Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep and (1939 and ) is a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. It has been adapted for film twice, in 1946 and again in 1978. The story is set in Los Angeles 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 and quot;sleeping the big sleep and quot;. In 1999, the book was voted 96th of Le Monde and 's and quot;100 Books of the Century and quot;. In 2005, it was included in Time magazine and 's and quot;List of the 100 Best Novels and quot;.

The Big Sleep

Sarah Christine Gill

Philip Marlowe, a private eye who operates in Los Angeles's seamy underside during the 1930s, takes on his first case, which involves a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder

Sharp dialogue, smoky rooms, and a detective who never flinches.

A classic that’s as stylish as it is confusing, in the best way.

Tanishq Khandelwal

Sharp dialogue, smoky rooms, and a detective who never flinches.
A classic that’s as stylish as it is confusing, in the best way.

Gavin

A pinnacle of style. He lays it out and winds it up within about 90 pages, then drawls out a subplot over the last 40. One reason it's still so fresh is the understatement. The "fuck"s are all em-dashed out, and basically everybody is constantly dry and laconic with each other, Marlowe most of all of course. In fact it's notable when one character is inarticulate ("Carol Lundgren, the boy killer with the limited vocabulary...") 

  "Sit down next to him," Brady snapped. "Hold it on him low down, away from the door..."
She came over and sat next to me on the davenport and pointed the gun at my leg artery. I didn't like the jerky look in her eyes.

("Leg artery")

It wears noir's obligatory cynicism lightly: 
  "I'm a copper," he said, "a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style."


  Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. [But] We just don't run our country that way.

Constantly balances concision and winning detail, e.g: 
  "Ohls growled and turned to me, his eyebrows bristling. «You're on the air, Marlowe. Give it to him."
I gave it to him.
I left out two things, not knowing just why, at the moment, I left out one of them. I left out Carmen's visit to Brody's apartment and Eddie Mars' visit to Geiger's in the afternoon. I told the rest of it just as it happened.
Cronjager never took his eyes off my face and no expression of any kind crossed his as I talked. At the end of it he was perfectly silent for a long minute. Wilde was silent, sipping his coffee, puffing gently at his dappled cigar. Ohls stared at one of his thumbs.
Cronjager leaned slowly back in his chair and crossed one ankle over his knee and rubbed the ankle bone with his thin nervous hand.

Its homophobia is what dates it, with very contemporaneous nonsensical stuff like: 
  I still held the automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

Janice Hopper

I read a crapton of Chandler and similar stuff back in the 80's. I'd been meaning to revisit it for a while, but hadn't got around to it.

Today I decided to listen to this one from Audible.

It holds up pretty well. The narrator of the version I listened to was very good. The plot of this one is fairly convoluted, but everything gets ironed out in the end. And some of the writing is VERY good.

Of course, in a book like this you have to remember that you're not going to find currently acceptable language about women, LGBT folks, or race. So be aware of that. And I'm a little less comfortable with all the male gaze stuff now that I was 30 years ago.

But Chandler can write a sentence, and can handle a plot pretty well. Language/societal issues aside, I still liked it. At only 6 hours and a bit, I listened to it in one way while I was doing laundry and spinning.

My favourite work by my favourite author. I absolutely love this novel. 

Alyssa deRaad

brendan sudol

Trever

Chandler manages to write well and write a good plot-driven novel. Marlowe is the prototypical tough private eye, but since this was the origin of that character type I have some damn respect for it. I do definitely want to read more Chandler, although right now I've got too many books on the docket.

Fraser Simons

Pretty enjoyable, though unabridged I can tell it’s edited. When there’s a swear word it starts the first syllable and then fades; it’s possible that only augmented the experience though, since it was written in the 30s. It’s also very well narrated. I can tell it’s the actor who plays Ross’s father in Friends, which sometimes sprang into my head at odd times. But otherwise it suited the subject matter well and he’s great at making each character distinct. 

The actual story is familiar to me having seen the movie. I didn’t expect the prose to be Hemingwayesk and yet halfway to distinctive writing. It’s pretty interesting, stylistically. The dialogue is almost certainly where cyberpunk got its jargon use. It effectively creates a sense of a sub culture and can be an exercise in intuition on the readers part. I’m sure some of it is antiquated diction too, but it’s effect is somewhat timeless because it serves its purpose. 

Plot wise, it was a heck of a lot of fun and it’s an interesting psychic distance for the character. We aren’t privy to some thoughts in the characters head but only sometimes can we know the actual reasoning and turning of the case, which should feel like it isn’t playing fair, but I never seemed to mind. I’m not sure if I prefer the movie plot or this one, both suit the mediums. Anyway, this was pretty fun. I’ll probably read some more of them.

Shannon Arputharaj

'I was neat, clean, shaved and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.' Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is indulging in some petty blackmail. A weary old man, Sternwood just wants the problem to go away. But Marlowe finds he has his work cut out just keeping Sternwood's wild, devil-may-care daughters out of trouble as they prowl LA's dirtiest and darkest streets. And pretty soon, he's up to his neck in hoodlums and corpses . . . 'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes.' Anthony Burgess

Nooshin

There's something with American culture in the mid 20th century I just don't get.

B.H. Pitt

Somewhat dated (especially in terms of gender roles, but also in plot and story structure), but Chandler has an amazing command of language, beautifully establishing tone with setting. All in all, a fun, refreshing start to the year.

Simon Elliott Stegall

The Big Sleep is a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first in his acclaimed series about detective Philip Marlowe. The work has been adapted twice into film, once in 1946 and again in 1978. The story is set in Los Angeles, California. The story is noted for its complexity, with many characters double-crossing each other and many secrets being exposed throughout the narrative. The title is a euphemism for death; it refers to a rumination in the book about "sleeping the big sleep."

Mayra Melo

Very disappointing. So cliché. Nothing I haven't read or seen before.

He might have been among the first ones in the spy noir genre, but Marlowe's still extremely homophobic, arrogant and misogynistic. He might have been inspiration to the modern spies but he leans more towards the old school I'm-too-sexy-to-care-about-you-babe James Bond. It's no wonder the newer movies are admittedly learning a thing or two from Jason Bourne. 

Arrogant, homophobic spies are outdated. And I know this was written in 1939, but the homophobia is not excused. Especially when you take a look at The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27).

Daryl Houston

I'm reading some Stout, some Hammett, and some Chandler all close together, and it's interesting to note the comparisons. Hammett is more minimal, short on ornate physical descriptions of things. Chandler by contrast attends more to how environments are presented; he embroiders the scene a bit more. Stout lies somewhere in the middle and is a little more overtly funny or witty (beyond the wisecracks all three sprinkle throughout their books).

This was a fine, quick read. I enjoyed it but wasn't affected by it.

Tejas Bhatt

I liked the narrative and the character of Marlowe. However, for a detective novel, either my expectations were set differently, having read a lot of Holmes and Poirot, or things happened so quickly in the novel that any rationale or motive couldn't be etched properly.

There is a time in the novel when Marlowe tells the Sternwoods that his job is not like that of Holmes, where he can pick up a pen at a crimescene and figure out what the cops are missing. He has to go to places no one else would, risk his life to do his job. 

Well, that's the irony seeing how Marlowe just needs to be at certain place and every mystery gets solved. There is no method to how he concludes what he does and no explanation, no rationale, no logic.

I liked the character of Marlowe, and probably the novel would have just been right when it was written. Or it was only me who missed something that others saw.

The Big Sleep

Reviews

Highlights