THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler

Reviewed by Ryan Bradley

An old millionaire named General Sternwood lies on his deathbed. His two daughters rack up gambling debts, fall into blackmail plots, get men killed and see men killed. They giggle, bat their eyelashes, sway their hips, and jump into bed with all the racketeers and two-bit hoodlums that populate the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles circa 1939. Rain pours, daylight rarely comes, and Philip Marlow—private eye—attempts to undo the damage the Sternwood girls have wrought. “The Big Sleep” is death. That is, to sleep the big sleep is to die. It is a hard, harsh world that Raymond Chandler manifests, one in which the hero (Marlow) limps home, alone, to nurse a bottle of whiskey and never gets the girl.
Chandler is the master of the hard-boiled detective novel; only Dashiell Hammet approaches such a tightly constructed plot that unravels at such a breakneck pace. Chandler’s style has inspired such varied talents as Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami (all of them male but more on this in a moment). In the neo-noir film “Brick” (2005, Focus Features) writer/director Rian Johnson mines Chandler and Hammet to construct a modern day hard-boiled detective story set in a Southern California high school. Seven years after “The Big Sleep” was published in 1939, the film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and directed by Howard Hawks hit screens. The feeling of Chandler’s novels is even evoked in Hong Kong cinema—in the films of Wong Kar Wai and the recent, genre-bending “Kung Fu Hustle” by Stephen Chow. Point is, Chandler’s world is as popular, and relevant, as it was nearly 70 years ago. And it’s not just because brogues (wingtips) and fedoras are in style.

Chandler writes with a pop sensibility. There are few pretenses and the voice he gives to his narrator hero is nothing if not straightforward. Marlow says: this is what it is, it is nothing more. His sentences issue forth like bullets from a tommy-gun. Many are startlingly beautiful. Take this example, when Marlow is knocked-out and drifting into unconsciousness:

“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 wriggled 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.”

In Marlow we have a classic hero: One who would just as well his fists do the talking but manages breathtaking precision in his words. He says the right thing always. This is why we love this hard-hearted bastard. He speaks for and to all men who never got the girl, who’d like to say the right thing, who live outside the law yet (mostly) abide it. For men who’d like to win a fistfight and maybe lose a few. Through Marlow, Chandler speaks to every down on his luck bum, barroom philosopher, and general screw-up. In other words, Chandler speaks to men.

Women may, or may not, enjoy “The Big Sleep” too.