"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler

 

The beautifully written classic of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The Crime Writers Association thought it the 2nd best crime novel of all time in their list of the 100 best published in 1990. The Mystery Writers of America rated it 8th in their top 100 published in 1995. Time Magazine chose it as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923).

This is very much a book of two halves. Chandler's hero solves the case for which he has been hired by the 50% mark but he then worries away a couple of loose ends. It was no surprise for me subsequently to discover that he constructed TBS by sticking together two short stories that he had already written Killer in the Rain, 1935, and The Curtain, 1936. He then added threads to make them seem a coherent whole. In the process of this he added his trademark atmospheric descriptions.

TBS is unusual for its time in being a murder mystery in which the first-person narrator is the detective. The tradition, established with Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson and continued with Agatha Christie's Poirot and Hastings and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, had been to use the sidekick as narrator. Otherwise, most of the stories of the 'golden age of detective fiction' (1920s and 1930s) are written in the never-quite-omniscient (by definition since a mystery must perforce involve hiding things) third person. 

For all his disillusion, Marlowe sees himself as an old-fashioned knight rescuing a damsel in distress. This theme comes from the very first page as Marlowe sees "a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.” (Ch 1) Much later, he is considering a chess problem and realises: “Knights had no meaning in this game. it wasn't a game for knights.” (Ch 24) And almost - but not quite - at the end he sees that “The knight in the stained-glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.” (Ch 30) But he does solve the case and he also rescues the damsel.

The joy in TBS doesn't lie in the plot (there is a loose end that is never properly tied up) but in the prose. Marlowe is a master of metaphor and simile and he uses this to create perfect descriptions which are brief but original and as precisely tuned as a resonant frequency:

•  “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and storks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.” (Ch 2)
• “The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.” (Ch 3)
• “She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service.” (Ch 3)
• “Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.” (Ch 6)
• “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” (Ch 8)
• “He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.” (Ch 9)
• “Their accounts of the Affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come - as close as Mars is to Saturn.” (Ch 20)
• “You leak information like a radio announcer.” (Ch 23)
• “He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.” (Ch 26)

His longer descriptions are also meticulously observed:

• “The gourd player rubbed his fingertips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water. The pretence was as wasted as the music.” (Ch 22)
• “He hit me again. There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red riddled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees.” (Ch 27)

Selected quotes:

• “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.” (Ch 1)
• “She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable.” (Ch 1)
• “I could see ... that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.” (Ch 1)
• “There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows. I didn't know whether it was any good, not being collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.” (Ch 4)
• “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.” (Ch 6)
• “I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust. ... A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. you wouldn’t know him.” (Ch 11)
• “You have to have your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on the stray blondes.” (Ch 21)
• “The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change.” (Ch 26)
• “I’m ... just 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.” (Ch 30)
• “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.” (Ch 32; start of final paragraph)

November 2024; 251 pages

First published in 1939 by Knopf in the USA

My edition published in 2011 by Penguin

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God