LOS ANGELES: HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND

Chandler, Raymond. The long good-bye, London : Hamish Hamilton, 1973.

For most of his adult life he fought alcohol addiction and ill-health, but Raymond Chandler also produced some of the finest short stories and novels of American life in the twentieth century.  Along with Dashiell Hammett, Chandler reinvented the crime novel as literature, far beyond the realm of the crime caper or who-dunnit

Six of the novels feature the wisecracking, cynical private detective Phillip Marlowe, who was to be so famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in films such as The Big Sleep.

The Long Good-bye is seen as his finest novel and it exemplifies the Chandler touch; remarkably observant characterisation combined with humourous dialogue, complicated plot lines and an overriding sense of locale - how and where people lived. 

VIDEO: Bogart as Phillip Marlowe in THE BIG SLEEP