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The Long Goodbye is Chandler's opus. The other great one is The Big Sleep. Chandler was a funny man. I recommend hes collected letters. He had zero interest in plot and it shows. Talk about circuitous. But it doesn't matter. His prose is beautiful and his characterization is brilliant. In his letters, he says that he wrote scenes within a very rough outline, chucked out what lacked legs, and kept the rest. That was the novel. So he only kept what prose that came alive. Also he never wrote after dark because the results were execrable. He was a big drinker, so presumably he was a bit doused by sundown.
His books star Philip Marlowe and he mastered the art of the hard-boiled moral detective in a dirty world. A cliche now, it was innovation when he wrote, and it is not a cliche when he writes. Marlowe is alive and unflinching. Chandler said his main character was not from imagination. He had met Marlowe many times, and that he was always poor, and he always will be, presumably because he is incorruptible.
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