The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep, classic hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1939. It was the first of seven novels to feature the famed detective Philip Marlowe. The story was filmed twice, in 1946 and 1978.

The Big Sleep represents some major departures in the nature of the detective genre, changes that necessarily reflect the world in which it was written. Corrupt networks map out Chandler’s post-Prohibition era, be they explicitly criminal or nominally official, and it is the gray areas in between that allow the detective Philip Marlowe to exist. Marlowe is a man both of his age and out of time; his very name harks back to the English playwright and adventurer Christopher Marlowe. The gloomy, claustrophobic urban space is a major constituent of the novel; it is set in Southern California, with its foggy “marine layer” blanketing Los Angeles, but the location could really be any major city given that exteriors are almost entirely absent. Rooms, cars, and even phone booths represent a series of divided compartments in which the story develops, a series of points with no connections.

This is Chandler’s first Marlowe story, its basic form made up of two earlier stories that Chandler combined and that do not quite mesh. There is no introduction to the character; rather, we leap straight into the investigation as it gets underway. This is essential to the nature of the world and the character, a new kind of “hero” who seems only to become active when there is a crime to solve. We know nothing of his background and only ever see him return to his office or occasionally his apartment, where he broods over chess moves, and this only when a trail is exhausted. Marlowe combines a kind of shabby fallibility—a hard drinker who seems to be constantly beaten up by men and women alike—with an almost supernatural authority whereby he seems to serenely coast over the jumbled twists and turns of the case, observing and randomly following leads and providence, until a solution is finally reached. That this is in such contrast to the Sherlock Holmes school of detective work—where central to the plot is the immense intellectuality of the detective that allows him to simply consider at length the facts in order to succeed—is perhaps the most significant factor in the novel’s literary importance.

Chandler took on controversial themes for his time: one minor character is a pornographer, another a mentally unstable nymphomaniac, the rich are seen as degenerate and irredeemable, and there is always the suggestion that the police who lurk on the sidelines are corrupt. One important thread of the plot, as contemporary reviewers noted, is forgotten as the novel progresses, which seemed not to trouble Chandler. For all that, thanks in part to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s sometimes risqué interplay in the first film version, Chandler’s novel and that film adaptation were commercial successes in their day and remain hallmarks of California noir film and literature.