History of crime fiction quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape. He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of, preferably, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself. As Raymond Chandler's protagonist Philip Marlowe—immortalized by actor Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation (1946) of the novel "The Big Sleep" (1939)—admits to his client, General Sternwood, he finds it rather tiresome, as an individualist, to
The Long Goodbye (novel) Long Good Friday" (1980), an episode of "" entitled "The Big Goodbye" (1988), and Frank Miller's graphic novel "The Hard Goodbye" (1991–92), the first volume in the "Sin City" series. In music, crime novelist Matt Rees's band Poisonville, which is named after the fictitious location of the Dashiell Hammett novel "Red Harvest", released a song about "The Long Goodbye" on its first album. Rees described the novel as "a creepier book than people think." The Long Goodbye (novel) The Long Goodbye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. Some