The Long Goodbye

What a sense of pleasure and relief it is to read a good book after a mediocre one. Forget the Pulitzer prize - Raymond Chandler deserved the Nobel prize. This subtle story is a tragedy, a set of tragedies, and like all his books is a moral fable. It's about a man who takes the fall for someone else and dies. Not a particularly good man, but an ordinary guy who noone - but Marlowe - seems to miss. The long goodbye is his goodbye to this man, in a way, because it gets mixed up with another murder and another murderer. I think one unsolved mystery is why Marlowe has such a sharp iron sense of morality. Anyway, at the end, he loses his friend not to death but to his sense of right and wrong. And there's the tragedy. What a wonderful piece of writing.