The Big Sleep
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What is 'The Big Sleep'?
The Big Sleep, a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, was published in 1939 and was the first of seven novels featuring private detective Philip Marlowe.
The novel is set in a gloomy, claustrophobic Southern California, where Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to investigate blackmail related to his daughter's gambling debts and the disappearance of Sean Regan. As Marlowe investigates, he becomes entangled with killers, blackmailers, gamblers, and pornographers, and falls in love with Sternwood's other daughter, Vivian.
The Big Sleep has been filmed twice, once in 1946 and again in 1978. The 1946 film, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is a film noir classic, despite its complex and often confusing plot.
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Who wrote 'The Big Sleep' and when was it published?
The Big Sleep, a hardboiled crime novel, was written by Raymond Chandler and published in 1939. This was the first of seven novels featuring private detective Philip Marlowe. The story takes place in a gloomy, claustrophobic urban space in Southern California. The Big Sleep represents major changes in the detective genre, reflecting the world in which it was written.
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What genre does 'The Big Sleep' belong to?
The Big Sleep, a novel by Raymond Chandler, falls into the hard-boiled fiction genre, which is a tough and unsentimental style of American crime writing that emerged in the 1920s. The Big Sleep includes the genre's characteristics, such as graphic sex and violence, vivid urban backgrounds, and fast-paced, slangy dialogue. The novel, published in 1939, was the first of seven featuring detective Philip Marlowe, set in a post-Prohibition era of corruption, with Marlowe as a "new kind of hero" active only when solving crimes. The story was adapted into a film noir film in 1946.
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Who is the main character in 'The Big Sleep' and what does he do?
The main character in The Big Sleep, a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, is Philip Marlowe. As a private detective in the seamy Los Angeles underworld, Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to investigate blackmail related to his daughter's gambling debts and the disappearance of Sean Regan. The investigation draws Marlowe into a complex web of criminality involving killers, blackmailers, gamblers, and pornographers. Despite being frequently beaten up, Marlowe possesses a supernatural authority, serenely navigating the twists and turns of the case by observing and randomly following leads until he reaches a solution.
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What is the main mystery or problem in the novel?
The main mystery in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep revolves around Philip Marlowe's investigation into the Sternwood family's dark secrets. Hired to handle a blackmail case involving the promiscuous Carmen Sternwood, Marlowe soon finds himself entangled in a web of murder, pornography, and hidden connections. As he navigates the corrupt underbelly of Los Angeles, Marlowe seeks to uncover the truth behind the blackmail and the disappearance of Sean Regan, a friend of the family. The complex plot, filled with twists and turns, ultimately focuses on the criminal investigation itself, rather than a clear-cut solution.
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How has 'The Big Sleep' influenced detective stories and popular culture?
Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, published in 1939, significantly influenced the detective genre and popular culture. The novel, featuring private detective Philip Marlowe, marked a departure from previous detective stories by portraying a post-Prohibition era filled with corruption and moral ambiguity.
Marlowe's character, a flawed yet authoritative figure navigating a gloomy urban landscape, contrasts sharply with the intellectual Sherlock Holmes-type detective. The Big Sleep also tackled controversial themes for its time, such as pornography and the degeneracy of the wealthy. Its commercial success, along with the 1946 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, cemented its place as a hallmark of California noir film and literature. The focus on criminal investigation rather than crime-solving, combined with its complex plot and sexual innuendo, further contributed to its cultural impact.
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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.
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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.