[2] The novel is notable for using hard-boiled detective fiction as a vehicle for social criticism and for including autobiographical elements from Chandler's life.

Outside of "the Dancers," a club in Los Angeles, private detective Philip Marlowe meets Terry Lennox, a drunk with scars on one side of his face.

In June, Lennox shows up late one night at Marlowe's home in "a great deal of trouble" and needing a ride to the airport across the border in Tijuana.

Marlowe is arrested for aiding a suspected murderer after refusing to cooperate with police detectives, who want him to confess he helped Lennox flee.

After three days of antagonizing his interrogators, Marlowe is released, the police explaining that Lennox has been reported to have committed suicide in a small Mexican town with a written confession by his side.

Wade wakes up and begs Marlowe to remove and destroy typewritten pages in his study he wrote while drunk, not wanting his wife to read them.

Marlowe reads the pages, finding a cryptic self-analysis by Wade which hints at repressed trauma he does not quite understand alongside a clear statement that "once a good man died" for him.

As he is leaving, a distraught half-naked Eileen enters a sort of trance and attempts to seduce Marlowe, thinking him to be a former lover who died in the Second World War.

Through his own hunches and inquiries, Marlowe learns that Terry Lennox had previously lived as Paul Marston, who had married and spent some time in England.

After indulging in self-pity over his writing difficulties, he posits that he is an alcoholic because he is trying to find answers to the trauma in his past, offers Marlowe a check of $1,000, then proceeds to drink himself into a stupor.

Marlowe refuses to let the story lie, and when the authorities decide to forgo an inquest because it will show them up, he steals a photostat of Eileen's confession from the police.

Marlowe listens to his story but rejects it and offers his own version, ending with the revelation the Mexican man is none other than Lennox himself, who has had cosmetic surgery.

Her long illness and death had a profound effect on him, driving him into fits of melancholy and leading him to talk of and even to attempt suicide.

Lennox is a Canadian citizen but he had spent a great deal of time in England and retained the restrained and formal attitude of an English gentleman.

Chandler also retained a great love for the English and what he viewed as their more civilised way of life compared with the shallowness and superficiality of Los Angeles.

[4][5] This novel was dramatized for television in 1954 for the anthology series Climax!, with Dick Powell playing Marlowe, as he had a decade earlier in the film Murder, My Sweet.

The episode, which was broadcast live, was known for supposedly containing a scene where actor Tris Coffin, who was playing a corpse in a morgue, got up off a stretcher in full view of the camera.

However, in a later interview, Coffin debunked this as a rumor; while the blanket over his body was partially removed before he was out of frame, he did not walk off set in full view of the camera.

The novel's title has been alluded to in the titles of other works of fiction with a hardboiled, noir, detective or gangster theme, including the British gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980), an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation 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.