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Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep (A Philip Marlowe Novel) Paperback – July 12, 1988

by Raymond Chandler (Author)

4.3 8,020 ratings

Book 1 of 8: Philip Marlowe

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The renowned novel from the crime fiction master, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe. • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, and Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

“Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” —The New York Times Book Review

Book 1 of 8

Philip Marlowe
Print length

231 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Publication date

July 12, 1988
Dimensions

5.17 x 0.62 x 7.96 inches
ISBN-10

0394758285
ISBN-13

978-0394758282
Lexile measure

660L
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." Published in 1939, when Raymond Chandler was 50, this is the first of the Philip Marlowe novels. Its bursts of sex, violence, and explosively direct prose changed detective fiction forever. "She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full."

From Library Journal

Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period. His full canon of novels and short stories is reprinted in trade paper featuring uniform covers in Black Lizard's signature style. A handsome set for a reasonable price.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Raymond Chandler is a master." —The New York Times

“[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.” —The New Yorker

“Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.” —Los Angeles Times

“Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.” —The Boston Book Review

“Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler’s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.” —Literary Review

“[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” —Ross Macdonald

“Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.” —Erle Stanley Gardner

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” —Paul Auster

“[Chandler]’s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that’s like ours, but isn’t. ” —Carolyn See

From the Inside Flap

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

"Chandler [writes] like a slumming angel and invest[s] the sun-blinded streets of Los Angelos with a romantic presence."
--Ross Macdonald

From the Back Cover

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.
"Chandler [writes] like a slumming angel and invest[s] the sun-blinded streets of Los Angelos with a romantic presence."
--Ross Macdonald

About the Author

RAYMOND THORNTON CHANDLER (1888 - 1959) was the master practitioner of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Although he was born in Chicago, Chandler spent most of his boyhood and youth in England where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a freelance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, Chandler served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps (R. A. F.). In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing fiction, publishing his first stories in Black Mask. Chandler’s detective stories often starred the brash but honorable Philip Marlowe (introduced in 1939 in his first novel, The Big Sleep) and were noted for their literate presentation and dead-on critical eye. Never a prolific writer, Chandler published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. Some of Chandler’s novels, like The Big Sleep, were made into classic movies which helped define the film noir style. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California on March 26, 1959.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn't look as if anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at the corners. Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war. The officer had a neat black imperial, black mustachios, hot hard coal-black eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with. I thought this might be General Sternwood's grandfather. It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties.

I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It wasn't the butler coming back. It was a girl.

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn't look too healthy.

"Tall, aren't you?" she said.

"I didn't mean to be."

Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

"Handsome too," she said. "And I bet you know it."

I grunted.

"What's your name?"

"Reilly," I said. "Doghouse Reilly."

"That's a funny name." She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

"Are you a prizefighter?" she asked, when I didn't.

"Not exactly. I'm a sleuth."

"A--a--" She tossed her head angrily, and the rich color of it glistened in the rather dim light of the big hall. "You're making fun of me."

"Uh-uh."

"What?"

"Get on with you," I said. "You heard me."

"You didn't say anything. You're just a big tease." She put a thumb up and bit it. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.

"You're awfully tall," she said. Then she giggled with secret merriment. Then she turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet. Her hands dropped limp at her sides. She tilted herself towards me on her toes. She fell straight back into my arms. I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor. I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up. When her bead was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me.

"You're cute," she giggled. "I'm cute too."

I didn't say anything. So the butler chose that convenient moment to come back through the French doors and see me holding her.

It didn't seem to bother him. He was a tall, thin, silver man, sixty or close to it or a little past it. He had blue eyes as remote as eyes could be. His skin was smooth and bright and he moved like a man with very sound muscles. He walked slowly across the floor towards us and the girl jerked away from me. She flashed across the room to the foot of the stairs and went up them like a deer. She was gone before I could draw a long breath and let it out.

The butler said tonelessly: "The General will see you now, Mr. Marlowe."

I pushed my lower jaw up off my chest and nodded at him. "Who was that?"

"Miss Carmen Sternwood, sir."

"You ought to wean her. She looks old enough."

He looked at me with grave politeness and repeated what he had said.

