you start something with a type like Earl you have to finish it. Keep it simple and don’t change your mind.

“You know something, Marlowe? I could get to like you. You’re a bit of a bastard—like me.”

“That kiss won’t leave a scar. You just think it will.

Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it.

He had short red hair and a face like a collapsed lung. He was as ugly a guy as I ever saw.

She sobbed violently and threw herself into his arms. I stepped around them and got out of there. Every cocktail party is the same, even the dialogue.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

We were very much in love—the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.”

I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish.

What the hell are you praying to, you fool? If a well man prays, that’s faith. A sick man prays and he is just scared.

Phooey: I was looking at life through the mists of a hangover.

“You people with a lot of money are really something,” I said. “You think anything you choose to say, however nasty, is perfectly all right.

There were all sorts of ornamental trees in clumps here and there and they didn’t look like California trees. Imported stuff. Whoever built that place was trying to drag the Atlantic seaboard over the Rockies. He was trying hard, but he hadn’t made it.

Don’t be a hero, young man. There’s no percentage in it.”