Well, it seems I do not go along with classic noirs. I tried Hashmett and I tried Chandler without any success. This one was better than the other but I cannot declare that I like it. What went wrong? Not sure, I guess is the dated writing, the sexism, the plot which did not interest me and the bland/blunt characters. I can see the value of these novels but they are not for me. Having say that, I love Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther but he is a bit younger, I guess.

Once again I read this really well written novel and it leaves me in awe, not so much the plot but the writing by Chandler is excellent and pretty special. Some writers have tried to copy him and yet they always end up being compared and found wanting. So much fun to read and yet every few years a pleasure to revisit. In full honesty I hear and see Bogart when I read these books by Chandler, he is the Uber Marlowe in my humble opinion. The rest of this review is from the last time and I still stand by it.

What did it matter where you lay since you were dead?- In a dirty sump or on 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.

I have read the the book several times quite some time ago in my native Dutch, this is actually the first time I read it in its native language. And it is actually quite a good read and does not feel as dated as some other books I have read from that period. It is also a strange experience to read a book that has so brilliantly been filmed with Bogart and Bacall, so sometimes you mix up your memories between the book and the movie. I did behave and read the book and left the movie on the shelf not tor throw me off. [Did watch the Maltese Falcon, I still have to read that one soon as well.}

So the great PI Philip Marlowe gets on a case and is hired to solve a blackmail case that quickly develops into a case with some deaths involved and two seriously lost, or less flattering, crazy sisters that make life interesting and dangerous for men around them. Then there is another Blonde that gets away after having lost three men around her as well but she leaves unscathed.
Marlowe deals with dames, lowlifes, gunslingers, police and blackmailers. he gets out unharmed but whiskey cannot cure the feeling he is left with at the end of this tale.

The language and descriptive writing style makes Chandler a classic when it comes to PI literature and anybody reading this genre has not read anything unless he/she read Chandler. And this book is well worth a 5 star rating. Read it first and then watch the movie, you will be sorry if you don't.

Essential reading.

Do you know that early episode of Scrubs (yes, I really am going to begin this review with a Scrubs reference) where J.D. is trying to stop his relationship with Elliot falling into the 'friend zone'? The idea is that after that first flirty moment, you've got 48 hours to seal it with a kiss, or you're stuck forever in the 'friend zone'.

I got given n  n    The Big Sleepn  n in the omnibus collection of Marlowe books 1,2 and 6 on a long term loan/gift, from my friend Justin (the same awesome Zimbabwean spy I that mentioned in my n  Angelmakern review). I was all, like, "Wow, I've heard of this, this sounds amazing!" And I tried to start it and something (I forget what) interrupted me. And I tried to start it again, and something else (a Jehovah's Witness visit, maybe?) interrupted me again. And boom, we were in the friend zone. I got comfortable having this book kick around with me, forever unread. I moved house with it, more than once. I took it to work a few times, like some kind of literary take-your-child-to-work day. My baby son ripped the front cover off in his rambunctious enthusiasm for all things book. But we never took our relationship to the next level. I never slipped between the covers (what was left of them) and gave n  n    The Big Sleepn  n that good, hard read it was clearly begging for.

So we drifted along for a couple of years. And then, recently, I opened the question up to the Goodreads feed and asked "What book, on my to-read shelf should I pick up next?" Dan Schwent (a huge Marlowe fan) encouraged me to give Chandler his well overdue chance... and here we are.

I'm clearly a moron. Why did I wait for so long? This was FANTASTIC.
I read it at work, on my lunch breaks, and my breaks were never long enough.

I read n  Neuromancern for the first time recently, and my response was exactly the same. I love cyberpunk inspired work and - you'll never guess - I loved the book that defined cyberpunk! n  n    The Big Sleepn  n follows that same winding path of inspiration all the way back to it's noir roots. I've heard that Hammett basically created the noir detective, and Chandler then refined it - if that's true, I should probably read some Hammett because I loved this, especially with n  Neuromancern still fresh in my mind.

I love noir tinted sci-fi. I love noir tinted urban fantasy. Why does it surprise me that I love straight-up noir?!?!

I think it's because I'm a bit of an era-snob. As a rough rule, I'm sceptical of anything written before 1980. Oh, sure, there are some good books from before that time - from Chandler's era I've read Tolkien, Orwell, Lewis, Peake... but that's about it. If it was written before you could buy a Casio digital watch, I'm sceptical - that's how I feel.

Also, I think my expectations were damaged by cinema. I never fell in love with the classic black and white noir movies - but I love their influence on modern cinema. So if old noir movies didn't sway me, old noir books would leave me cold too, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Clouds, old chap, you've got to stop making these assumptions!

