To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Raymond Chandler today, Hamish Hamilton have reissued five of his key novels with their original early-edition hardback covers. Jennie checked out The Big Sleep for Bookgeeks.

Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep traffics in shades of grey. Women are wicked but reformable; men are lethal but protective; crime, and murder, are occasionally an honourable option. But though the moral colouring of the characters may be questionable, the novel itself is filled with garish and lush descriptions of the tumultuous city of Los Angeles and the California countryside.

The Big Sleep is Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe novel, and the reader meets him at

about eleven o’ clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain 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.

This wash of specific description, interspersed with some of the sparest and most fantastic dialogue ever written, makes the book. Because the story is told as a monologue from Marlowe’s point of view, the reader is enthralled, fooled, and angered along with him. This makes what could be a very unsympathetic character extremely compelling. With Marlowe’s eyes and conclusions the only ones available, he is the knight is dented armour that he claims to be, no matter what his actions may look like to the outside observer.

The story begins with Marlowe at a millionaire’s mansion. Near death, General Sternwood has two wild, lovely daughters and a blackmail problem. The daughters may be trouble, but the General wants Marlowe to focus on the blackmail. After a conversation that includes a mention of gambling debts, a run-away husband, and the proclivities of the rich, Marlowe is sent on the hunt for A.G. Geiger. Soon after this interview, he meets Vivian and Carmen, the General’s two daughters. They try to pump him for information and seduce him, respectively, and Marlowe’s disdain for both their efforts and their opinions puts him solidly in the tough as nails private detective category.

The two Sternwood girls are not the only femme fatales wandering in and out of Marlowe’s investigation. Marlowe tracks Geiger to a shady bookshop that seems an unlikely source of rare books and excessive income. Fittingly, this store is guarded by a woman who gets the full Chandler descriptive treatment:

She was an ash blonde with greenish eyes, beaded lashes… She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair. Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

Marlowe clears up the blackmail soon enough, but he is quickly drawn further into the Sternwood family troubles when Carmen ends up getting mixed up in murder, and Vivian starts hanging around with the owner of an illegal casino. The combination of women, motive, and money serve to keep Marlowe enthralled and on the case. As the bodies begin piling up, and life begins to look bleak for the Sternwood women, Marlowe has to unravel a case that has gone far beyond blackmail.

Chandler’s detective is saturated with the foibles and prejudices of his time. Much of the book is spent with a bottle of scotch, a willowly blonde, or snub-nosed revolver close at hand. Ironically, although Marlowe spends most of the book having guns pointed at him, he refuses to shoot at anyone unless absolutely necessary. He lives, and is willing to die, by a code that requires that he only succumb to temptation up to a certain point and protect his client at all costs.

It is nearly impossible to read this book without images of Bogart and Bacall, in all of their black and white noir glory, floating through and speaking in sultry smoke roughened voices.  What should never be forgotten, though, is that although the popular image of this book is filmed in black and white, the novel itself is bursting with colour.  The greens, reds, and golds of California, the silks and patterns of the women’s dresses, and the stark enviroment that Marlowe surrounds himself with are richer than the black and white image that has so firmly been attached to the character. The popular image may be in black and white, but the book itself has colour, guts, and a life that make the vivid red cover a fitting opening and Marlowe’s musing on thoughts “as gray as ashes”  a melancholy close.

Bookmark to