RAYMOND CHANDLER BOOKS: THE BIG SLEEP

Here are some questions and discussion starters here. Also – we want to hear from YOU! Share your thoughts, and we may just include them in our upcoming episodes!

Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler Books)

Marlowe is 33 and went to college once. He’s a bit of a cynic, and his manners are bad. He was fired for insubordination. “I test very high on insubordination.”

American hero: “Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious” (NYT Book Review).

Prometheus: “Marlowe is Prometheus [of American myth]: the noble outsider, sacrificing and enduring for a code he alone upholds.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

Honest: Vivian asks if Marlowe is honest. “Painfully,” he says. He tells Carmen he has “professional pride.” Her father trusts him not to “pull any stunts.”

Tough Guy: He’s tough, clever, and a good judge of character. His speech is brash and witty.

Self-Destructive streak? “I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar check coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming … That was how smart I was” (ch. 21).

Catalyst: There are the aficionados of deduction and the aficionados of sex who can’t get it into their hot little heads that the fictional detective is a catalyst, not a Casanova. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

Dashiell Hammett’s Influence on the Raymond Chandler Books

The famous Detection Club: “Its roster includes practically every important writer of detective fiction since Conan Doyle. But Graves and Hodge decided that only one first-class writer had written detective stories at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. … Graves and Hodge were not fuddy-duddy connoisseurs of the second-rate; they … were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Writing about real things: “I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had firsthand information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it was made up out of real things.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Writing about real people: Hammett wrote for people who weren’t “afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. [He] put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Dashiell Hammett “was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Golden Age of Detective Fiction

The Golden Age of detective fiction “starts after the First World War and lasts up to about 1930. … Two thirds or three quarters of all the detective stories published still adhere to the formula the giants of this era created, perfected, polished, and sold to the world as problems in logic and deduction.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

“In Trent’s Last Case (often called ‘the perfect detective story’) you have to accept the premise that a giant of international finance, whose lightest frown makes Wall Street quiver like a chihuahua, will plot his own death so as to hang his secretary, and that the secretary when pinched will maintain an aristocratic silence—the old Etonian in him, maybe. I have known relatively few international financiers, but I rather think the author of this novel has (if possible) known fewer.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

About Hercule Poirot: is an “By duly messing around with his ‘little gray cells’ M. Poirot decides that since nobody on a certain through sleeper could have done the murder alone, everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a series of simple operations like assembling an egg beater. This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

“The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

The detective story “does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement’ … because it is a “literature of escape” and not a ‘literature of expression.’” (Dorothy Sayers, Omnibus of Crime)

Chandler: “Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Pulp Magazines and Black Mask

English detective stories “are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. … The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody thought of only two minutes before he pulled it off. But if the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Pulp magazines (printed on wood-pulp paper) were a cheap source of popular entertainment that sometimes mixed in subversive social commentary. The format was invented in 1882 as a vehicle for children’s adventure stories. By the 1920s, pulps specialized in detective stories, love stories, westerns, …. During the Depression, they provided a sense of escape. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

“In 1931 my wife and I used to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast in a very leisurely way, and at night, just to have something to read, I would pick a pulp magazine off the rack. It suddenly struck me that I might be able to write this stuff and get paid while I was learning.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

“It took me a year to write my first story. I had to … learn to write all over again.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

The emotional basis of the standard detective story had always been that justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passagework. The denouement justified everything. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story, however, was that the scene outranked the plot. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

Raymond Chandler Books and the Hardboiled School of Detective Fiction

How is The Big Sleep an exemplar of the hard-boiled American school of detective/crime fiction?

As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that justice will be done—unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made that happen. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

Hardboiled as a subgenre is infamously “American.” It’s the mystery going native. Hardboiled captured the violence of the ‘20s and desperation of the ‘30s, and displayed them in a brutal, clipped, but—in the case of Hammett and Chandler—distinctly poetic style. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

The phrase is an Americanism. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: to be “hard-boiled” is to be “toughened by experience; a person with no illusions or sentimentalities.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

Walter Mosley: hardboiled style is “elegant and concise language used to describe an ugly and possibly irredeemable world.” The world according to hardboiled is not only tough but vibrant: a gritty, profoundly urban setting teeming with underworld life—booze, sex, drugs, violence—and the decadence of the wealthy and powerful. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

For Chandler and Hammett, Hemingway was the greatest living American novelist. The Sun Also Rises (1926) became the hardboiled touchstone, with its interior monologue, stark prose, and colloquial turns of phrase. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. … down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

The Wealthy and the Working Class

Marlowe makes $25/day plus expenses, a fee the general calls “reasonable enough for removing morbid growths from people’s backs.”

