I first read this in 1975, as I precariously trod the dull, straight and narrow road in a Chorpromazine-addled miasma.

My job that year was likewise dull...

It consisted of earmarking files to call forward at the request of engineers later on, putting files once returned under lock and key, and fixing paper jams in the photocopier.

And generally gadbouting about at the beck and call of my seniors.

With the meds I was a fly - pinned and wriggling.

Oh, at least there were magazines, like at your dentist's office, to divert me from dronish drudgery. But I hated the seventies. Who knew - I was averse to the amoral.

I had all the makings of a fledgling Christian, but I didn't see any signs of Heaven in this Hell, with my pills. I didn’t see I was a Grain of Sand on an Endless Beach.

So I wasn't one. We are saved by hope!

And The Big Sleep matched my mood, a real roman noir. Back then, L.A. was as corrupt as the entire world is now.

Marlowe (a nod to Conrad?) has been there, done that and seen "The Horror!"

It's never Pretty, I muttered over my magazine.

There are no eyes here in this valley of dying stars
in this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

Yikes! I looked up suddenly from People Magazine and saw the big sign over the photocopier as an engineer was doing his job - (spy versus spy) - and knew I had been caught:

It said "EYES UP AND LOOKING!" for the Cold War's fear was why I had a job.

Back to reality!

I was not doing my work.

You know, as my one of my fave writers, Ajahn Brahm, stresses, mindfulness is key!

For it is the Path to Peace...

And the value of my meds was only in the lessons to be learnt from them.

Avoid making waves, kids - you’ll have more friends, and you’ll always see the Universe in every Grain of Sand!

How many hardboiled detective novels have been written since 1939, the year Raymond Chandler introduced his perceptive, quick-witted LA tough guy, private eye Philip Marlowe? Round to the nearest 10,000.

That's hardboiled as in a world of crooked cops, organized crime, double-crossing grifters and every other door in a downtown office reeking of swindle, sex angles or shady business deals. In such a world, it's every citizen for themselves and an honest detective can trust absolutely nobody, frequently not even their client.

The Big Sleep takes its rightful place among American literary masterpieces. Give me a feature of what goes into making a great novel, things like character, plot, scene, suspense, dialogue, atmosphere, tone. and I'll point out examples aplenty in The Big Sleep.

To focus on one key feature, let's take a gander at a string of Big Sleep character sketches. And as with all seven Raymond Chandler novels (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Good-Bye, Playback), Detective Philip Marlowe is the first-person narrator:

Carmen Sternwood - "She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn't look too healthy."

Vivian Regan - "She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. they seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and chin. There was a sulky droop in her lips and the lower lip was full."

Gangster Eddie Mars - "He was a gray-man, all gray, except for his polished black shoes and two scarlet diamonds in his gray satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts. His shirt was gray and his double-breasted suit of soft, beautifully cut flannel...He took a gray hat off and his hair underneath it was gray and as fine as if it had been sifted through gauze. His tick gray eyebrows had that indefinable sporty look. He had a long chin, a nose with a hook to it, thoughtful gray eyes that had a slanted look because the fold of skin over his upper lid came down over the corner of the lid itself."

District Attorney Wilde - "He sat behind a desk, a middle-aged plump man with clear blue eyes that managed to have a friendly expression without really having any expression at all. He had a cup of black coffee in front of him and he held a dappled thin cigar between his neat careful fingers of his left hand."

Police Captain Cronjager - "A cold-eyed hatchet-faced man, as lean as a rake and as hard as the manager of a loan office. His neat well-kept face looked as if it has been shaved within the hour. He wore a well-pressed brown suit and there was a black pearl in his tie. He had the long nervous fingers of a man with a quick brain. He looked ready for a fight."

Grifter Harry Jones - "He was a very small man, no more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher's thumb. He had tight brilliant eyes that wanted to look hard, and looked as hard as oysters on the half shell. He wore a double-breasted dark gray suit that was too wide in the shoulders and had too much lapel. Over this, open, an Irish tweed coat with some badly worn spots. A lot of foulard tie bulged out and was rainspotted above his crossed lapels."

