# The Big Sleep

Author: Raymond Chandler · 1939

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.

## Review

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.

## Why read this

The Big Sleep is to American crime fiction what Pride and Prejudice is to the romance novel: the originating text that everything after references. Read it after The Maltese Falcon to understand the difference between Hammett's economy and Chandler's poetry — two visions of what detective fiction can be. Philip Marlowe remains the definitive private detective: more morally serious than Spade, more world-weary than Holmes.

## Themes

- LA noir
- Hard-boiled detective
- Moral corruption
- Lyrical prose
- Family secrets

## Buy

Kindle (affiliate): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086QX4Q88?tag=cyberlibrar00-20

Source page: https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/lists/classic-mystery/big-sleep/

## Free public-domain picks on Cyber Library

- [The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes](https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/books/sherlock-holmes-adventures/) — Arthur Conan Doyle