On this day in 1953 Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye was published. Many say it is his best novel, and the biographers trace many connections to Chandler's personal life, none of them happy ones. Nor would any of them have been encouraged by Chandler:
Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books.... I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel. But all in all I think my favorite weapon is a twenty-dollar bill ... FULL STORY »
