The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye is a crime novel by the American writer Raymond Chandler, published in 1953. It is the sixth novel to feature the private investigator Philip Marlowe, and it is set in Los Angeles.

Marlowe meets Terry Lennox outside a club and drives him home, and over a few drinks becomes the one man in the city who will take Lennox's side. When Lennox's rich and difficult wife is found dead and Lennox himself disappears, Marlowe is left dealing with a police department that thinks he helped and a gangster who wants the same answers he does.

The case also brings Marlowe into contact with a wealthy family and an alcoholic writer whose marriage is falling apart, and the novel uses the investigation as a way of looking at money, loyalty and life in the city. Chandler wrote it while his own life was going badly, and he later described it as his best book.

The Long Goodbye is generally counted among Chandler's strongest works, and it received an Edgar Award in 1955. It was adapted into a film in 1973.