Hitman Mr. Canino - "He had a cool face and cool dark eyes. He wore a belted brown suede raincoat that was heavily spotted with rain. His brown hat was tilted rakishly. He leaned back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way."

The Big Sleep typifies the new wave of American crime fiction. Raymond Chandler wrote again and again how in a story published by Black Mask magazine (publisher of such authors as Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner as well as Chandler himself), scene outranks plot and the details of character and social context hold more importance than simply discovering at the end who committed the murder along with making sure the audience knows crime doesn't pay.

Nope. Much in The City of Angels has turned rotten in Raymond Chandler's lifetime. The transplanted Brit didn't hold back on letting readers know just how rotten.


British-American novelist Raymond Chaldler, 1888-1959

I probably wouldn’t have picked up The Big Sleep if I wasn’t trying to get through the Pop Chart 100 Essential Books list. This novel is an odd read. On the one hand, Philip Marlowe is a great character, a foundation of the hard-boiled detective genre. His running observations of the world around him are wonderfully written in a way that sound almost cliché but are so well done that they still work:

Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.
…
She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
…
The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.
…
So the first thought is somebody rolls him for it and rolls him too hard, so they have to take him out in the desert and plant him among the cactuses.

But there’s a lot in this book that I struggled with. Gay slurs abound, and casually slapping women around is not a good look, even considering the book is almost 80 years old. What disappointed me more was the plot itself. The reader is given few clues until the book’s final pages about what is really happening, or even being investigated by Marlowe. And like the joke that Indiana Jones’s presence changes nothing in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marlowe’s presence and actions in The Big Sleep change almost nothing in the plot.

I’m not sorry I read this book, but I have to say I preferred  The Maltese Falcon. The Big Sleep is worth reading for the atmosphere and characters, but know going in that the story is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

4.5★
“Her black hair was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.”

Finally, I have met Raymond Chandler’s LA PI, Philip Marlowe, and I enjoyed the banter and the characters. This was written in 1939, and though Chandler had written stories and loved all kinds of pulp fiction, this was his first novel.

I couldn’t help thinking as I was reading how many books I’ve read in a similar style with great action and sarcastic, off-handed cracks. From what I can gather, it began in the 1920s during the gangster-Prohibition era, and moved into dime novels and magazines. I bet many books I’ve enjoyed were inspired by or at least influenced by Chandler.

Here, Marlowe has been hired by a wealthy, wheelchair-bound old father of a couple of extremely spoiled, wild daughters, and he’s being blackmailed. Marlowe has a meeting with the eldest, Mrs. Regan, who had married three times, the latest husband being an Irish bootlegger who has disappeared.

This is where Bogie meets Bacall in the film, although her marital status and name was changed to appease the censors back in the day. She has a drink, then a second, without offering him anything.

“I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.”

She tries to find out exactly what her father has hired him for – to find her ‘missing’ husband perhaps? Marlowe doesn’t say.

“I grinned at her with my head on one side. She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. ‘I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,’ she snapped. ‘And I don’t like your manners.’

‘I’m not crazy about yours,’ I said. ‘I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.’’”

There is blood, there are bodies, and this is not polite, cosy crime. But it sure is entertaining. I can see how Chandler and Marlowe captured the imagination of so many readers.

For a better review, read the one my GR friend wrote, which convinced me I must read this. Aditya wrote:  Aditya's review

I'm sure this must be available at all good libraries, in one form or another.

Jar of Death Pick #30

I've never watched the movie The Big Sleep but I own the dvd. I bought it because I knew that one day I would watch it, The Big Sleep on my list of movies to watch before I die. But before I could watch the movie, I wanted to read the book first. I've owned this book for almost 10 years but I was a little scared to read it. Classics are hit or miss for me and I've found that I prefer noir movies over noir books. I just think noir is better as a visual art form.

Now my thoughts on the book.

