The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye is a hard-boiled detective novel by the American writer Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, in which Chandler's private investigator Philip Marlowe befriends a troubled acquaintance, Terry Lennox, and helps him flee to Mexico only to learn that Lennox's wife has been found murdered and that Lennox is the prime suspect. Marlowe's loyalty to his friend draws him into a wider case involving the alcoholic novelist Roger Wade and a web of wealthy, morally compromised Los Angeles society, as the novel uses the conventions of detective fiction to mount a broader critique of wealth, corruption and personal betrayal. Chandler wrote much of the novel while his wife was dying, and later called it his own best book; it won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1955 and is widely regarded as his most personal and ambitious work. The novel was adapted into a 1973 film directed by Robert Altman.