Glenn Russell's Reviews > The Big Sleep

How many hardboiled detective novels have been written since 1939, the year Raymond Chandler introduced his perceptive, quick-witted LA tough guy, private eye Philip Marlowe? Round to the nearest 10,000.

That's hardboiled as in a world of crooked cops, organized crime, double-crossing grifters and every other door in a downtown office reeking of swindle, sex angles or shady business deals. In such a world, it's every citizen for themselves and an honest detective can trust absolutely nobody, frequently not even their client.

The Big Sleep takes its rightful place among American literary masterpieces. Give me a feature of what goes into making a great novel, things like character, plot, scene, suspense, dialogue, atmosphere, tone. and I'll point out examples aplenty in The Big Sleep.

To focus on one key feature, let's take a gander at a string of Big Sleep character sketches. And as with all seven Raymond Chandler novels (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Good-Bye, Playback), Detective Philip Marlowe is the first-person narrator:

Carmen Sternwood - "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."

Vivian Regan - "She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. they seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and chin. There was a sulky droop in her lips and the lower lip was full."

Gangster Eddie Mars - "He was a gray-man, all gray, except for his polished black shoes and two scarlet diamonds in his gray satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts. His shirt was gray and his double-breasted suit of soft, beautifully cut flannel...He took a gray hat off and his hair underneath it was gray and as fine as if it had been sifted through gauze. His tick gray eyebrows had that indefinable sporty look. He had a long chin, a nose with a hook to it, thoughtful gray eyes that had a slanted look because the fold of skin over his upper lid came down over the corner of the lid itself."

District Attorney Wilde - "He sat behind a desk, a middle-aged plump man with clear blue eyes that managed to have a friendly expression without really having any expression at all. He had a cup of black coffee in front of him and he held a dappled thin cigar between his neat careful fingers of his left hand."

Police Captain Cronjager - "A cold-eyed hatchet-faced man, as lean as a rake and as hard as the manager of a loan office. His neat well-kept face looked as if it has been shaved within the hour. He wore a well-pressed brown suit and there was a black pearl in his tie. He had the long nervous fingers of a man with a quick brain. He looked ready for a fight."

Grifter Harry Jones - "He was a very small man, no more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher's thumb. He had tight brilliant eyes that wanted to look hard, and looked as hard as oysters on the half shell. He wore a double-breasted dark gray suit that was too wide in the shoulders and had too much lapel. Over this, open, an Irish tweed coat with some badly worn spots. A lot of foulard tie bulged out and was rainspotted above his crossed lapels."

Hitman Mr. Canino - "He had a cool face and cool dark eyes. He wore a belted brown suede raincoat that was heavily spotted with rain. His brown hat was tilted rakishly. He leaned back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way."

The Big Sleep typifies the new wave of American crime fiction. Raymond Chandler wrote again and again how in a story published by Black Mask magazine (publisher of such authors as Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner as well as Chandler himself), scene outranks plot and the details of character and social context hold more importance than simply discovering at the end who committed the murder along with making sure the audience knows crime doesn't pay.

Nope. Much in The City of Angels has turned rotten in Raymond Chandler's lifetime. The transplanted Brit didn't hold back on letting readers know just how rotten.


British-American novelist Raymond Chaldler, 1888-1959