The Long Goodbye

I'd forgotten how much I like Chandler - it was the only useful thing to come out of my LA distribution requirement in college. The dialogue is amazing. By modern standards, it's ridiculously pugnacious and aggressive - did people ever talk like that? But it's also very very smart, and it leaves me wondering what's going on half the time, and deeply curious. I don't know my literary history well enough to know if Chandler was the first guy to come up with the world weary aggressive and cynical private eye, but he renders the voice perfectly. Such a very different sort of thing from what I normally read, and yet so much fun at the same time.