If you loved riding shotgun with Marlowe’s I-voice—his dry similes, stubborn ethics, and bruised empathy as he shields Terry Lennox and needles power players like Harlan Potter—then Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case will feel like a natural next step. Lew Archer tells the story himself, guiding you through a missing-heir mystery where old California money, buried identities, and sins of the past keep bleeding into the present. That intimate, confessional narration pulls you close the same way Marlowe does while he trudges from Idle Valley to Mexico, refusing to let go of a friend or a truth that won’t sit right.

Chandler’s L.A.—with Mendy Menendez’s muscle, backroom favors, and a media machine eager to spin Terry Lennox’s "suicide"—is as smoggy morally as it is meteorologically. In The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy turns the same city into a night-blooming graveyard of obsession and cover-ups. As Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard chase Elizabeth Short’s murder, the violence corrodes everything it touches, just as Marlowe’s case stains the Wades’ house in Idle Valley. If you felt the city closing in on Marlowe each time he tried to do one decent thing, Ellroy’s relentless, blood-dark tone will hook you.

If what gripped you was watching Marlowe hold to his own battered code while everyone around him—cops, tycoons, even friends like Terry Lennox—cuts moral corners, you’ll be riveted by Tom Ripley. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith flips the equation: Tom is no knight-errant but a charming chameleon whose choices are breathtakingly self-serving. Like Marlowe weighing how far to go to protect Terry or how much truth to tell about Roger and Eileen Wade, you’ll find yourself uncomfortably invested in a man whose brilliance and nerve make you complicit, even as he slides past every ethical guardrail.

Chandler lets the case unspool slowly—late-night barrooms, awkward lunches, quiet conversations that shift everything—until the truth about Terry’s vanishing and the Wades’ marriage clicks into place. Higgins does the same in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The plot simmers through brilliantly tuned dialogue and incremental deals, the way Marlowe’s visits and phone calls keep tightening the noose. If you enjoyed the way The Long Goodbye accrues power in small, tense encounters rather than shoot-outs, Eddie’s world of favors, betrayals, and whispered strategies will scratch that slow-burn itch.

Beyond the mystery, what lingers in The Long Goodbye is the ache: Marlowe’s isolation, Terry Lennox’s self-erasure, Roger Wade’s drink-sunk genius, and Eileen’s carefully concealed fractures. In a Lonely Place burrows just as deeply, locking you inside Dix Steele’s unsettling psychology as postwar Los Angeles becomes a map of hunger and harm. If Roger’s blackouts and the Wades’ toxic dance fascinated you as much as the whodunit, Hughes’s tight focus on motive and mindset—set against the same sunstruck, shadow-choked L.A.—will hit that vein of psychological intensity.