If The Long Goodbye could boiled down to just one descriptive proverbial piece of advice it might be that one about judging books by their covers. Or, since there is only one writer, not many readers and a whole lot of deceptive people, perhaps a more fitting piece of advice that aptly describes the book is “caveat emptor.” Marlowe become entangled with a host of characters wrapped in pretty packages, but who are revealed to be various levels of junk once the wrapper comes off.
The sinister, powerful and thoroughly corrupt millionaire working to pull every string possible to keep Marlowe one step behind the truth, Harlan Potter, at one point goes off on a tangent that appears to be a pointless digression. The speech is all about the gap between quality and mass merchandising and the need to sell consumers on an enticing façade so they will overlook everything else. He finally comes to his point:
“We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”
That thing about deceiving appearance? It is the driving force behind everything in the novel except Marlowe. He is changed, sure, but he still retains his knightly integrity and inability to be corrupted. As for the rest, however, it is a litany of style over substance, packaging over content, personality over character. Nothing in the book is really quite what it seems; the entire narrative seems slightly out of sync. Things begin with Terry Lennox being accused of a murder which he did not commit. This leads to news of the suicide of Terry Lennox in Mexico which proves untrue. And finally, when Lennox reveals that he is very much alive, it is with a completely different face resulting from plastic surgery. Later, an even more stunning revelation is made about Lennox. This is not the first time he has returned from the dead. Only the time before was under a different name and his death was only presumed after being reported missing in action. Before going missing, however, he had gotten married.
To the woman now known as Eileen Wade who has contacted Marlowe to track down her second husband to go missing, Roger. Even though the whole time she knows exactly where Roger has been. Her husband turns up as another apparent suicide, but that’s no more true than that Terry Lennox murdered his wife, Sylvia. The most corruptible aspect behind Eileen’s stunningly beautiful package is the central revelation of the story.
The packages hiding ugly contents continues. Lennox becomes one of the very few men that Marlowe develops a friendship with and though he knows his faults, he never believes him to be a murderer. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel Marlowe has thrown the Lennox wrapper and its contents away. The same holds true for another member of that exclusive club—and the only cop that Marlowe really trusts—Lt. Ohls. Marlowe’s kinship with Ohls is based on trust, but by the end the relationship has become fractured because Marlowe now knows he can’t really trust Ohls; at least not to the extent he did.
All these deceptions and corrupted contents wrapped in pretty packaging are spokes on a giant wheel rolling along through the narrative. That wheel is the American justice system which features some of the most attractive packaging of all: ideals like equality under the law, beautiful marble buildings in which justice is carried out, rights to which everyone is entitled and judges deemed to be not just wise in their counsel, but impossible to corrupt in their rulings. Marlowe knows better, however. The Long Goodbye does not move Marlowe off the mean streets of L.A. and entirely into the wealth of the city by accident. Justice is all wrapped up in the package of fairness, equality, and equal rights. And for the wealthy that is what they find inside. For everybody, when they remove the wrapper, they are rightly astounded to find that there is absolutely nothing inside.
