The story is noted for its complexity, with characters double-crossing one another and secrets being exposed throughout the narrative. The title is a euphemism for death; the final pages of the book refer to a rumination about "sleeping the big sleep".
Philip Marlowe, a private investigator in Los Angeles, is called to the home of the wealthy and elderly General Sternwood. He wants Marlowe to deal with an attempt by a bookseller named Arthur Geiger to blackmail his wild young daughter, Carmen. She had previously been blackmailed by a man named Joe Brody. Sternwood mentions that his other, older daughter Vivian is in a loveless marriage with a man named Rusty Regan, who has disappeared. On Marlowe's way out, Vivian wonders if he was hired to find Regan, but Marlowe will not say.
Marlowe investigates Geiger's bookstore and meets Agnes, the clerk. He determines that the store is an illegal pornography-lending library. He follows Geiger home, stakes out his house and sees Carmen enter. Later, Marlowe hears a scream, followed by gunshots and two cars speeding away. He rushes in to find Geiger dead and Carmen drugged and naked, in front of an empty camera. Marlowe takes her home but when he returns, Geiger's body is gone; he quickly leaves. The next day, the police call Marlowe and let him know the Sternwoods' car was found driven off a pier, with their chauffeur, Owen Taylor, dead inside. It appears that Owen was hit on the head before the car entered the water. The police also ask if Marlowe is looking for Regan.
Marlowe stakes out Geiger's bookstore and sees its inventory being moved to Brody's home. Vivian comes to his office and says Carmen is being blackmailed with the nude photos from the previous night. She also mentions gambling at the casino of Eddie Mars and volunteers that Eddie's wife, Mona, ran off with Rusty. Marlowe revisits Geiger's house and finds Carmen trying to get inside. They look for the photos, but she plays dumb about the night before. Eddie suddenly enters; he says he is Geiger's landlord and is looking for him. Eddie demands to know why Marlowe is there; Marlowe takes no notice and states that he is no threat to him.
Marlowe goes to Brody's home and finds him with Agnes, the bookstore clerk. Marlowe tells Brody that he knows they are taking over the bookstore and blackmailing Carmen with the nude photos. Carmen appears with a gun and demands the photos, but Marlowe takes the weapon and makes her leave. He interrogates Brody further and pieces together the story: Geiger was blackmailing Carmen; Owen Taylor did not like this and killed Geiger, taking the film of Carmen. Brody was staking out Geiger's house during the murder and pursued Owen, knocked him out, stole the film and possibly pushed the car off the pier. Suddenly, the doorbell rings and Brody is shot dead; Marlowe gives chase and catches Geiger's male lover, Carol Lundgren, who shot Brody thinking he had killed Geiger. He had also hidden Geiger's body, so he could remove his own belongings before the police got wind of the murder.
The case is seemingly over, but Marlowe is nagged by Rusty’s disappearance. The police accept that he simply ran off with Mona, since she is also missing, and since Eddie would not risk committing a murder in which he would be the obvious suspect. Eddie calls Marlowe to his casino and seems to be nonchalant about everything. Vivian is also there, and Marlowe senses something between her and Eddie. Marlowe drives her home and she tries to seduce him, but he rejects her advances. When he gets home, he finds Carmen has snuck into his bed, and he rejects her as well.
A man named Harry Jones, Agnes' new partner, approaches Marlowe and offers to tell him Mona's location. Marlowe plans to meet him later, but Eddie’s henchman, Lash Canino, is suspicious of Jones and Agnes' intentions and kills Jones first. Marlowe manages to meet Agnes anyway and receives the information. He goes to the location in Realito, a repair shop with a home at the back, but Canino – with the help of Art Huck, the garage man – jumps him and knocks him out. When Marlowe awakens, he is tied up and Mona is there with him. She says she has not seen Rusty in months; she only hid out to help Eddie and insists he did not kill Rusty. She frees Marlowe, and he shoots and kills Canino.
The next day, Marlowe visits Sternwood, who remains curious about Rusty's whereabouts and offers Marlowe an additional $1,000 if he is able to locate him. On the way out, Marlowe returns Carmen's gun to her, and she asks him to teach her how to shoot. They go to an abandoned field, where she tries to kill him, but he has loaded the gun with blanks and merely laughs at her; the shock causes Carmen to have an epilepticseizure. Marlowe brings her back and tells Vivian he has guessed the truth: Carmen came on to Rusty and he spurned her, so she killed him. Eddie, who had been backing Geiger, helped Vivian conceal the killing by helping to dispose of Rusty's body, inventing a story about his wife running off with Rusty, and then blackmailing her himself. Vivian says she did it to keep it all from her father, so he would not despise his own daughters, and promises to have Carmen institutionalized.
With the case now over, Marlowe goes to a local bar and orders several double Scotches. While drinking, he begins to think about Mona "Silver-Wig" Mars, but never sees her again.
