The Big Sleep
Los Angeles, 1939. Philip Marlowe is hired by the ailing General Sternwood to handle a blackmail case involving his younger daughter Carmen. By the end of the first chapter, a man is dead and Marlowe is in over his head.
What Makes This Book Essential
Chandler famously couldn't explain who killed the chauffeur — even to the film's director Howard Hawks. It doesn't matter. The Big Sleep is not really about its plot; it's about Los Angeles: the money, the corruption, the beautiful people and the ugly facts beneath the surface.
Marlowe moves through it all — among gangsters, pornographers, corrupt cops, and a family that is destroying itself — maintaining an impractical code of honor that costs him constantly. Chandler's prose is the novel's greatest achievement: sharp, melancholy, packed with metaphors that feel inevitable ('as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake').
Where Hammett wrote with cold precision, Chandler wrote with lyrical romanticism. Both are essential, but Chandler's voice is more distinctive — there are a hundred imitations and only one original. The Kindle edition is restored from Chandler's corrected manuscript.
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