The Big Sleep

When asked by director Howard Hawks (who made the film starring Bogart and Bacall) to explain the many plot twists of the story, Raymond Chandler answered simply, “I have no idea”. Plunging readers into a delightfully dirty and corrupt world of noir detective thriller, The Big Sleep stands in the literary canon as a book that is a major departure from detective fiction that had heretofore been written! 

Hardboiled private dick, Phillip Marlowe, is hired by the extravagantly rich General Sternwood to shake off a blackmailer. Whilst the job starts off easy enough, it takes a turn for the dark, mysterious, and murderous when Marlowe discovers that the General’s two wild and wayward daughters seem to be the centre around which a web of lies, pornography, gambling, corruption, and murder is spun. And with his loyalty to his client driving his curiosities further, it’s only a matter of time before Marlowe could find himself staring down the barrel of a gun. 

Chandler’s writing style; the language, the syntax, the descriptions, similes, and dialogue all work phenomenally to bring to life this horrible, wild, and seemingly moral-less LA world of noir. The women are shady and highly sexualised and the men are peacocks, rough riders, and desensitised to the gutter-life world they’re living in. Everything on the page; the characters, the focalisation, and first person narrator’s voice just work so well together as an adhesive that shapes this horrible world and lifts it off the page so that we ourselves become totally immersed in it. 

The character of Marlowe is a particularly interesting one in that this book is the first of the Marlowe stories, but it does not function as an introductory text. Right from the first sentence, we are thrown into the middle of this world and the beginning of this new case and we are provided with absolutely no back-story or character history for Marlowe. The only clues we are given as to his personality and what type of character he is are hidden within his dialogue and the voice with which he tells us his story. 

The writing is very frank and blunt, creating a wonderful vibe of the world in which we are submerged. Most of it is in short sentences with the longer chunks of narrative being connected together by many repetitions of the word ‘and’. Chandler’s absence of punctuation, whilst at first reads a little clunky, actually works itself into a great flow of narrative and really helps in establishing the voice of Marlowe the narrator. 

As I mentioned before, this book is a departure from the detective novels that had heretofore been consumed by readerships. Marlowe is no Sherlock Holmes, as he himself says, and we see that in the sort of detective/character that he is. He’s a desensitised character, throughout the entire novel you actually wonder if he was emotionally invested within the case at all or just bored by it and driven by the spur of payment at the end. There’s apathy in his voice that comes through in dialogue and the narration as well as a sort of half-heartedness and almost clumsiness in the way he trails leads. Marlowe is not the keen-minded, analytical detective of Conan Doyle or Poe; he’s a guy who just swans through the motions, takes the hits, and then works off of gut hunches. His methods are brash and oftentimes a little rough, which more than once lands him in a bit of a jam. 

Whilst it’s a modern departure of the detective novel, there’s still a lot about this book that is in keeping with the gothic genre. Carmen Sternwood is very much like Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret, we’ve got the bad seed and the dysfunctional family, grim and also lavish settings play a very big role, and of course we have quite a few of the gothic tropes appearing in our characters as heroes, antiheroes, heroines, and villains. 

Filled with action, mystery, murder, drama, and ‘romance’, The Big Sleep is a book that is deceptively easy to read, but does provide a little bit of a challenge in grasping the plot. Its many characters and incestuous, interwoven stories make it a very slippery story to get a grasp on, but therein lies the fun! I thoroughly enjoyed it.