Background
The Big Sleep, like most of Chandler's novels, was written by what he called "cannibalizing" his short stories.[2] Chandler would take stories he had already published in the pulp magazine Black Mask and rework them into a coherent novel. For The Big Sleep, the two main stories that form the core of the novel are "Killer in the Rain" (published in 1935) and "The Curtain" (published in 1936). Although the stories were independent and shared no characters, they had some similarities that made it logical to combine them. In both stories there is a powerful father who is distressed by his wayward daughter. Chandler merged the two fathers into a new character and did the same for the two daughters, resulting in General Sternwood and his wild daughter Carmen. Chandler also borrowed small parts of two other stories, "Finger Man" and "Mandarin's Jade".[3]
This process — especially in a time when cutting and pasting was done by cutting and pasting paper — sometimes produced a plot with a few loose ends. An unanswered question in The Big Sleep is who killed the chauffeur. When Howard Hawks filmed the novel, his writing team was perplexed by that question, in response to which Chandler replied that he had no idea.[4] This exemplifies a difference between Chandler's style of crime fiction and that of previous authors. To Chandler, plot was less important than atmosphere and characterisation. An ending that answered every question while neatly tying every plot thread mattered less to Chandler than interesting characters with believable behaviour.
When Chandler merged his stories into a novel, he spent more effort on expanding descriptions of people, places, and Marlowe's thinking than getting every detail of the plot perfectly consistent. In "The Curtain", the description of Mrs. O'Mara's room is just enough to establish the setting:
This room had a white carpet from wall to wall. Ivory drapes of immense height lay tumbled casually on the white carpet inside the many windows, which stared towards the dark foot-hills. The air beyond the glass was dark too. It had not started to rain, yet there was a feeling of pressure in the atmosphere.
In The Big Sleep, Chandler expanded this description of the room and used new detail (e.g. the contrast of white and "bled out", the coming rain) to foreshadow the fact that Mrs. Regan (Mrs. O'Mara in the original story) is covering up the murder of her husband by her sister and that the coming rainstorm will bring more deaths:
The room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air already.[5]
Of the historical plausibility of Geiger's character, Jay A. Gertzman wrote:
Erotica dealers with experience had to be tough, although not necessarily predatory, and the business was not for the timid or scrupulous. But the criminality of erotica dealers did not extend beyond bookselling into organized racketeering; Al Capone and Meyer Lansky were not role models. A figure like A. G. Geiger, the dirty-books racketeer in Raymond Chandler's Big Sleep (1939) who supplements his business activities as owner of a pornographic lending library in Hollywood by arranging sex orgies and blackmailing rich customers, is a fascinating but lurid exaggeration. However susceptible film personalities were to blackmail, it was not the métier of book dealers.[6]
The Big Sleep takes place in the 1930s, and thus its story was also largely influenced by the very real massive social upheaval during the interwar period. During the harsh 1930s, the American people lost much faith in the government due to their repeated intervention failures, experienced the rise of gang violence from Prohibition, and endured the severe decline of public welfare from disasters such as the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.[7] Chandler himself was fired from his job at an oil company in 1932, which would lead him to begin writing in the grittier and more cynical hard-boiled genre that mirrored the hardships of its time. In American essayist Herbert Ruhm's introduction to the Black Mask, a hard-boiled magazine that Chandler initially wrote for, Ruhm found that: "...the streets of the cities best reflected the moral disorder of the era. Events were depicted in language of these streets; mean, slangy, prejudiced, sometimes witty and always tough."[8]
Through this time of suffering, people began flocking towards big cities such as Los Angeles—also the setting of The Big Sleep—for work, which consequently made cities hotspots for the new meshing of demographic and socioeconomic changes. As a result, roots of modernity and mass culture began to form in America, slowly eroding old social norms such as the traditional views of masculinity and family. This plays heavily into Chandler's depiction of Marlowe as a chivalrous lone wolf of the old guard, futilely trying to change the world around him.
Themes
Masculinity is at the very core of The Big Sleep. In the very beginning of the novel, Chandler already sets up the masculine characterization of Marlowe when he observes a stained-glass panel portraying a knight attempting to rescue a damsel in distress. Readers have interpreted Marlowe's self-identification with the knight as illustrating a conformity to the chivalrous old views of masculinity. His disdain for queer relationships, such as with Geiger and Lundgren, sheds more light on what delineates Marlowe's masculinity as strictly conforming to the heteronormative perspective.[7]
Marlowe's loyalty to the Sternwoods also caused readers to make connections to themes of family hierarchies and relations. Marlowe's isolation hangs over the entire novel, and readers have inferred that Marlowe's close dedication to his client is his implicit desire to be part of a family, citing Marlowe's continued use of "we" in interrogating suspects as his attempt to integrate himself into the family.[9]
The Coen brothers' film The Big Lebowski was inspired by the character Philip Marlowe and the style and plot elements of Chandler's novels such as The Big Sleep.[10][11]
The Big Sleep has achieved critical acclaim. On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed The Big Sleep on its list of the 100 most influential novels.[12] In a 2014 retrospective, The Guardian ranked it No. 62 on its list of the 100 best novels.[13] The book review site The Pequod rated the book a 9.5 (out of 10.0), saying, "This is one of Raymond Chandler's best books … The real pleasures lie not in the story, but in Chandler's atmospheric settings."[14]The New York Times also praised the book: "As a study in depravity, the story is excellent, with Marlowe standing out as almost the only fundamentally decent person in it."[15]
Related Research Articles
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas", starting in 1933.