The Big Sleep is about the infamous private eye Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is a tough talking, hard drinking, grizzled womanizer. Marlowe is tasked with find out who is blackmailing a wheelchair bound millionaire. Marlowe thinks this will be easy money but he hadn't counted on the millionaires 2 young & wild daughters. Marlowe knows he should stay away but who can turn down a dangerous vixen.

I like to think of Phillip Marlowe as the precursor to James Bond. Where Bond is slick, Marlowe is kinda grimy. Both men share a love/ disdain for women but I chalk that up to being men of their time.

I enjoyed The Big Sleep but I will admit that I was confused at times. This book contains a lot of 1930's slang. I did at several points have to reread a page or two because I missed a major plot point. That's the only thing that stop this from being a 5 star read. I had fun reading this book I can't wait to meet Humphrey Bogart's Phillip Marlowe.

A classic that I highly recommend!

The Big Sleep was the first novel by Raymond Chandler and published in 1939 about the iconic and legendary Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. It is said that Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best of twentieth-century literature. It is in this book that we are first introduced to Marlowe and his streetwise individualism and heroism when he is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to determine who is blackmailing him and his concern about increasing gambling debts as well as his two troublesome daughters, Vivian and Carmen. What could go wrong? This novel has had enduring appeal over the years and has long been considered one the best 100 novels. The title The Big Sleep is considered a euphemism by gangsters for death and is described by Philip Marlowe as follows:

n  

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell."

n

And now I am going to enjoy the film noir The Big Sleep from 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

You know what a McGuffin is? It’s defined as:
“an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.”
A McGuffin may seem important, even vital, but it’s really only a writer’s trick to move things along. On this, my third time through The Big Sleep, I had an epiphany — for Raymond Chandler, the plot itself was the McGuffin. Sure, a plot seems vital, but for Chandler it was just a trick to show his hard bitten hero in action, a slight of hand through which he could display startling similes and marvelous metaphors, delivered through rapid fire, staccato sentences. In the end, you don’t even miss it.

Do they teach Chandler in academia? If not, they should. In The Big Sleep, he transformed genre ghetto, pulp fiction writing into true art. Writing for small remuneration and even less respect, he created an American masterpiece. It’s a book that thrills you the first time through. Then you have to read the rest of his Philip Marlowe novels. Then you’re done, and it makes you a little sad, until you remember that you can read them all over again. That is when you discover (if you haven’t already) that what comes off as a fun thrill read is really a work of literary genius.

(Word to the wise — experience this book through Phoenix Audio. Elliott Gould, who played Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s 1973 film, The Long Goodbye, narrates. His voice is as perfect for the book as Bogart’s face was for the movie version.)

Reading a hard-boiled detective novel long past the point when I'd already learned lots of things about the hard-boiled detective novel was an interesting experience. Marlowe's blunt, quippy language, his day drinking, and his over-the-top descriptions of women delighted me, not just on their own merits but simply because it was fun to read something that was exactly the way I'd always heard it would be. On the other hand, there were some elements of the book that surprised me. How much of the action took place during the day, for instance—for some reason I'd always assumed Raymond Chandler novels involved a lot of skulking around after midnight. The Big Sleep was also much, much funnier than I thought it would be, which was obviously a good thing. Most of all, though, I was surprised—although really, I shouldn't have been—to recognize exactly how much of a debt contemporary authors of detective novels owe to Chandler, the father of them all. No, The Big Sleep didn't entirely match the set of expectations I had going in, but it certainly didn't disappoint me.

The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars and went for a despicable 4-star rating instead is that Philip Marlowe doesn't have vegetarian half-dark-elf assassins or Dead Men as sidekicks. Glen Cook, this is all your fault You have ruined me forever.  

.

'What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that...You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.'

So concludes Philip Marlowe at the end of this case. I'm really glad I didn't know the story beforehand, having never watched the movie. I didn't see whodunnit until the very end.

Fabulous original crime noir novel where no one is ever really innocent and every one has secrets to hide... I loved the style of writing and could have quoted from almost every page. Marlowe is an honest-ish , hard boiled gum shoe , fast-off-the-trigger-with-those-wisecracks, who's been around the block a few times. Foxy dames, chain smoking, cyanide, blackmail, extortion, murder, insanity. What more can you ask for?
Fabulous!

