The Big Sleep and Other Novels
A detective who not only rivalled but also surpassed Sherlock Holmes?
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 everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
On a rainy October morning in Los Angeles, private detective Philip Marlowe is all set to see millionaire General Sternwood. His daughter Carmen is being blackmailed by Arthur Geiger, a crooked bookseller who claims that she owes him gambling debts. It’s Marlowe’s job now to track him down.
Meanwhile, Rusty Regan, General’s second daughter’s husband, has also disappeared. Soon the detective is thrown into a complex web of double-crossing and deceit, and nothing is what it seems.
Raymond Chandler was 51 when this crime pot-boiler was published. He had taken up writing at the age of forty-five after being fired from an oil company because of alcoholism. “This was his first novel, the first of seven featuring the ever-inimitable and much-copied Philip Marlowe,” said reviewer Steve King.
Robert McCrum in The Guardian calls him “one of the great characters in the Anglo-American novel, a protagonist to rival and possibly surpass Sherlock Holmes.” Publisher Alfred Knopf thought this promising and took out a full, front-page ad in Publisher's Weekly to announce it. Marlowe’s alcoholism reflects Chandler’s own – a preoccupation that makes its way into much of the novel where we always find someone or the other having a drink.
The Big Sleep refers to the gangster euphemism for “death” and rose to international fame after it was adapted for Howard Hawks’s film starring Humphrey Bogart. It was also included in Time magazine's List of the 100 Best Novels.
Published in 1939.