Month: January 2015

Book Review: The Long Goodbye


The Long Goodbye (1953) finds Marlowe living in a borrowed house in Los Angeles when he meets a down and out drunk and former war hero named Terry Lennox. Marlowe strikes up a friendship with the man and one morning Marlowe is awakened to find Lennox asking to be driven to Mexico. Marlowe does this and the finds out Lennox’s wealthy wife was murdered with Lennox the prime suspect. Lennox writes out a confession and kills himself in Mexico. The cops, organized crime, and the dead woman’s father want Marlowe to forget the case, yet Marlowe feels an obligation to Lennox.

To begin with, The Long Goodbye is the longest of all Chandler novels. The same publisher did the most recent reprint of the Marlowe books, and the first five novels range from 231-292 pages. This book weighs in at 379 pages.  At this point in his career, Chandler had come to realize what people looked to Marlowe books for: the characters and the dialogue, and Marlowe telling people off. So Chandler gave us this in spades.

He gives ample time to develop the Marlowe-Lennox relationship at the start of the book and there are great Chandler characters spread throughout the book including author Roger Wade, who I can see as a self-insertion character by Chandler particularly after listening to the BBC Radio 4 play about Chandler and Hitchcock attempting to collaborate on Strangers on a Train. The book is full of rich characterization, settings, and dialogue.

The downside of the Long Goodbye is that in the midst of all that, Chandler loses the story several times. It’s hard to remember a detective novel where the detective took so little interest in solving the central mystery of the book. Marlowe literally goes weeks without doing anything and there are moments in the story where I wonder if we’re ever going to get back to the Terry Lennox case. It’s hard to care about the solution to a story when the main character doesn’t seem to.

In addition, this is a much more cynical and jaded Marlowe than prior books with his remarks that organized crime is just a cost of civilization in one of the later chapters. Marlowe seems at times to be almost exaggerated at a few times even explaining he was trying to be mysterious at one point.

I also feel the relationship between Marlowe and Linda Loring or the attempt thereof was weak and far less interesting than the flirting with romance in prior novels.

Overall, this is a still a good read and is better than The Little Sister and The High Window with so many interesting characters and settings, and some great dialogue. Still, it feels less organic and its pacing issues place it below the very best Marlowe novels in the series. For my part, I think the 1970s BBC radio adaptation with Ed Bishop is probably the best way to experience the story as it manages to preserve the heart of the story while leaving a lot of extraneous elements on the cutting room floor.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0

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EP1484: Dragnet: The Big Escape

Jack Webb
A friend of Joe’s is arrested for a robbery in which Ben was shot.

Original Air Date: January 5, 1950

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Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Bum Steer Matter (EP1483)

Bob Bailey

Johnny is called in by a fan of the radio show to gather “atmosphere” from his ranch. When Johnny makes it out, the man who called him is dead.

Original Air Date: October 6, 1957

When making your travel plans, remember http://johnnydollarair.com

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EP1482: Nick Carter: The Case of the Missing Piano Player

Lon Clark

Nick is called in to investigate a crooked roulette wheel and discovers a mystery surrounding a missing piano player.

Original Air Date: July 13, 1947

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EP1481: Philip Marlowe: The Indian Giver

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe investigates a case of stolen pottery and as usual someone gets killed.

Original Air Date: August 13, 1949
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EP1480: Crime and Peter Chambers: Murder at the Masquerade Party

Dane Clark
Peter Chambers is hired to go to a masquerade party to protect to a man who’s planning to buy an expensive. Murder ruins a wonderful evening.

Original Air Date: July 13, 1954

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EP1479: The Saint: The Baseball Murder

Vincent Price

The father of a hot pitching prospect calls the Saint in to protect his son from gamblers.

Original Air Date: September 3, 1950

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Four Difference Between 1970s and Later Columbos

Columbo in the 70sColumbo 90s

Peter Falks run as Columbo can be divided into two sections. The first ran from 1971-78 over NBC as part of the network’s Mystery Wheel. Columbo returned in 1989 over ABC in a series of TV movies.

There were four key differences between the newer Columbo films and the originals:

1) Length

Most of the original Columbo films had a 90 minute time slot which made them about 70-75 minutes without commercials. The new Columbo films took up 2 hours and had running time of approximately 90 minutes. I have to admit that in general, this was a case of “less is more.”

One key example was the second ABC Columbo, “Murder, Smoke, and Shadows” where the film started really strong but dragged on too long and at the end of Columbo’s denouement we had (and I kid you not), the police coming out and doing a musical number when they announced the arrest.

The old Columbos worked because of their limitations. They didn’t go on forever and ever, and when there was a longer case thrown in such as with, “A Friend Indeed,” the time was well-spent while the only new film that I think actually benefited from the longer running time was, “Agenda for Murder.”

2) More Adult Content

Columbo in the 1970s remains a mostly tasteful family friendly TV show. The latter Columbo could be something else with a lot more sex in the plot and a lot more skin on the screen.   There were a few episodes with featured lurid plots and disturbing murder scenes. Of course, this isn’t to say that all of the latter Columbos were strictly adult affairs, but there were quite a few that pushed the envelope.

