Content area
Abstract
Many of the works which fall into that broad category we call the crime genre, are pot-boilers. Like their cousins in other popular genres (such as the adventure, horror, romance, spy, and western stories), the basic crime situation, the mystery, is popular because of its predictable form. By the end of the narrative, a solution to a crime has been found. But within this enormous body of work, there are some narratives which stretch the limits of their form to intersect with the artistic concerns of their time. Rarely, if ever, does a single work in the crime genre achieve such a feat in two different media. And yet, Raymond Chandler's longest and most complex hard-boiled detective novel, The Long Goodbye, is arguably the apotheosis of its type in fiction, and Robert Altman's film version of the work twenty years later uses Chandler's plot to create something totally different, another detective story which extends the form in completely new and unexpected ways. This study, after a brief survey of the artistic evolution of the crime genre, will examine these two significant works in detail because their duality is so intriguing. Chandler's novel is an engrossing detective mystery and it is a novel with the artistic purposes of this century's Modernist authors. Altman's film is a captivating detective mystery and it is a challenging Post-Modernist cinematic experience. By comparing and contrasting the two versions of The Long Goodbye I intend to demonstrate that it is the hybrid nature of each work which accounts for its enduring appeal.