So yes. I got it very wrong.

I felt right at home from page one. I was swept away on the style, the tone, the dialogue and details. It's a book of mad rich dames giving a snappy talking private eye with ironclad morals the run-around. It's a book of dirty rackets and dirtier blackmail.

It's four cups of coffee (black), a long slug from the office bottle in the bottom drawer then a couple of French cigarettes first thing in the morning.

God DAMN it tasted good.

The omnibus I have is three books, but I'm pacing them out. I read one book at work and one at home. I'm alternating these as my work books, with another title between each one. So my at-work books were:
n  n    The Big Sleepn  n,
Then n  Hominidsn (parallel worlds Neanderthal sci-fi),
Then the second Marlowe, n  Farewell my Lovelyn (which was very nearly as good as this),
Then Manhattan in Reverse (sci-fi short stories, which I'm reading now),
And then finally I'll be onto n  The Long Goodbyen, the last of my Marlowe omnibus within the next couple of weeks.
I can't wait!

The tough call for me now is whether to put the rest of the Marlowe books straight onto my finishing-the-series list. I'm trying to clear that list down, not build it up, but these books are just so good, I don't think I have a choice...

After this I read: Downbelow Station

The heat in this disreputable part of the old town was oppressive and anything but sultry. All I wanted to do was shed the sweat-clinging skin of the day and stand under a freezing shower for about a week. If I followed that up with a few slugs of bourbon with some ice cold cubes swimming in them, well, that was nobody's business but mine.

She wouldn't have it, though. She stared at me from where I'd discarded her on the beat up couch with a burning reprimand sizzling in her non-existent eyes. She was wearing a lurid red jacket that fit her perfectly. She was small but I could tell she contained multitudes.

She held intense action, calculating sleuthing that owed more than a little to hunches and dumb luck than I'd have liked to admit and some tantalising passion that threatened to consume me within her papery arms.

She'd finished telling me her tumultuous tale on the long, hot drive back from my office this evening. Her words entering me as close as any lover's whisper as the hot air pummelled me through the open car windows without offering a shred of relief. I'd have to get that AC fixed...

I knew what she wanted. She wanted what they all wanted in the end. She couldn't let me just relax and move on to another love when I was good and ready. No, she wanted me to review her; fast and dirty right there on the couch, the vixen. Why can't these chippies just leave me in peace?

I guess peace is too much to ask for a broken down, half-dead bum like me. I'd show her, though. She thought she'd left me trapped in a corner on a hot night with no choice but to give in and review... but I'd been around the block a few times and knew a few tricks myself. The secret was to move fast, before she fixed me with another freezing glance. I feinted right, and she glanced at my piece just as I'd hoped, while my south paw clicked on 'Save' and I hightailed it outta there like Beelzebub himself was on my ass...

Buddy read with Sunshine Seaspray. Now there's a gallon of trouble in a half-pint glass...

It was a joy to read crime fiction that wouldn't be awkward to review on GR, and which doesn't make me feel like apologising to half the review's likely readers. Most mysteries I've read since joining the site have been recent-ish Scandi noir; it was always tricky, because I have to talk to two sets of people in the same post when I actually want to say different things to each of them, and neither is too fond of the other's perspective. I might want to say those who read that sort of genre crime at least occasionally "this is well-written" by which I mean in the context of contemporary police procedurals (there are some right clunkers out there). Then there are friends who read pretty much only high-literary and experimental - if they are even bothering to read the review, which they might not anyway, but what if they do and in a few weeks or months they find themselves somewhere with only a small or mundane selection of books that includes one by this author, and they pick it up because they saw it on GR and think it's terrible? At any rate I would never recommend the book to them personally, and if I ever mentioned it to them individually I'd say, "This is fairly decent writing by the low bar of this subgenre, but you'd probably hate it."

Chandler's writing, though, is unquestionably stylish and witty. It's well-known so no-one would require a ton of examples to be persuaded - and yet it's plain and simple enough that it isn't going to put off anyone who'd find a contemporary "literary thriller" - the sort with a strong emphasis on the literary - to be pretentious. Where there is obvious exposition, and there isn't much, it feels like a natural part of the story. Seventy years after The Big Sleep was published, it is still a platonic ideal of how to phrase thriller writing - though Chandler is also distinctive enough that it would be foolish to imitate him too closely.