The Blue Dahlia is a 1946 American crime film and film noir with an original screenplay by Raymond Chandler directed by George Marshall and starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake and William Bendix. It was Chandler's first original screenplay.
Farewell, My Lovely is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1940, the second novel he wrote featuring the Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. It was adapted for the screen three times and was also adapted for the stage and radio.
The Long Good-bye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. Some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book".
Lady in the Lake is a 1947 American film noir starring Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows. An adaptation of the 1943 Raymond Chandler murder mystery The Lady in the Lake, the picture was also Montgomery's directorial debut, and last in either capacity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) after eighteen years with the studio. Montgomery's use of point-of-view cinematography and its failure was blamed for the end of his career at MGM.
Murder, My Sweet is a 1944 American film noir, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Dick Powell, Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley. The film is based on Raymond Chandler's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. It was the first film to feature Chandler's primary character, the hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe.
Playback is a novel by American-British writer Raymond Chandler featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe. It was first published in Britain in July 1958; the US edition followed in October that year. Chandler died the following year; Playback is his last completed novel.
The Big Sleep is a 1946 American film noir directed by Howard Hawks. William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman co-wrote the screenplay, which adapts Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in a story that begins with blackmail and leads to multiple murders.
The Big Sleep is a 1978 neo-noir film, the second film version of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel of the same name. The picture was directed by Michael Winner and stars Robert Mitchum in his second film portrayal of the detective Philip Marlowe. The cast includes Sarah Miles, Candy Clark, Joan Collins and Oliver Reed, and features James Stewart as General Sternwood.
The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, his fifth featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and follows Marlowe's investigation of a missing persons case and blackmail scheme centered around a Hollywood starlet. With several scenes involving the film industry, the novel was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949 and was released in the United States three months later.
The Long Goodbye is a 1973 American neo-noir film directed by Robert Altman, adapted by Leigh Brackett from Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel of the same name. The film stars Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe and features Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Jim Bouton, Mark Rydell, and an early, uncredited appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The High Window is a 1942 novel written by Raymond Chandler. It is his third novel featuring the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe.
Poodle Springs is the eighth Philip Marlowe novel. It was started in 1958 by Raymond Chandler, who left it unfinished at his death in 1959. The four chapters he had completed, which bore the working title The Poodle Springs Story, were subsequently published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962), a collection of excerpts from letters and unpublished writings. In 1988, on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler's birth, the crime writer Robert B. Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel.
Marlowe is a 1969 American neo-noir film starring James Garner as Raymond Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe. Directed by Paul Bogart, the film was written by Stirling Silliphant based on Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister.
Farewell, My Lovely is a 1975 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Dick Richards and featuring Robert Mitchum as private detective Philip Marlowe. The picture is based on Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940), which had previously been adapted for film as Murder, My Sweet in 1944. The supporting cast features Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Jack O'Halloran, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, Sylvester Stallone and hardcore crime novelist Jim Thompson, in his only acting role, as Charlotte Rampling's character's elderly husband Judge Grayle. Mitchum returned to the role of Marlowe three years later in the 1978 film The Big Sleep, making him the only actor to portray the character more than once in a feature film.
Radioactive Dreams is a 1985 post-apocalyptic science fiction-comedy film written and directed by Albert Pyun and starring George Kennedy, Michael Dudikoff, Don Murray, and Lisa Blount. The names of the two main characters are homages to noir detective fiction icons Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler and Mike Hammer. The film has achieved cult status and has been screened in several cult revival programs around the world.
The Falcon Takes Over, is a 1942 black-and-white mystery film directed by Irving Reis. Although the film features the Falcon and other characters created by Michael Arlen, its plot is taken from the Raymond Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely, with the Falcon substituting for Chandler's archetypal private eye Philip Marlowe and the setting of New York City replacing Marlowe's Los Angeles beat. The B film was the third, following The Gay Falcon and A Date with the Falcon (1941), to star George Sanders as the character Gay Lawrence, a gentleman detective known by the sobriquet the Falcon.
Perchance to Dream is a detective crime novel by Robert B. Parker, written as an authorized sequel to The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Following his post-mortem collaboration with Chandler on Poodle Springs, this 1991 release is the second and final Philip Marlowe novel written by Parker.
"The Big Sleep" is a 1950 American TV play based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. It was an episode of the anthology series Robert Montgomery Presents. Montgomery had played Philip Marlowe previously in Lady in the Lake. Many episodes of the series were adaptations of Hollywood films.
↑ Gertzman, Jay A. (1999). Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920–1940 (First paperback printing, 2002ed.). Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp.35–37. ISBN0-8122-1798-5.
Phillips, Gene D. (2000). Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky. ISBN0-8131-9042-8.
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