The general incidents and prevalence of sex and violence in the media and on various TV shows is certainly for a debate. I think that with a couple of exceptions, it tended to detract rather than add from Columbo. At its core, the strength of Columbo are great characters and their interactions, and the episodes that tended to have the most adult content such as, Uneasy Lies the Crown and Murder: A Self Portrait tended to not to sacrafice quality charagers. If there was an episode that seemed more “Grown up” that did work, it was, “It’s All in the Game” starring Faye Dunaway as a suspect who is trying to seduce Columbo to keep him off her trail but that works because of the character interactions.

Too often, the content inserted comes off as gratuitous or trashy. The seventies series was more stylish and tasteful.

3) More Experimentation

Of the 44 1970s Columbo films, only one messed with the formula of Columbo being an inverted mystery (Season 5’s Last Salute to the Commodore). Of the twenty-four revived shows, there were half a dozen different attempts to break with the formula. These variations ranged from following the killer up to the point of the murder and finding someone else had already committed the murder, not showing the murder and then planting doubt as to the killer’s guilt, and then there were two adaptations of Ed McBain novels.

While Last Salute to the Commodore was one of my two least favorite 1970s episodes, some of these later experiments aren’t too bad. Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo begins with the funeral of “Mrs. Columbo” and is then told through flashback from the point of view of a woman seeking revenge on the good Lieutenant  through murdering his wife. The McBain novel adaptation, Undercover is a fine thriller if you can get past the fact that Columbo’s behavior is completely inconsistent with everything we know of the character. Columbo Cries Wolf had its moments.

The other three are more problematic but not for messing with the formula but for other issues. Still, I have to say that while the revived Columbos that go in other directions can actually be entertaining, they still can’t beat the best of the “normal” Columbo episodes.

4) Less Star Quality

The original Columbo, even more than its plots were known for the amazing casting. Among the actors who played Columbo killers in the gold old days were Anne Baxter, Robert Culp, Leonard Nimoy, Roddy McDowell, Martin Landau, Dick Van Dyke, Patrick McGoohan, Ricardo Montalban, Ruth Gordon, and so many more. Peter Falk was a fantastic actor and had great chemistry with so many guest stars.

The new series had a virtual power outage, particularly in 1989 and 1990. Of the first eleven villains, the only actor in Falk’s league was Patrick McGhoohan. The second best of the group was Fisher Stevens. A big let down from the 1970s.

The series did better guest stars between 1991-94 when Columbo cut back from 4-6 films a years to between 2 and 3 films a year with better stars. The results were among the best of the new series as Faye Dunaway was nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Glove for her apeparance, and Dabney Coleman, George Hamilton, and Rip Torn turned in memorable and satisfying performances.

Of course, not even a good guest star could save some films. A mustached William Shatner’s is miscast in Butterfly in Shades of Grey. Tyne Daley did the best she could with a fairly stereotypical flirty lush roll in, A Bird in the Hand but deserved far better as a Columbo villainess.

There did seem to be a fair share more stories in the later years that strained credulity in terms of motive or were just plain derivative (i.e. Stange Bedfellows.)

Yet, the one thing that remained the same was Peter Falk. There are episodes were it felt like the only thing good in the movie was Columbo…but almost always that still made it worth watching. There’s so much in every moment when Falk’s on the screen that he can carry the show by himself which was a good thing because he often had to.

By almost every measure, ABC’s Columbo was an inferior product to its predecessor, but it provided two dozen opportunities to see Peter Falk in action as his greatest character and that alone makes them worth viewing.

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EP1478: Dragnet: The Roseland Roof Murders

Jack Webb

Friday and Romero investigate a series of robberies and killings.

Original Air Date: December 29, 1949

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EP1477: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Doubtful Dairy Matter

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Bob Bailey

Johnny is hired to investigate a rich farmer whose had yet another silo destroyed by fire.

Original Air Date: September 29, 1957
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EP1476: Nick Carter: The Case of the Sunken Dollar

Lon Clark
Nick investigates a case of murder and the theft of rare coins.

Original Air Date: June 29, 1947

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EP1475: Philip Marlowe: The August Lion

Gerald Mohr
A friend of Phil’s who hasn’t seen in six months come to Marlowe’s apartment with the body of a dead woman and pleads with Marlowe to get him off for her murder.

Original Air Date: August 6, 1949

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EP1474: Crime and Peter Chambers: The Double Indemnity Murder

Dane Clark
Peter Chambers investigates the murder of a doll manufacturer.

Original Air Date: July 6, 1954

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EP1473: The Saint: Cupid and the Corpse

Vincent Price
When going to buy scalped tickets from a bookie, Simon finds a dead body.

Original Air Date: August 27, 1950

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EP1472: Dragnet: A .22 Rifle for Christmas

Jack Webb

Sergeant Friday leads a search for a missing boy whose Christmas President (a .22 rifle) is missing

Original Air Date: December 22, 1949

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