I'd always had a problem with classic noir sounding generic or absurd; I would hear it in my head in Steve Martin's narrative voiceover from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a film that was on TV regularly in my teens and which I must have seen maybe four or five times - I learnt about many noir tropes from a spoof before I ever saw or read the real thing. I eventually learned to appreciate the classic films in themselves, but when I tried to read noir as text, back came the echoes of Steve Martin, and I couldn't take it seriously, nor could I understand how so many other people took it seriously. (This is probably why I hadn't read Chandler before, but recently enough book lists and reading challenges converged.) But reading The Big Sleep just now, it didn't take long for the Steve Martin voice to change to Humphrey Bogart's, an excellent sign, and at some point in the second half of the book, I wasn't hearing every sentence in any actor's voice, and the novel and book-Marlowe became their own thing.

I think Chandler's elaborate metaphors possibly read even better now than they would have at time of publication - full of details of place and time, they augment the setting and sense of history, and have become exotically vintage. As a rule, I'm not that interested in the WASP USA and novels about it, but found Marlowe's LA compelling, partly through the book, partly through of the frisson of classic noir films. To appreciate even more of the references and slang, I would love to have read an annotated edition - there is one, but it's not too readily available, and the Penguin Modern Classics edition I read, The Big Sleep and Other Novels, has no notes.

Unfortunately there are old homophobic-sterotype characters (types I don't think I've seen in books later than the 1960s; I was really old before I realised this sort weren't simply villains who happened to be gay), and other characters being homophobic about them. And the plot structure is almost like two novellas and a short story (or a play in three acts?) but otherwise it's still nigh-on perfect, in both writing and story being neither too simple nor too complicated. (I'm not going to criticise the femmes fatales because it's rare in most modern non-mythological literature - I've read next to no classic noir - for there to be scenes where an attractive young woman's sexual advances are unwelcome to an unattached straight man, and even cause him stress; I rather wish I'd read this at 18 or a little earlier, as a small counterweight to the overwhelming 90s pop-culture and post-war litfic messaging that men were always up for it.)

A great deal has already been said about The Big Sleep, so I will now just link to what is IMO the best GR review of it I've read (by a US literature academic). Whilst I like Chandler's phrasing better than this reviewer, he makes points I'd want to about the novel (and film's, and noir's) place in the Anglophone urban psyche and pop culture, and how Marlowe maintains both integrity and his place in a gritty milieu; the review's highlighting of The Big Sleep as a knightly quest, and of the glimpses of queerness in the narrative, enabled me to get more out of the book.

(read & reviewed January 2020)

(Book 599 from 1001 books) - The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe #1), Raymond Chandler

Private investigator Philip Marlowe is called to the home of the wealthy and elderly General Sternwood, in the month of October.

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.

General Sternwood mentions 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. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و هفتم ماه فوریه سال2003میلادی

عنوان: خواب گران: کتاب نخست از سری ماجراهای فلیپ مارلو؛ نویسنده: ریموند چندلر؛ مترجم قاسم هاشمی نژاد؛ تهران، کتاب ایران، سال1382؛ در299ص؛ موضوع داستانهای پلیسی از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

هشدار: اگر هنوز کتاب را نخوانده اید و میخواهید بخوانید، از خوانش ادامه ی ریویو لطفا خودداری فرمائید

راوی داستان «فیلیپ مارلو»ی کارآگاه است، ژنرال «استرن وود»، او را به خدمت گرفته، تا راز بدهی‌های دختر کوچکترش «کارمِن» را، که گویا در قمار بالا آورده، دربیاورد؛ بدهی‌هایی که در طول داستان، منجر به اخاذی از او می‌شوند؛ در این میان، «ریگان»، داماد ژنرال نیز، ناپدید می‌شود، و «ویویان»، دختر بزرگتر ژنرال، و همسر «ریگان»، به شک می‌افتند، که شاید برهان استخدام «مارلو»، یافتن «ریگان» باشد؛ «آرتور گیگر»، صاحب یک مغازه ی کرایه ی محصولات، «کارمِن» را، با مواد مخدر، گیج و منگ کرده، و با گرفتن عکس‌هایی عریان از او، میخواهد اخاذی کند...؛ از اینجا به بعد است، که ...؛ انگار برای نویسنده، گره گشایی از قتلها، و اینکه به خوانشگر بگوید: «کی، کی را کشته» اصلا مهم نیست؛ گویا اهمیت از نظرگاه ایشان در این است که «قضیه‌ ی کی، کی را کشته و برای کی مهم است» است؛ و...؛

بهترین اقتباس سینمایی از این رمان را، در سال1946میلادی، کمپانی «برادران وارنر» تهیه کردند، کارگردانی فیلم را، «هوارد هاکس»، برعهده داشتند، و «همفری بوگارت»، عهده دار ایفای نقش «فیلیپ مارلو»، بودند؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 23/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 20/08/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Wonderful mystery set during Art Deco Los Angeles. I think I heard Humphrey Bogart.