TWO

We went out at the French doors and along a smooth red-flagged path that skirted the far side of the lawn from the garage. The boyish-looking chauffeur had a big black and chromium sedan out now and was dusting that. The path took us along to the side of the greenhouse and the butler opened a door for me and stood aside. It opened into a sort of vestibule that was about as warm as a slow oven. He came in after me, shut the outer door, opened an inner door and we went through that. Then it was really hot. The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

The butler did his best to get me through without being smacked in the face by the sodden leaves, and after a while we came to a clearing in the middle of the jungle, under the domed roof. Here, in a space of hexagonal flags, an old red Turkish rug was laid down and on the rug was a wheel chair, and in the wheel chair an old and obviously dying man watched us come with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago, but which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes in the portrait that hung above the mantel in the hall. The rest of his face was a leaden mask, with the bloodless lips and the sharp nose and the sunken temples and the outward-turning earlobes of approaching dissolution. His long narrow body was wrapped--in that heat--in a traveling rug and a faded red bathrobe. His thin clawlike hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.

The butler stood in front of him and said: "This is Mr. Marlowe, General."

The old man didn't move or speak, or even nod. He just looked at me lifelessly. The butler pushed a damp wicker chair against the backs of my legs and I sat down. He took my hat with a deft scoop.

Then the old man dragged his voice up from the bottom of a well and said: "Brandy, Norris. How do you like your brandy, sir?"

"Any way at all," I said.

The butler went away among the abominable plants. The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.

"I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it. You may take your coat off, sir. It's too hot in here for a man with blood in his veins."

I stood up and peeled off my coat and got a handkerchief out and mopped my face and neck and the backs of my wrists. St. Louis in August had nothing on that place. I sat down again and I felt automatically for a cigarette and then stopped. The old man caught the gesture and smiled faintly.

"You may smoke, sir. I like the smell of tobacco."

I lit the cigarette and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a rathole. The faint smile pulled at the shadowed corners of his mouth.

"A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy," he said dryly. "You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There's very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?"

"Not particularly," I said.

The General half-closed his eyes. "They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute."

I stared at him with my mouth open. The soft wet heat was like a pall around us. The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head. Then the butler came pushing back through the jungle with a teawagon, mixed me a brandy and soda, swathed the copper ice bucket with a damp napkin, and went away softly among the orchids. A door opened and shut behind the jungle.

I sipped the drink. The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lip slowly across the other with a funeral absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands.

"Tell me about yourself, Mr. Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?"

"Sure, but there's very little to tell. I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. There isn't much in my trade. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once. His chief investigator, a man named Bernie Ohls, called me and told me you wanted to see me. I'm unmarried because I don't like policemen's wives."

"And a little bit of a cynic," the old man smiled. "You didn't like working for Wilde?"

"I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination, General."

"I always did myself, sir. I'm glad to hear it. What do you know about my family?"

"I'm told you are a widower and have two young daughters, both pretty and both wild. One of them has been married three times, the last time to an ex-bootlegger who went in the trade by the name of Rusty Regan. That's all I heard, General."

"Did any of it strike you as peculiar?"

"The Rusty Regan part, maybe. But I always got along with bootleggers myself."

He smiled his faint economical smile. "It seems I do too. I'm very fond of Rusty. A big curly-headed Irishman from Clonmel, with sad eyes and a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard. The first time I saw him I thought he might be what you are probably thinking he was, an adventurer who happened to get himself wrapped up in some velvet."

"You must have liked him," I said. "You learned to talk the language."

He put his thin bloodless hands under the edge of the rug. I put my cigarette stub out and finished my drink.

"He was the breath of life to me--while he lasted. He spent hours with me, sweating like a pig, drinking brandy by the quart and telling me stories of the Irish revolution. He had been an officer in the I.R.A. He wasn't even legally in the United States. It was a ridiculous marriage of course, and it probably didn't last a month, as a marriage. I'm telling you the family secrets, Mr. Marlowe."

"They're still secrets," I said. "What happened to him?"

The old man looked at me woodenly. "He went away, a month ago. Abruptly, without a word to anyone. Without saying good-bye to me. That hurt a little, but he had been raised in a rough school. I'll hear from him one of these days. Meantime I am being blackmailed again."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; Reprint edition (July 12, 1988)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 231 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394758285
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394758282
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 660L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 0.62 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #9,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #26 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- #100 in Historical Mystery
- #120 in Private Investigator Mysteries (Books)

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4.3 8,020 ratings

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Raymond Chandler

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Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe.

Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".

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Katherine Y

Classic crime novel is well-written but plot is convoluted

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2021

Verified Purchase

You might like this classic crime story if you like complex mysteries where all the characters have hidden agendas. Private investigator Phillip Marlowe is hired by wealthy, dying Gen. Sternwood to find out who is trying to get him to pay off the gambling debts of his youngest daughter, Carmen. Sternwood has received a letter from an Arthur Geiger asking for the money. He presents the letter to Marlowe when they meet. This isn’t the first time Carmen has gotten into trouble, requiring her father to bail her out. After Marlowe meets Carmen, he doesn’t think it will be the last time either. The girl is wild and acts on every impulse. Marlowe is pulled aside by Vivian, Sternwood’s older daughter, as he is leaving. Vivian wants to know if her father has hired him to find Rusty, Vivian’s husband, who disappeared a month previously. Marlowe is caught off guard but doesn’t show it. He now knows that far more is going on with this family than he thought.
Marlowe leaves the mansion pondering unanswered questions but knows his priority is to stop the man threatening the General over Carmen’s gambling debts. Marlowe identifies the man as the owner of a rare book shop. He confronts Geiger later that night and walks into a murder scene. Geiger is dead, and Carmen is nude and drugged, curled up in a chair. A camera is nearby with no film in it. It’s not long before Marlowe discovers that Geiger is using Carmen for pornographic pictures. The problem with Geiger is taken care of. But who killed Geiger and why?
Having never read anything by Raymond Chandler, I wanted to try one of his best crime novels. The story was well-written in the tough-guy vernacular of the time (the 1940s), and the characters were engaging. The scene where Marlowe meets Carmen for the first time is priceless. What I didn’t like so much was the convoluted storyline that introduced character after character with questionable motives. Red herrings were abundant. There were so many; I had to take notes to keep them straight. My advice would be to pick this one up only if you’re a huge fan of 40s era noir and love puzzles, the more complex, the better.

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MagnoliaSouth

Elegance of the well written word!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 4, 2017

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My review here is a drop in the bucket compared with the great number of them all. Also, book reviews at Amazon are often hits and misses and often do not contain what I want to know. I prefer not to discuss the synopsis. There are tons of synopses all over the web and so you can find those anywhere. Again, I simply don't feel they belong in a book review. I want to know other things.

If you've not read anything by Raymond Chandler, then the first thing that you'll notice is his descriptive writing. I love it! Take a simple phone booth call, "I dropped my nickel and dialed his number just for fun." There are too many great lines to count, but another of my favorites is, "A few tentative raindrops splashed down on the sidewalk and made spots as large as nickels." I can almost hear Humphrey Bogart reading the book to me.

The film is best known for its confusion, but the book irons those issues straight out. What is really interesting to me is how the then-modern world saw itself. They refer to old fashioned values as Victorian. Homosexuality was out there in a kind of don't ask don't tell way, much like the 80s, actually. However, they were not afraid to notice it. In fact, one man goes both ways in the book! Casual sex did exist, despite what the Hollywood Hays Code wanted everyone to believe. However, I see a lot of misinformed folks making statements about this. City life was different than small-town life. A small town in California is incredibly different than a small town in other parts of the country. Morals are only what a community makes them to be. They shouldn't be forced on anyone and this book actually kind of leads you to that kind of understanding. Morals are personal, not law. Too many confuse that these days.

The steady paced reader could finish this book in less than 7 hours, without any breaks. However, I didn't read it at a steady pace, unless you call crawling along a steady pace and in a way that's really what it was. I liked to savor his words. Raymond Chandler is a descriptive genius. Now there comes a problem too. When there is too much of it, it kind of sounds overdone. There were only a couple of times though that I saw this problem. I have to admit that his craft was interesting because he normally balanced it with interesting dialog with a lot of sarcasm. "... you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes."

The slanguage is fascinating. If you've never read anything like this before, you're sure to learn a whole bunch of new slang. For example, a police badge is called a "buzzer" and I think "buttons" was police, which is probably referring to their uniforms if I even had that right but you get the idea.

