Product Description

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood’s two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA’s seedy backstreets, Marlowe’s got his work cut out – and that’s before he stumbles over the first corpse …

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5700 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Best-known as the creator of the original private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, and he is widely regarded as one of the very greatest writers of detective fiction.

Customer Reviews

One of the all-time classic American crime novels
First of all, I should say that I can't believe no one else has written a review of this wonderful crime novel. I'm happy to rectify this oversight now.

For me, Raymond Chandler's first novel, published in 1939, stands as not only one of the great crime novels of the 20th century, but one of the best genuinely American prose works in all of literature. Only an ignorant snob could argue that this isn't a piece of literature and a work of art as well as a highly entertaining story of detection. Philip Marlowe is Chandler's laconic private eye hero, an urban knight and man of honour operating in a grim world, a tough guy with a hard shell covering a man of culture and learning. Chandler writes both lines of dialogue and first person narrative to die for, combining a poet's use of metaphor with the hard-edged wit of the mean streets of Los Angeles, whose dark underbelly Chandler explores in his novels.

The plot of this mystery is legendary for its labyrinthine structure as Marlowe takes on a case for the wealthy General Sternwood, getting mixed up in murder, sex and a pornography racket.

I couldn't praise this masterpiece enough. Suffice to say that I consider it to be flawless.

Old School Crime
I read The Big Sleep because I wanted to finally read one of the classics in the crime genre. I couldn't have picked a better book. The plot is interesting, and the style of writing is very descriptive and easy to read. I thought the style (such as referring to some of the women as 'dames' etc.) would be a bit jarring and dated, but instead it turned out to fit perfectly with the character Phillip Marlowe.

That isn't to say the book isn't dated, but that is part of what makes it so enjoyable. The emphasis in many crime novels these days is on forensic evidence and psychological profiling, but the absence of these elements makes for a refreshing change. At first I was yelling "No, you're ruining the trace evidence" (yelling in my head, obviously, as it would have caused a few odd looks if I'd actually yelled loud in the Tube), but after a while you get used to it and just go with the story.

I can recommend this book to anybody who enjoys modern crime novels, but I'm sure others will enjoy it just as much. I only wish it had lasted a bit longer, I finished it within a couple of days even though I had to work in between bits of reading.

Original
It's almost 75 years since the original publication of 'The Big Sleep' and it shows its age all of once, if that.

Reading the book, you can almost feel the ground still shaking from the time Chandler broke it. Marlowe is fresh a character as he always was, breezing through the hell-hole of LA, up to his knees it and still not caring that much; still the man brissles with originality and wit, despite (or maybe because of) every hack crime writer trying to immitate him.

Pick this book up, you won't put it - it took me five days, but you know how a working life can get in the way - as Marlowe begins looking into a blackmail racket and by the end finds himself sunk under five or more homicides. Chandler's control of the pace is wonderful, his plot sublime like he stumbled across it a line at a time - not until the last few pages does he let it all slide and, though the book had pulled and dragged across a couple of places, the ending is gripping. Without having a clue where Chandler's taking you, you'll want to be there all the same.

An excellent peice of work.