The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep-Raymond Chandler

How I found this book: I actually watched the movie years ago, but Patric got the book, and was drooling all over it, and so I checked out the audiobook version of it.

Setting: 1940’s Los Angeles, (my home turf).

Main Characters:

Philip Marlowe: A tough, hard-boiled LA detective, Marlowe doesn’t take a lot of crap from people, and is very intuitive about what they are saying behind the lines. He also appears to have a bit of a heart-of-gold, and a very honorable streak.

General Sternwood: An aging oil millionaire, the General has been laid up as a paraplegic for years, and is in the last moments of his life. He is saddled with two very wild daughters, and hires Marlowe to get one of them out of a jam before she disgraces the family.

Vivian Regan: Sternwood’s eldest daughter, she is imperious and manipulative, and doesn’t appear to like Marlowe very much. Her husband, Rusty, a former gin runner, has been missing for a month, and she seems to think that Marlowe has been hired to find him.

Carmen Sternwood: The younger of the Sternwood daughters, she is childish and a nymphomaniac, with a penchant for alcohol, and a tendency of getting herself in compromising situations.

Arthur Geiger: A small time blackmailer, he is running a clandestine porn shop in Hollywood, right under the nose of the police. He is killed early on while taking nude photographs of Carmen Sternwood to blackmail her with.

Joe Brody: A friend of Geiger’s store clerk, Agnes, he is trying to horn in on Geiger’s business when Geiger is murdered.

Eddie Mars: A gangster who runs a casino that is frequented by Vivian Regan, he seems very interested in why Marlowe is poking around, and seems to be covering up a great deal concerning Vivian’s now missing husband.


Plot: Philip Marlowe is hired by General Sternwood to look into what he thinks is a simple blackmail case involving his daughter, Carmen. What Marlowe finds out is that everyone involved in the case is busy double crossing everyone else and hiding secrets that at first don’t seem to connect together. It’s up to Marlowe to figure out why it is that Geiger, Carmen’s blackmailer, was murdered, and what connection that has, if any, to the mysterious disappearance of Rusty Regan, Carmen’s brother-in-law.

Themes:

Everyone, including the rich, is dirty: The people in this book had so many secrets to hide, everything from Carmen’s nymphomania, to Eddie Mars missing wife. The most interesting thing about the novel is that ‘class’ seems to be fluid in LA at the time, the Sternwoods, who are rich, seem to have little or no problem running around with pornographers, (Geiger), or gangsters, (Mars). While it’s scandalous, yes, no one seems to bat much of an eye at it. Perhaps it is a statement on the social scene of Los Angeles at the time, and how everyone here had something to hide at the time.

It’s a cold, cruel world out there: People are so busy playing one another that they almost forget their humanity, and are only looking out for themselves. Marlowe’s morose mood seems to come from the depression of working with these types of people, who don’t seem to have a heart, but seem to have a hell a lot of greed. There are shining moments of Marlowe’s own compassion though, especially when dealing with General Sternwood, who he knows is dying, and with Mars’s wife, who he knows could be in danger for helping him.

Sex, Sex, and more Sex: Not that they weren’t have sex before now, but it’s still a shock to see that in the midst of the ‘no porn, no nudity in films’ sort of era, you have a book like The Big Sleep, come out where the crux of the novel is sex, and one person’s insatiable need for it. Of course, that person is a woman, which I think seems to go with that whole ‘pulp’ genre, (it’s rare that the nymphomaniac is ever a man in these type of stories.) Naked women or interested women keep flinging themselves at Marlowe, and Chandler tries to deal with the topic as frankly as possible.

Even the cops are twisted: I know it’s a common theme in the genre of ‘pulp’ novels, but even the cops aren’t everything they seem to be either. Gees, who was looking out for this city sixty-years ago anyway? This explains a lot about LA cops!

Every book sucks somewhere: If I had to pick something that sucked, and it’s honestly something that can’t be helped, it would be the vernacular of the book. So much of the off-handed lingo is no longer used anymore in modern society that I found it hard to keep up sometimes what people were saying. Thankfully, I listen to a lot of old-time radio shows, so I wasn’t completely lost, but to the average reader you might be a bit confused by the dialogue because it’s unfamiliar to us sixty years later. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of writing something that reflects a particular place and time and culture.

What did I like: Chandler is one of the most descriptive writers out there. I adore the type of similes he uses, and the way the unique way he has of describing the most ordinary things. It really set the standard for the hard-boiled style of detective, and is reflected in its film-noir movie counterpart. It’s a unique way of seeing the world that is both imaginative, and yet very dark and gritty.

How would I rate this wormy book: I would rate a FAT WORM, it’s a great read for anyone who likes a good ‘whodunnit’, where the story isn’t so much about who committed the murder as much as it is what in the world is really going on in this whole mess. I’d read the book before seeing the equally great movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, because the movie had to leave so many of the good things out, (for obvious reasons), that it might be better to read the book first, so you can get the deeper level of what is going on in the movie.