
The Long Goodbye (1953) is widely considered Chandler's masterpiece and the most personal of the Marlowe novels. When Marlowe befriends the charming, broken Terry Lennox, he is drawn into a case of murder, literary fraud, and betrayal that stretches from the drunk tanks of LA to the mansions of Idle Valley. More meditative and emotionally complex than its predecessors, the novel is Chandler's elegy for a vanishing world of loyalty and honour.