My first Raymond Chandler and I thought it was fantastic. What a voice. An intriguing mystery, but with something more.

Philip Marlowe is good at his job as a private detective because he’s good at reading people. He doesn’t ponder situations and work out the answer. Instead, he watches people, and he sees them.

It’s a complex story, but the complexity is in the characters. Are they telling the truth or not? What clues does Marlowe pick up on that answer that question?

“He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.”

“The purring voice was now as false as an usherette’s eyelashes and as slippery as a watermelon seed.”

And then, of course, there’s the noir. I can’t help myself, I find it delicious, maybe because I have a pretty squeaky clean life and opposites attract.

Plus, I have a real soft spot for the 1930’s, especially 1930’s California. Partially due to family history, and certainly influenced by old movies, but it gets stronger each time I read something from this time and place.

“From behind a communicating door came the sound of a typewriter clacking monotonously to the bell, to the shift, line after line.”

If you’ve ever heard that sound, you will remember, especially if it was in an old office building, the kind with tall, wood-trimmed doors of pebbled glass and tile floors that make the clack of the typewriter echo down the hallway. I remember, but it’s a sound lost to history.

These emblems of the time: the typewriters, the Stetsons, the coupes, the conversations that relay a kind of jaunty cynicism … they’re all juxtaposed with this horrific misogyny and prejudice and small-mindedness that were also of that period. I’m thrilled that I didn’t have to live then, but all that negative stuff puts the little period details in relief somehow, makes them stand out and shimmer.

And it all makes for a really fun read.

★★★☆☆½

n   “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.” n

Yeah, so? What do want a medal or something? Sorry to break it to you, Phil, but, for the rest of us poor working-class schmucks, that’s basically the status quo. Well, maybe not razor smooth, but damn, it’s not yet noon and you’re bragging about being sober?

Sheesh! Well, at least now I know who to blame for all those hard-drinking, wisecracking PIs that followed.

But, it’s really no wonder future authors would attempt to emulate this guy—he’s the very definition of cool. And, this is a story that just oozes style—all the more impressive a feat for a first novel penned way back in 1939.

The Big Sleep is the novel that started it all, by introducing the legendary Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe. The novel begins when Marlowe is hired by General Sternwood, an elderly, paralyzed millionaire, to investigate a blackmailer who’s gotten his hooks into the General’s youngest daughter. As they’re discussing the particulars of the case, it becomes rather evident that the General is also concerned about the missing husband of his oldest daughter. While he doesn’t specifically hire Marlowe to find the husband, he does sort of leave it unsaid.

What follows is a surprisingly twisty tale involving blackmail, pornography, gambling, and multiple murders. With a cast chock-full of criminals, and two young daughters, “still in the dangerous twenties,” and enough double and triple cross to give you whiplash, it’s really no surprise Phil hits the booze so hard.

I can’t fault Marlowe too much for coloring outside the lines and working around the law either—at one point even keeping a murder scene under wraps to serve his purposes. It’s not that he’s immoral; more that he’s only looking out for his client.

Anyhow, the good news is that the writing was terrific - at times highly quotable. The bad news is that the mystery was overcooked. It was all a bit too convoluted for my taste, and the ending especially was rather weak. I couldn’t help but feel as though I were reading a couple of different stories roughly cobbled together. A brief Wikipedia search confirmed that was indeed the case, and I must say, it shows. There were also a few overly descriptive sections early on, but those seemed to diminish as the story began to hit its stride.

Look, there’s no doubt The Big Sleep was a hugely influential work that set the tone for many noir detective stories to follow, but I’m sorry I don’t grade on a curve.

3.5 stars - A clear case of style over substance.

n   “You’re as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?”
“Sure.”
“You can call me Vivian.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Regan.”
“Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.”n

Read as part of another Non-Crunchy Cool Classic Buddy Read.


One side benefit of a long shelf life is the abundance of time to amass a vast collection of dust jackets. Here are a few of my favorites: