Raymond Chandler, Part 2: The Big Sleep

Read the episode (Narration script)

The Big Sleep opens with a man checking his own outfit. It is mid-October, around eleven in the morning, with rain coming in over the foothills of Los Angeles. Philip Marlowe is wearing a powder-blue suit, a dark blue shirt and tie, and socks with dark blue clocks on them. "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it," he says. He is calling on four million dollars.

That first paragraph tells you most of what is new about the book. The detective is talking to you directly, and he is funny about himself. He is dressed up because he is visiting money, and he knows how ridiculous that is. And the word "sober" is doing work. In this book, sober is a thing a man has to announce.

The Big Sleep came out in early 1939 from Alfred A. Knopf. Chandler was fifty. He built it from his pulp stories, mainly "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain," merging their characters and rewriting their scenes. He called this cannibalizing. He threw away a first draft and started again, and the voice that came out of the second try was Marlowe's.

The setup is simple. In the front hall of the Sternwood mansion there is a stained-glass panel of a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady tied to a tree, a lady who has no clothes on. Marlowe looks at it and decides that if he lived in the house he would sooner or later have to climb up there and help the knight, who does not seem to be really trying. It is a joke, and it is also the book's plan. Marlowe is going to be the knight, and he is going to find that the role does not fit the world.

His client is General Guy Sternwood, an old oil millionaire who is paralyzed and nearly dead. He receives Marlowe in a hothouse full of orchids, heated like a jungle, because his blood no longer keeps him warm. He cannot drink anymore, so he pours Marlowe a brandy and watches him drink it. "A nice state of affairs," the General says, "when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy."

The General has two daughters. Vivian, the older, is sharp and bored and married to a former bootlegger named Rusty Regan, who has disappeared. Carmen, the younger, is giggly and unstable and bites her thumb. Someone named Arthur Geiger has sent the General gambling notes signed by Carmen and asked for money. The General wants Marlowe to make Geiger go away. He does not mention Regan, though Marlowe quickly suspects that Regan is what the General really wants to know about.

From there the plot is a spreading stain. Geiger runs a rare book shop on Hollywood Boulevard that is a front for renting out pornography. Marlowe watches Geiger's house in the rain, hears shots, and goes in to find Geiger dead and Carmen drugged, posed naked in front of a camera, with the photographic plate gone. The Sternwoods' chauffeur, Owen Taylor, is found drowned in the family car off a pier. A small-time blackmailer named Joe Brody gets the photographs and is shot dead at his apartment door. A gambler named Eddie Mars, who owns Geiger's house and a casino, keeps turning up with a smile. And a little grifter named Harry Jones is poisoned by a gunman while Marlowe listens from the next room.

When Howard Hawks filmed the novel in 1946, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the screenwriters could not work out who killed the chauffeur. They asked Chandler. He said he had no idea. The story has become a joke at the book's expense, but it shows what Chandler cared about. The plot is a way to move Marlowe through rooms. The rooms are the point.

And the rooms are remarkable. The book is a tour of Los Angeles in the late 1930s, from oil money in the hills to rented bungalows and gambling clubs on the coast. Chandler writes it in short, plain sentences broken by sudden comparisons that make readers laugh out loud. He was proud of those extravagant similes and admitted he sometimes ran them into the ground. What keeps them from being a trick is that they come from a specific person. Marlowe uses jokes the way some people use a raised hand: to keep the world at a distance.

Underneath the jokes is a code. Marlowe works for twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses. He refuses money he has not earned. He turns down Carmen when she turns up in his apartment uninvited. He keeps his client's secrets from the police, at some cost to himself, because a client is a client. One night, alone with a chess problem, he moves a knight, then takes the move back. "Knights had no meaning in this game," he thinks. "It wasn't a game for knights." That is the book's central tension in two sentences. Marlowe acts like a knight in a world that has no use for one.

The ending finds Rusty Regan. Chandler resolves it at an abandoned oil field below the Sternwood house, where the family fortune came out of the ground, and the answer has been inside the family all along. The money that hired Marlowe also paid to hide what happened, and he is left choosing which of the Sternwoods' secrets to keep from a dying old man.

The final page gives the book its title, and its most famous passage. Marlowe thinks about death, and how it no longer matters where a dead man lies, in a sump or a marble tower. "You just slept the big sleep," he says, "not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell." He goes to a bar and has a couple of double Scotches, and they do him no good.

The book has real flaws, beyond the dead chauffeur. Its attitude toward gay men is contemptuous in a way that was ordinary for its time and is hard to read now. Several of its women are drawn as either predators or ornaments. Chandler would do some of this better later.

But The Big Sleep changed what a detective story could sound like. Chandler took the pulp formula of guns, gamblers and blondes and gave it a first-person voice with wit, melancholy and a moral center. He was not the first hard-boiled writer. Dashiell Hammett came first, and Chandler said so. What Chandler added was a narrator whose voice carries the feeling of the whole book. Next time, Book Report follows Marlowe to Central Avenue, where a huge man in a loud suit is looking for a girl named Velma. That is Farewell, My Lovely.