The Big Sleep

Rating:
Summary: A rollercoaster ride of a plot
Review: "The Big Sleep" opens with private eye Philip Marlowe being summoned to the expansive estate of the aged and wealthy General Sternwood. Sternwood hires Marlowe to investigate a blackmailer who has been involving Sternwood's wildly misbehaving younger daughter in some embarrassing indiscretions. Marlowe's trail leads him through a labyrinth of murder and deceit, and it is impossible for the reader to guess the real story behind Sternwood's daughter's trouble until Marlowe analyzes and reveals the scheme at the end of the book.

As he explains in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler disdained the linear "whodunit" style of mystery and set about to turn the genre upside down with this, his first Marlowe novel. Chandler's style of designing a complex plot and inserting the detective somewhere in the middle to put the pieces together was to be a big influence on many crime writers to follow and particularly on a TV show like "The Rockford Files." (Jim Rockford was not unlike a '70s version of Marlowe, and many of the episodes featured similarly complex plot structures.) While some of Chandler's dialogue, situations, and props may seem a bit dated, his mindbending plot concept seems as fresh and exciting today as it must have sixty years ago.

Rating:
Summary: THE DEBUT OF THE MODERN FICTIONAL DETECTIVE KNIGHT
Review: As a mystery author with my first novel in its initial release, I make frequent appearances at mystery conventions to promote my debut title. At one recent convention, I was sitting on an author panel discussing "The Private Eye." Following our presentation, a reader in the audience asked us to trace the development of the modern private eye. I fielded that question and explained that Raymond Chandler's THE BIG SLEEP is one of the crucial developmental steps along the way to the private eyes contemporary authors write about today. In THE BIG SLEEP, Chandler started with a pulp magazine character-type and transformed that character-type into a Romantic hero--the modern urban knight-errant. He took Hammett's tough guy, kept him tough yet gave him heart. THE BIG SLEEP tells a complicated tale in a complicated fashion. William Faulkner, when he was scripting the classic Bogart film, claimed he couldn't comprehend the plot. I've always assumed Faulkner was joking. The story can be comprehended by even small minds, like mine. The story involves murder, blackmail, gambling, a family of great wealth, self-destructiveness, and other standard plot fixtures of detective fiction. Most importantly, this book marks the debut of Philip Marlowe. Without Chandler's Marlowe the mystery genre would not be what it is today.

Rating:
Summary: perfect writing, massive wit, and philosophical, too!
Review: Chandler is, bar none, the best writer of the so-called "hard boiled detective" genre, and this is his greatest work.

In a labyrinthine plot featuring corrupt, orchid-growing millionaires, beautiful blondes, gray men with guns and the cynical, deeply romantic narrator-protagonsit Marlowe, we see Los Angeles of the 1940s as Marlowe looks for the truth about murder, pornography and, ultimately, loss.

The sheer genius of Chandler's writing-- aside from the accompished plot twists-- is his deceptively simple language, which sparkles, and his narrator's deadpan wit. From the descriptions of women ("Inside was a blonde. A blonde! A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.") to the caustic remarks in the face of death ("She would either shoot me, or she wouldn't.") to his existential comments ("I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun"), Marlowe is as entertainign to lsiten to as he is to watch.

Chandler's achievement here goes beyond the action sequences, or the wit of his narrator, or the complexity of his plots. His narrator, the tough-as-nails Marlowe, appeals because he is profoundly romantic at heart, but doomed, like Hamlet, to be disappointed. Like Hamlet-- who writes a play to discover the origins of his misery-- Marlowe too is a storyteller, whose stories lead to one kind of understanding, where actions and sequences finally cohere. But Marlowe's dilemmas are Hamlet's, in that although he can tell the story, his sense of what it all means at the end is far from complete.

Chandler's stories are really about people who are lost. Marlowe's quest to find the body and re-tell the story-- although always successful-- is always undermined by his elliptical and understated awareness that, for all our ingenuity and striving, it all ultimately comes down, as it does for Hamlet and for all of us, to the big sleep.

Rating:
Summary: A grim, grimy work that created a new detective genre
Review: Raymond Chandler's THE BIG SLEEP was the first of his novels featuring private detective Philip Marlowe. In creating this tough-as-nails, chain-smoking, heavy boozing investigator, Chandler was one of the first writers of the ''hardboiled" mystery genre. While its style has become a tradition over 60 years since it was first published, it is important to understand how original THE BIG SLEEP was. Literature had only seen before gentleman detectives such as Sherlock Holmes solving the mysteries of the genteel classes. THE BIG SLEEP, on the other hand, involves the seedy Los Angeles underbelly, with a cast of gamblers, con-men, and perverts.

The book opens with the visit of Philip Marlowe to the estate of old, dying General Sternwood. The general's two daughters constantly vex him by getting into all sorts of trouble. One's a infantile neurotic, the other's mired in gambling debts and has already been thrice married. Sternwood hires Marlowe to resolve the blackmail of one of his daughters by a shady bookseller. Once bodies start to drop, however, it becomes apparent that Marlowe is in for more than he bargained for.

In his Philip Marlowe novels, Chandler was more concerned with creating characters of various degrees of depravity, dialogue, and narrative style than with plot. In fact, only in the last three pages does he put all the pieces in place, in such a fashion that resolving the mystery seems like an afterthought. Nonetheless, the reader enjoys the ride. Marlowe's thoughts, which we get from the first-person narrative, and the witty dialogue is entertaining enough.

THE BIG SLEEP is also a window on a period of American history much different from the present. Nearly every scene has the characters lighting up, whether pipes, cigarettes, or cigars. In one scene, the police harass a homosexual boy with glee. In few other books do we see there sorts of details which show how Los Angeles of 1939 was not like it is today.

All in all, I'd recommend THE BIG SLEEP. Even if this doesn't seem like your genre, it has an important place in American literature.