Marlowe to Carmen: “The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it” (ch. 23).

General: “I think they go their separate and slightly divergent roads to perdition. Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull the wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat. Neither have I. No Sternwood ever has.”

“A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick.”

Marlowe calls Vivian on her crap. She says, “People don’t talk like that to me.”

This story is set during the Great Depression (‘30s), when most Americans were struggling. Yet the Sternwood family, despite their money, are terribly unhappy.

“They were hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work. It was work they could get.” (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

Eddie Mars is ruthless, but he won’t get blood on his hands; others to do his dirty work.

Philip Marlowe vs. Sam Spade (Raymond Chandler Books vs. Dashiell Hammett Books)

In what ways are Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade similar? In what ways are they different?

“I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights” (ch. 24).

At the start of the novel, Marlowe wants to help the knight save the damsel in distress. However, the knight in the stained glass still hasn’t saved the damsel in distress at the end.

Chandler grew up in Nebraska, England, and Ireland and attended a good English public school, where he studied languages and the classics. Retellings of the stories of the Knights of the Round Table were common in Edwardian England. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

WWI, the literary Modernism it spawned, and Depression-era America seem antithetical to the Romantic tradition. However, the themes of chivalry and heroism lay buried but alive in Chandler’s imagination. They reappear, maimed and shell-shocked, in his first novel. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

Is Marlowe drawn to knights? Harry Jones: “[Agnes is] my girl now. I don’t put my girl in the middle for anybody.” Harry gives Canino a fake address. “‘Well, you fooled him, Harry,’ I said out loud, in a voice that sounded queer to me. ‘You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me” (ch. 26).

Harry Jones is a “small man in a big man’s world. There was some thing I liked about him” (25).

Was Regan a knight? Sternwood wants Regan found because he’d been a good friend, sweating with him in the greenhouse many a day, providing conversation to a sick and dying man.

The Law and Philip Marlowe

What is Marlowe’s relationship with the police, the D.A., and the law? Why is Marlowe a private investigator instead of a police officer?

Vivian says Owen “didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.” Marlowe says, “I wouldn’t go that far.” (Wouldn’t he though?)

Los Angeles as Setting and Character in the Raymond Chandler Books

Let’s talk about L.A. of the 1930s – the Sternwood mansion, other areas of LA, Marlowe’s tiny apartment, even the weather. How do these various settings establish the mood of the novel?

L.A. served as setting and in some ways as the other major character in the Marlowe novels. It was a city of excess, escapism (Hollywood!), tawdriness, exhibitionism, and corruption. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

In the nineteen-teens it was the fastest-growing city on earth, hyped and hustled like no other city ever had been. From 1910-1930, the population ballooned from 310,000 to 1,250,000. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

The streets were paved, automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages and the electric railway, and the L.A. Aqueduct was built to heist water from the Owens Valley 250 miles away. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

Moral ambiguity or moral decay? Corruption was rife, and politicians and law enforcement often worked with the “System,” the L.A. syndicate of organized crime. L.A. was also a proto-Las Vegas with prostitution and gambling. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

Is this dark, criminal world an outlier in America? Is L.A. home to self-serving and mistrustful people who turn to violence and dishonesty to achieve personal gain?

“The world was a wet emptiness”(ch. 23). What exactly is being critiqued in the Raymond Chandler books?

Captain Gregory: “Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. we just don’t run our country that way” (ch. 30).

The “Legend” of Rusty Regan

Rusty Regan is dead before the story begins. Regan, the missing, bootlegging husband, always carried 15K on his person. What does that say about him?

Harry Jones: “This Regan was a cockeyed sort of buzzard. He had long-range eyes. He was looking over into the next valley all the time. He wasn’t scarcely around where he was. I don’t think he gave a damn about dough. And coming from me, brother, that’s a compliment” (ch. 25).

He exists only in “the big sleep,” far from the everyday reality of seedy LA. Why do you think Chandler never lets us see Rusty Regan, alive or dead?

Carmen …

“I could see … that thinking was always going to be a bother to her” (2). She sucks her thumb, giggles, and has a habit of repeating “You’re cute” to the men who cross her path. She’s childlike and mentally unstable.

Marlowe finds Carmen at Geiger’s place: “She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else” (ch. 7).

To him, she’s a “dope.” He slaps her around without batting an eye. She “didn’t mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boyfriends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might” (ch. 12).

Is Carmen a total ditz, or do her mental health issues contribute to her behavior?

