The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
Summary
Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by the wealthy, dying General Sternwood to deal with a blackmail scheme tied to his wild younger daughter Carmen, a job that quickly widens into pornography, gambling and multiple murders once Marlowe starts pulling threads. He finds the bookseller running the blackmail scheme already shot dead, and the Sternwoods' chauffeur turns up drowned in a car pushed off a pier, a death the novel never fully explains. Working through gambler Eddie Mars and his network, Marlowe eventually reconstructs the real crime buried underneath the blackmail: Carmen had made advances toward Rusty Regan, the older daughter Vivian's husband, and shot him dead when he refused her, after which Vivian and Eddie Mars conspired to hide the body and invent a story that Regan had simply run off with Mars's wife. The novel ends with Marlowe letting Vivian handle Carmen's fate privately, having her institutionalized rather than turning her in, a resolution that leaves the case solved on paper without ever feeling settled.
Chandler cares less about the mechanics of the plot than about mood and voice, and it shows; even Chandler himself, asked years later who killed the chauffeur, admitted he had no idea. The novel reads fast on the strength of Marlowe's wisecracking, world weary narration and Chandler's sun bleached descriptions of Los Angeles, and its loose plotting is part of a deliberate bargain, atmosphere and character over airtight mechanics, that shaped an entire genre after it.
Chandler built the novel by cannibalizing two of his own earlier pulp stories, Killer in the Rain and The Curtain, merging their separate troubled fathers into General Sternwood and combining two different daughter characters into Carmen, a patchwork method that explains some of the book's loose ends. Howard Hawks's 1946 film version, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, became one of film noir's defining works even as its own writers could not determine who killed the chauffeur either.
Historical Context & Significance
Alfred A. Knopf published The Big Sleep in 1939, introducing Philip Marlowe in his first full novel after years of Chandler's pulp magazine stories. The New York Times called it an excellent study in depravity with Marlowe standing out as almost the only fundamentally decent person in it. No mystery prize existed yet to recognize hardboiled detective fiction as its own category; the Edgar Award would not arrive until 1946.
The novel's influence has outlasted any prize it might have won. The BBC named it among the hundred most influential novels ever written, the Guardian ranked it 62nd on its list of the hundred best novels, and Le Monde placed it among its hundred books of the century. Chandler's clipped, atmospheric style, developed here into its most fully realized form, went on to shape the entire tradition of American hardboiled crime writing that followed him.