The first time I laid eyes on The Long Goodbye was twenty-odd years ago, somewhere in the north-western suburbs of London, on a warm day with a cloudy look of rain on the horizon. I broke the silver-coloured spine and gulped the book down in close to one day and it was the damnedest thing that I had read in a long time. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s erstwhile private detective, had been my guide previously through The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, but this story poked me in the teeth and socked me in the cranium.

There are detective novels and detective novels, if you walk through an airport bookshop its almost a joke nowadays. All of them have their points. There are the Victorian potboilers that straight-arm you with twists. The tweed-wrapped forensic puzzles that lurk in country-house corridors. There are the detective novels that emerge out of a downtown fog and leave you feeling like a hot shower. There are the ones that crack open a rib-cage, that strip out the veins, that saw off the top of a skull like a boiled egg – the kind of book that revolts and intrigues you in equal measures. There are those that chase you all over a European capital, teasing you with talk of God and mystery before racing off to pocket that huge royalty. And there’s the showpiece detective novel that outlasts us all, with its sharply drawn hero, intriguing plot and voice as clear as mountain air.

The Long Goodbye is none of these, it’s a novel packed full of charm and style and wit and pace and a sense of time and place, with a plot more direct that anything that Chandler had written for Marlowe previously. It sizzles through its tale of friendship and loyalty and honour, crackling like thunder with a passion unseen before in Chandler’s work.

Marlowe walks the mean streets and golden hills of Hollywood wrapped in the irony of both his disgust at the failings of the human race and his romantic opinion that everyone, and anyone, can be saved. He is our hero, our knight, as much a protector of those that society has discarded as a persecutor of those who twist it for their own ends. He will lose his personality in the felony cell so as not to renege on a friendship, but he wont take advantage of the disturbed wife of a man he dislikes; he’ll stand up to a multi-millionaire who could squash him like a fly before committing adultery with the millionaire’s daughter.

At the novel’s beating heart is the story of three men and three women: an (autobiographical) alcoholic writer who is supposed to understand what makes people tick, but doesn’t understand a thing about anybody; a strange, pampered, empty, war-veteran, torn between the dark and the light; and Marlowe, the unlikely and unwilling hero, a man for whom trouble is his line of work; and an heiress with five ex-husbands who all married her for much more than her money; the wife of the writer dragged down by the weight of her past; and a woman who may be the one to save Marlowe.

But ultimately this is the story of money, the kind of money that buys everything, that insulates and protects, but also the kind of money that cannot hide the futility and emptiness of life.

The Long Goodbye drinks a gimlet in an oak-paneled bar in early evening, waits alone in a darkened office for a phone call that will never come, is as out of place in a joint like this as a pearl onion in a banana split, and knows that to say goodbye is to die a little. With its turn of phrase, wit and reflection it is much more than a simple whodunit.

In all its sordid, bruised, hard-boiled, cool, beauty The Long Goodbye is the greatest of Chandler’s enviable canon, gritty with brutality and metaphor, and is in my humble opinion the best crime novel ever written, and one of the best books of the twentieth, or any, century.  They really don’t write them like this anymore.