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The Big Sleep

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Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book

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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

112 reviews
Sales Rank: 15866

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 234
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.6

ISBN: 0394758285
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780394758282
ASIN: 0394758285

Publication Date: July 12, 1988
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•	Paperback - Big Sleep (Alpha Books)
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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
"His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." Published in 1939, when Raymond Chandler was 50, this is the first of the Philip Marlowe novels. Its bursts of sex, violence, and explosively direct prose changed detective fiction forever. "She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full."

Product Description
When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

"Chandler [writes] like a slumming angel and invest[s] the sun-blinded streets of Los Angelos with a romantic presence."
--Ross Macdonald

Customer Reviews: Read 107 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Tough going November 3, 2008
Why is it that books that are labeled as "classics" often seem to disappoint? That's a question that has a longer answer than I'd care to write about here, but that thought did occur to me several times while reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I'm sure high expectations have something to do with it, and the story did seem to be a winner. Philip Marlowe, a private dick from L.A. is on a black mailing case involving a millionaire and his two insane daughters.

Here we find excellent prose, but a plot that is so hard to follow, I gave up about three quarters of the way through. I would have been able to keep up if I kept a notebook of all the characters (of which there are too many), and a history of what had happened thus far (too much too soon). Someone reading this for a college class may have a highlighter or two handy, and get more out of this book. However, the casual reader will find this novel tough going.

5 out of 5 stars

A Must Read September 19, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

What more can or needs to be said about Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep? Not much. The Big Sleep was his first novel, introduced Philip Marlowe, and is often considered his best work. The Big Sleep is a good whodunit, but Chandler shines when he examines the corruption that bubble up from the underworld of pornography, drugs, and illegal gambling. Chandler also takes the reader on a tour of a now-long gone Los Angeles.

Is Chandler's work `literature'? Chandler thought so. Here's how Chandler defined literature: "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball."

If you've ever enjoyed a detective story, a crime story, any kind of noir fiction, then you owe it to yourself to read Chandler and there's no better place to start than here at the beginning. The book is only about 150-230 pages long, depending on the edition, so trying it out for yourself will not long detain you. Highest recommendation.

5 out of 5 stars

A masterpiece not merely of hardboiled fiction but of the English language September 18, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

THE BIG SLEEP is one of the great books of American Literature, not merely of hardboiled fiction. It is far from a perfect book. There are passages that are so over-the-top that they border on self-parody. The scenes in which women can't help themselves in the presence of Philip Marlowe are generally appalling. But the book's virtues are difficult to overstate. The prose frequently veers into the realm of genius. The characters -- even minor characters -- are brilliantly and unforgettably sketched. The L.A. of the late 1930s captures the time and place as perfectly as Berenice Abbott's photos of thirties New York. For many individuals, Raymond Chandler in this and subsequent novels created the L.A. that haunted film noir in the next two decades.

Chandler's prose both thrills and infuriates me. His brilliance at negotiating English sentences makes me about as mad as when I read the first page of Nabokov's LOLITA. In both cases I read sentences that I know I could not emulate if given a lifetime to ape. In both instances the words go far beyond brilliance to something ineffable. What is amazing is that Chandler, though born in Chicago, was raised in Ireland and educated in English public (i.e., private) schools. He did move to the U.S. as an adult and resubmerged himself in the country of his birth, but just as no one wrote English prose better than the Russian born and raised Nabokov, no one wrote more cutting and hard-edged in the American vein than did the Anglicized Chandler.

THE BIG SLEEP is famous for its convoluted plot, but I have to say that even in my first reading I did not have this experience. Certainly it makes more sense than the famous movie version with Humphrey Bogart, which was hampered by extensive censorship (there are simply too many lines to read between to make grasping the plot an easy undertaking). But really, you don't read Chandler for plot. Of the big three hardboiled writers -- Hammett and Ross MacDonald being the other two -- only MacDonald can profitably be read for the story. You read Hammett and Chandler for the impossible to resist one-liners, the vivid ragged guys and treacherous woman who litter their stories, and for the way they evoke the San Francisco and Los Angeles that they write about. If you start getting hung up on plot, you've already missed the point.

One thing that is striking is how closely the movie -- hampered as it is by censorship -- hews to the book. Most of the book's major scenes can be found more or less intact in the film. Most of the great lines are in both, though the famous horse racing conversation between Bogart and Lauren Bacall was unique to the film. The one huge difference is the ending. The movie scraps the last 15 or so pages of the book and ends with an exhilarating and violent confrontation between Marlowe and Eddie Mars. All in all I actually prefer the movie's ending, helped in part by the brilliant dialogue written by William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett. But the Chandler ending makes far more sense of the plot.

This was Chandler's first full length novel. The most remarkable thing about that is that he was fifty years old when it was published. He wrote his first story when he was forty-five. There are few if any stories of such a brilliant writer getting started so late in life. And he did it despite an on and off very serious drinking problem, in which he drank not to be mildly inebriated, but drank to the point of getting DT's. But he illustrates better than anyone that it is never too late to start. He remains an inspiration of all of us aging potential authors.

2 out of 5 stars

Nope, sorry ... August 13, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

I tried with this "classic" ... two times, then a third ... and as much as the first few chapters (the exchanges between Marlowe and the daughter) were brilliant, I couldn't finish the thing. Just couldn't. I have an issue with private eye books anyway, but this one (between the several characters and all the confusion) just didn't take hold. I thought the exchanges between Marlowe and the kid (who killed the guy who killed his boyfriend) were great also, but immediately after that scene, I folded. It's probably my issue with private eye novels anyway, but aside from the wonderful dialogue, I had a hard time swallowing and ultimately couldn't/didn't finish The Big Sleep ... i became too anxious to read what was waiting in the bin (The Leopard). This is just the 2nd novel I couldn't finish this year (2008).

For my money, the James Cain novels were pure gold by comparison.

4 out of 5 stars

Where it all began July 26, 2008
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

"I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera."

Only Raymond Chandler could write a sentence like that. He's easy to parody, but impossible to improve on. In "The Big Sleep" (1939) he leads us through a sleazy LA world of hookers, pimps, pornographers, blackmailers, gambling junkies, and floozies too many to mention.
Their indiscretions lead Philip Marlowe from one red herring to another. Marlowe manages to keep his head high and his standards out of the gutter that surrounds him.

It's easy to see how much Chandler influenced everyone who followed him, consciously or not-- Mickey Spillane, James Ellroy, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard and so on.

Some of his work is dated: Greater Los Angeles was still surrounded by Orange and Avocado groves, gang-bangers didn't rule neighborhoods, and the Papparazzi hadn't taken over Sunset Boulevard. Men still wore hats and dressed for dinner, and people went out to Clubs in the evening. There is male chauvinism, political incorrectness, racism, and homophobia, but those were part of the times.

Chandler's work was a natural for the movies, and for radio. His ear for dialogue was matchless. Written by Chandler and director Billy Wilder, the screenplay of James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity" became a classic with Fred MacMurry, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson. His later works, "T he Long Goodbye: and "The Lady in the Lake" show a bit more maturity and cohesiveness. But it's safe to say that books like "LA Confidential" and "T he Black Dahlia" wouldn't exist without the earlier works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

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