Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 9-10

  Chandler, Raymond.  The Long Goodbye.  Boston: Houghton, 1954. In creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler followed the model that Dashiell Hammett provided in Sam Spade.  Both are hardboiled detectives who expect the worst of most people and are seldom proven to be overly pessimistic.  Both operate on the dangerous ground between the criminal underworld and…