Women More Generally in the Raymond Chandler Books

What’s going on in terms of gender roles and relationships between men and women? How does Marlowe see women? The Raymond Chandler books seem to include their share of misogyny—do you agree?

Agnes takes up with Brody and Harry Jones, always scheming to make an easy buck. She’s unhappy with her life but does nothing to better herself, instead blaming the men around her.

Agnes thinks she got a raw deal. “Like hell you did,” Marlowe tells her. “Three men dead, Geiger, Brody and Harry Jones, and the woman went riding off in the rain with my two hundred in her bag and not a mark on her” (27).

“It was raining again the next morning, a slanting gray rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads. I got up feeling sluggish and tired and stood looking out of the windows, with a dark, harsh taste of Sternwoods still in my mouth. I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets. I went out to the kitchenette and drank two cups of black coffee. You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick” (ch. 25).

“It’s so hard for women – even nice women – to realize that their bodies are not irresistible” (ch. 24). Do women have power in this story? If so, what kind?

True Love

Does true love mean caring about others to one’s own detriment?

Owen Taylor, the young chauffeur, is in love with Carmen and tries to run away with her, but he’s jailed when Vivian presses charges. To protect Carmen, he murders Geiger.

Lundgren kills for love, thinking Brody killed Geiger. He honors Geiger’s body in a ritualistic way.

Mona protects Eddie. She doesn’t want to believe he’s a ruthless murderer (“he’s not that sort of man”). She clips her hair short “to show Eddie I was willing to do what he wanted me to do – hide out. That he didn’t need to have me guarded. I wouldn’t let him down. I love him.”

What It Is to Be Starkly, Painfully Alone

Carmen calls Marlowe a name, and she fouls up his home, his safe space, his memories, “anything that took the place of a family.”

At his tiny apartment, he goes to a chessboard on a card table. “There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems” (ch. 24).

Mona “brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes. … Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house” (ch. 28).

The Big Speech in The Big Sleep

“I haven’t a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals. I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up. I do all this for twenty-five bucks a day – and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many nice girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers. And that makes me a son of a bitch” (ch. 31).

The Big Sleep and the Novel’s Ending

“With fifteen grand I could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes. I might even take a vacation without worrying about losing a case.” Instead, he makes Vivian promise to take Carmen away. Why does Vivian keep the truth from her father? Why does Marlowe?

Is Marlowe part of the nastiness now? “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.”

“On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again” (31).

The Art of Writing a Detective Story (Raymond Chandler Books)

“[T]he detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Second-rate items outlast most of the high-velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about as dull.

“This fact is annoying to people of what is called discernment.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

“The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

There’s authentic power in a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

The popular mystery story shed its refined good manners and went native. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. … Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

The average critic never recognizes an acievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

“In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary … When people ask … why I don’t try my hand at a serious novel, I don’t argue with them; I don’t even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be useless. They wouldn’t know.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

There are those who think violence and sadism interchangeable terms, and those who regard detective fiction as subliterary on no better grounds than that it does not habitually get itself jammed up with subordinate clauses, tricky punctuation and hypothetical subjunctives. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

To devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to. There are no “classics” of crime and detection. Not one. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

A classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

The Film (Howard Hawks, 1946)

Rizzuto: Chandler worked with Billy Wilder on the screenplay to James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. It was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Screenplay. By 1946, Chandler was an established name in Hollywood and in mystery novel circles.

The novel dramatizes profound subjects and themes, including human mortality; ethical inquiry; the sordid history of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century; the politics of class, gender, and sexuality; the explosion of Americanisms, colloquialisms, slang, and genre jargon; and a knowing playfulness with the mystery formula—all set against a backdrop of a post-Prohibition, Depression-era America teetering on the edge of World War II. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

In what ways does the film version exemplify film noir. Consider major characteristics of film noir, and specific scenes, cinematography in the Hollywood movie.

Iconic performance from one of Hollywood’s greatest leading men, Humphrey Bogart.

What qualities in the book lend themselves to filmmaking?

Compare/contrast the novel with the famous 1946 film directed featuring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Why is the ending different?

Raymond Chandler books had loose ends. William Faulkner worked on the screenplay of The Big Sleep. He supposedly called Chandler to ask who killed the chauffeur. Chandler said he had no idea.

Chandler once said about Bogart: “Bogart can be tough without a gun.”

Vivian Sternwood and the casting of Lauren Bacall, romance is in the air, feisty female taxi driver and a secret siren bookshop girl, Carmen and all her clothes, Rusty Regan and the simplified plot, noir aesthetic, and the ending. Oh, and is Marlowe still painfully honest?