I love reading crime novels from the past. This is hard boiled noir and I will be watching the Bogie & Bacall noir film this week to watch the book come alive.

The slang, the vernacular, even the ——- used in “Go —— Yourself” represent the era. I love the descriptions used in Marlowe’s POV. He’s edgy and smart, playing all the players like pieces on a chess board, or maybe a shell game.

If you don’t view this as a period piece you may be shocked at how women are treated. It was true of its time (Hell, it still happens now) yet the female characters intrigued me.

This was fun to read.

I liked The Big Sleep, though not enough to recommend it. Philip Marlow is a great character. I didn't really care for all the other characters, there were too many of them and not all of them were that well developed. Many of them were there just to make the plot more complex and to confuse the reader. You sort of wished for the General and his two daughters to make more appearances. Their interactions with Marlowe were the best parts of the book. The humor is excellent. Chandler gets the humor-melancholy mix just about right. But he is too busy showing off with the complicated plot.

I listened to this as an Audiobook because I feared that my home counties English accent wouldn’t do it justice. It was a good move. The narration was as slick as the grease on a 50s rockers, with the narrator, Ray Porter, doing the over-the-top voices that these over-the-top characters deserve. I listened to it during my daily lockdown exercise walks through the nearby woods, enjoying the contrast between the peaceful nature around me and the sleazy, crime-ridden Los Angeles of the tale.

I love noir and neo-noir movies, and it was a delight to read one of the original hardboiled novels that have inspired so many of them. It was interesting to see how directly many of the tropes and formulae have carried over to the big screen, especially in the prioritisation of character and mood over the mystery-to-be-solved and in the meandering way that Phillip Marlowe stumbles across one new character after another, so that each scene serves a showcase for their larger-than-life trappings. You can see the same in The Big Lebowski or more recently in David Robert Mitchell's excellent Under the Silver Lake, both of which also include rich patriarchs with similarities to The Big Sleep’s General Sternwood.

I also loved the slang: Dick, slicker, shill, hooch, hotcha, nix, and so on. Plenty of new terms, but you can usually get the meaning from the context.

There is a fair share of misogyny and homophobia in the book, both latent and blatant, which is not so great - from the characters, yes, but you get the sense that Chandler's views aren't far behind. The female characters are all what I imagine the word 'hussy' is used to describe (while most of the characters are depraved reprobates, the women strike as particularly low), and the term fag is thrown around liberally.

And, of course, there are the mind-bending similes. Similes up the wazoo. And I will end the review with a few of them.

If you like these, you will probably like the book:
“They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.”
“Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees.”
“I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets.”
“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain.”
“Her eyes [were] large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought.”
“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”
"Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head.”
"Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”

Raymond Chandler first published The Big Sleep in 1939, introducing us to the world of Philip Marlowe. A modern, noir like detective story, The Big Sleep changed the genre from passive interactions to action packed thrills between the private eye and criminals. Set in 1930s Los Angeles, then a sleepy town controlled by the mob as much as the police, The Big Sleep is a non stop action thriller.

General Sherwood has hired private eye detective Philip Marlowe to solve the mystery of the whereabouts of his son-in-law Terrance Regan. Marlowe takes the case because he usually subsides on $25 a day, and figures the case to be cut and dry. Then, he is introduced to the General's daughters, Carmen and Vivian, and Marlowe is roped into a world of crime.

Instead of having to solve a missing persons case, Marlowe has three murders on his hands and multiple mob goons breathing down his neck. With little assistance from assistance district attorney Ohls and viewed as a nuisance by the Los Angeles Police, Marlowe is on his own. Questioning everyone from racketeers to pornographers, he slowly pieced together Regan's whereabouts. Adding to the thrill of the crime, both of Sherwood's vixen daughters desire Marlowe in a way that has nothing to do with detective work. All these facets of the book add up to nonstop fun.

Before Chandler introduced readers to pulp detective books, crimes passively suggested whodunit. The detective went pawning around for clues and eventually solved the case. Last year I read a few modern mystery books set in the 1910s and they hold true to the time period. The action in the novel as well as short sentences in first person created changed the way mystery writers wrote detective and crime novels. Even though this book was published in 1939, it held my attention because of all the action packed into its pages.

Marlowe eventually holds off the Sherwood sisters and finds out whodunit to all of the crimes. Smitten with the older of two sisters and in the good graces of the police and district attorney's office, the door is open for Marlowe to return for more detective work. A fun book full of crime, the mob, and fast women, The Big Sleep is a fun detective book that held my attention throughout. I look forward to reading more of Marlowe's cases and I rate this premiere 4 solid stars.

what a book. the brisk prose. the world-worn attitude. the smell of legitimate “cool” wafting from the pages themselves. what a book.