The Long Good-Bye

First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. 319, [1]. Publisher's burgundy cloth blocked in silver to spine. With a supplied, price-clipped dustjacket designed by Beverly Lebarrow, and issued by Hamish Hamilton in 1988 in its Fingerprint Books series. Issued on November 27, 1953, the U.K. edition precedes the U.S. release by some four months.

Boards somewhat distended to edges, spine ends pushed-in, lightly water-stained to textblock top-edge and covers, else a tight, presentable copy.

Author's sixth book. Winner of the 1955 Edgar Award for Best Novel. A hard-boiled LA mystery featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe, and regarded by Chandler himself as his "best book". Undoubtedly his most autobiographical novel, it was written while the author was nursing worries about the deteriorating health of his wife, Cissy, and references both his alcoholic bouts and myriad sensitivities hidden beneath the tough carapace of Marlowe. His affinity for his creation is laid bare in a letter to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton: "It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life. I simply can't function without him" (14 July 1951).

Basis for the 1973 updated film adaptation, directed by Robert Altman from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, starring Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden. "Romantic, tending towards a sentimentality it never quite reaches, The Long Goodbye is beautifully composed, with taut economical style exactly suited to narrator Marlowe. If this is not literature, what is?" –Anthony Burgess, Burgess 99

[Hiney & MacShane [eds.]. The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-fiction, 1909–1959. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000; Hubin, p.76; Bruccoli A10.1.a]