The story is actually two of them. There is a link between them but this easily could have been broken up into two novellas. If I had to make a complaint, it would be the very ending. I think more explanation of someone's intention is necessary but I think that's only an error of time and science. In that day, health and the psyche were still in the early stages and many things they believed then are not necessarily how it worked. I know that sounds cryptic but it's the best way I can describe it without spoiling a single thing.

All in all, it's simply a fantastic book! I think even those who don't like mysteries would enjoy it because of its prose alone. If you're easily offended though, stay away. This is not a book for those kinds of pansy people, which I think Chandler would call them today. This is about what people were like and the morals that they had. It is to be enjoyed, not scorned.

110 people found this helpful

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Reg T.

Classic never bettered except by his next book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 9, 2022

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Forget about the plot, it's too complicated and not really necessary to follow too closely to enjoy the writing. Brilliant dialogue with outstanding tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the hero (Philip Marlowe) and his thoughts and feelings that it is a joy to read. Most of the metaphors and similes are unique and so clever that you simply have to laugh out loud and wonder how the author can be so inventive.
A must read for anyone who enjoys good writing even if you are not particularly interested in this genre of fiction.

3 people found this helpful

Malcolm Edwards

like Marlowe himself

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 10, 2017

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Philip Marlowe, a PI, is contracted by an elderly millionaire who is dying. The old man is concerned to find out what happened to his son-in-law, who has disappeared. Marlowe's investigation leads him through various demimondes of Los Angeles, where nothing is what it at first seems to be. There are the inevitable deaths and killings, encounters with petty criminals, sinister businessmen, assassins, and with the millionaire's two damaged daughters. Chandler creates a powerful and saturating sense of the anarchy that lies below the mansions and glitter of 30s Los Angeles, and the emptiness of the lives of both the wealthy, and the assorted crooks, chancers and victims who feature in his story. In the end, perhaps, all these people are, like Marlowe himself, looking for something to give their lives shape and meaning. Chandler's characters (including those who don't last long) are for the most part real and alive, and he avoids simplistic divisions into 'good' and 'bad'. Which is not to say that there are no bad people in the book, but that the dividing line is not always clear. People act, mainly badly, for what they see as their own interests or their own survival. Marlowe's voice is often censorious, but he is intelligent and wise enough to see people for what they are, and the reader infers that he does not feel himself to be morally or humanly superior to others. This was my first dip into Chandler, and early 'hard-boiled' crime fiction and I was surprised by the frank treatment of sexuality, as well as by the instances of what we coyly call 'swearing', conveyed int he book by suggestion. Despite - or precisely because of - the seaminess and moral anarchy of the world Marlowe descends into, the book is ultimately about preserving and protecting a sense of humanity. The writing is sharp, sophisticated, often funny and memorable. Chandler/Marlowe have many imitations, but this is the real thing: gritty, painful, existential and seriously human.

10 people found this helpful

I. C. Pizzie

So disappointed!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 17, 2018

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It is not a fair review really as I did not get past about 13% of the story. But I just could not continue. Marlowe was perhaps too engrained in my head, and I just didn't believe in him. His comments about women and 'jewesses' were jarring, and there was one sentence at the point I stopped that made no sense to me at all - something about a flash in a car-pocket. So...my point is that this book has a shelf life and in my opinion has passed it. I am sure many others disagree as I know this is considered a classic. I can cope with classics that are outdated usually but this one was also dull, and I was not drawn in by any of the characters.

6 people found this helpful

Ralph Walker

Couldn't put it down!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 31, 2021

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This was the first Raymond Chandler Phillip Marlowe story I'd read. I couldn't put it down. The gritty characters are built up superbly, especially their flaws which make them so real. Marlowe tells the story as a first person narrator. His trademark wisecracks, one-liners and comments make the story vibrant and are timeless. The plot can get tortuous and needs careful following but the twist at the end is unexpected, but once it comes is perfect.

One person found this helpful

Riven

An oldie but a goodie

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 11, 2021

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I don't usually like books written in the first person, however, I decided to stick with this as it is so well known. I must admit I had to force myself to continue in a few places but I am glad I did. The end was a real surprise to me but then I knew I hadn't paid proper attention to some details.

I will read it again now I know who is who and a bit more about the different characters. I will also know where the author is leading on a second reading.

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The Big Sleep (A Philip Marlowe Novel) Paperback – July 12, 1988

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