The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It wasn’t a game for knights.” It's mid-October and Philip Marlowe, private detective, has donned his powder blue suit: “I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.” Why the dress up? He’s calling on “four million” in the person of rich old General Sternwood. The first thing he sees upon entering the Southern California gothic mansion is a stained-glass panel featuring a knight in armor not really trying to untie a maiden garbed only in her modestly concealing long hair. Before he can get to see the General in his orchid hothouse, he’s approached by twenty-year-old Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth.” She notes Marlowe’s height (“Tall, aren’t you?”) and looks (“Handsome too”) before biting and sucking her finger-shaped thumb and falling into his arms. Marlowe coolly tells the smooth old butler, “You ought to wean her. She looks old enough.” Marlowe is duly hired by rich, old, declining, and (to Marlowe anyway) appealing Sternwood to deal with some guy trying to blackmail his younger wayward daughter Carmen. He also lets slip that his older wayward daughter Vivian’s husband Terry Regan has gone missing, but refrains from asking Marlowe to find him. Neither daughter “has any more moral sense than a cat.” It’s quite an opening to Raymond Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective novel The Big Sleep (1939). There will be smut and gambling. There will be a two-bit chiseler and a big-time underworld type and a seedy unsavory blonde and a classy charismatic blonde. There will be some gay types. The book is homophobic as befits its era: in one uncomfortable scene, Marlowe feigns an effeminate voice suitable for a fay book collector (“If you can weigh 195 pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best”), and in another uncomfortable scene a young gay man ineffectually punches Marlowe, for “a pansy’s punch” lacks a certain force). There will be some rather clean (given the city and the era) police captains and DAs and such. The Sternwood femme fatale daughters are “cute,” trying to insult or seduce Marlowe by turns, succeeding only in making him say things like, “the rich can go hang themselves” or “I was sick of women.” There will be terse and cool dialogue, as when Marlowe is threatened by a gangster on the phone and says, “Listen to my teeth chattering.” There will be many similes, some of which fail awfully (e.g., “The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings”), most of which succeed finely (e.g., “His Charlie Chan moustache looked as real as a toupee”). Chandler’s good at a vivid, seedy poetry of observation, like “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty, meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.” Or like “The world was a wet emptiness.” He writes some nice lines, too, like “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” Chandler’s also good at making Marlowe withhold his suspicions and conclusions about cases until he suddenly reveals them through conversations with clients and suspects and enemies and the authorities and the like. This keeps us guessing long after Marlowe has figured something out. The biggest achievement of Chandler is to present in Marlowe a cynical loner who drinks, plays chess, and says things like “the knights don’t belong in the game” and sees things like stained glass knights failing to rescue nude damsels in distress and thinks things like “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” but who despite it all remains above the sordid sump of Los Angeles (and the USA) by sticking to his “professional pride,” whereby a Private Investigator keeps his clients’ personal information private and where he refuses to take advantage of amoral women who literally throw themselves at him and where he stubbornly tries (at financial and other costs to himself) to protect the gradual deathwards decline of a rich old man. He’s satisfied with his $25 per day plus expenses. On the other hand, Marlowe is not above smacking a troublesome girl on the side of her face: “Probably all her boyfriends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand why they might.” Audiobook reader Ray Porter does female voices too high, whether it’s a Jewess with a “smoothly husky voice,” a spoiled and decadent rich girl, or a character played in the movie by Lauren Bacall. Porter is no Bacall! He's fine with male characters and most importantly with Marlowe, but he is sure poor at female voices, and listening to him try is unpleasant. One problem I found with The Big Sleep is that I didn’t really care about the characters, apart from or wait even occasionally including Marlowe. As an early example of the hardboiled detective genre, The Big Sleep is “cute” in the way Carmen Sternwood is cute: unsavory, taut, bone-scraped face, predatory teeth, inane giggle, liable to show up unannounced and naked in your bed one moment and ask you to teach her how to shoot a gun the next. But it is great nonetheless. For “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead. You were sleeping the big sleep.” View all my reviews
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