Essay on The Big Sleep
Of Raymond Chandler's seven detective novels, his first, The Big Sleep (1939), is arguably his best. The story is
structurally and thematically unified, the characters fully developed, and the style distinctive and sharp. When the
novel was published, Chandler was fifty years old. He had already spent five years as a full-time writer of short
stories and novellas for the pulp fiction magazine market, and during this apprenticeship had mastered his
technique. Although it would be years before the novel received the critical recognition it deserved, the
publication of The Big Sleep was a landmark in the history of the American hard-boiled detective novel. In the
years that followed, Chandler's style and technique would be widely admired and imitated; his work would help
establish the conventions of the genre that persist (in both detective novels and movies) to this day.
Commentary
Despite the complicated and sometimes confusing plot, the heart of The Big Sleep is not the solution of the
murders--the whodunit--but rather the world the story depicts and the movement of Marlowe within that world.
Chandler's characters repeatedly comment on the corruption of Los Angeles and the modern world in general. The
novel depicts a city in which pornographers and gamblers operate under the protection of crooked policemen,
young women use their sexuality to ruin men, and wealth can buy immunity from prosecution and damaging
publicity. It is a fallen world where glamorous appearances mask sordid deeds and everyone is a grifter.
This world view is further advanced through Chandler's skillful description of setting. He is particularly vivid
with sordid locations, from Marlowe's shabby office--with "venerable magazines" and "net curtains that needed
laundering"--to the Fulwider building's vacant offices, "one gilt elevator", and "tarnished and well-missed spitoon
on a gnawed rubber mat." In sharp contrast to these low places is the elegant Sternwood mansion in the
Hollywood foothills, where the family "could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still
look out their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to." Consistent throughout the
novel's setting is the sense of a once-grand place now gone to seed, as in Eddie Mars's Cypress Club, a "rambling
frame mansion" that was once a rich man's home, became a hotel, then ended up an illegal casino. The club has
about it "a general air of nostalgic decay"; the ballroom is "still a beautiful room," but there is "roulette in it
instead of measured, old fashioned dancing."
It is within this corrupt, fallen world that Marlowe must operate. After six years gestation in pulp fiction, he is
Chandler's detective hero fully developed. As the story unfolds, Marlowe's code of conduct is articulated and
tested. Key to this code is professional pride: honestly performing the job for which he has been hired. After he
saves Vivian Regan from the robbery attempt outside the Cypress Club, she offers herself to him. Marlowe kisses
her but refuses to go further. "Kissing you is nice," he tells her, "but your father didn't hire me to sleep with you. .
. . The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady, I don't
play at it." He offers a similar explanation to Carmen Sternwood when he rejects her advances: "It's a question of
professional pride. . . . I'm working for your father. He's a sick man, very frail, very helpless. He sort of trusts me
not to pull any stunts." This professional ethic causes Marlowe to pursue his employer's interests even against that
employer's instructions--in this case, investigating the disappearance of Rusty Regan.
The basis of Marlowe's professional pride has less to do with a commercial or work ethic than it does with an
older, chivalric code. The connection between Marlowe and a knight is made on the first page of the novel, when
he stands in the Sternwood hallway and looks up at a stained glass picture of a knight's attempting to rescue an
imprisoned lady. The knight is not getting anywhere, and Marlowe speculates than if he lived in the Sternwood
house, "I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him." Throughout the novel Marlowe plays the
role of knight errant to General Sternwood, questing for justice in loyal service to his lord despite sexual and
financial temptation and threats of physical harm.
Ultimately, this chivalric code fails. In a corrupt, fallen world, old standards of honor and loyalty no longer
function. Marlowe himself recognizes this failure when he ejects Carmen from his apartment. He looks down at
the game-board where he has been working on a chess problem and realizes that his last move--with a knight--is
wrong: "Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights." Despite this recognition, he
continues trying to act according to his code. He has already compromised his standards by participating in the
cover up of three murders, but he goes on working for the General and begins looking for Rusty Regan.
In a way, The Big Sleep functions as a bildungsroman: Marlowe learns about the moral illness of the modern
world and his own inability to function within it. He begins the story with his knightly code; it is tested and it
fails. His final statements are bitter and desperate--the struggles of a man who has lost his sense of moral order
and is reaching out for a source of support.
Composition
Chandler began working on The Big Sleep in the spring of 1938. The writing progressed quickly, taking only
three months--a pace he would never again be able to match. The plot is drawn from two of his short stories,
"Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain" and incorporates small pieces of "Finger Man." Although he called the
process "cannibalization," Chandler did not cut and paste passages but rather rewrote entire scenes, in the process
tightening his prose and enriching his descriptions.
The improvement can be seen comparing the opening paragraphs of the novel's Chapter 3 with the original
version in "The Curtain", both of which describe Vivian Regan/O'Mara's bedroom:
from "The Curtain"
The room had a white carpet from wall to wall. Ivory drapes of immense height lay tumbled casually on the white
carpet inside many windows. The windows stared toward the dark foothills, and the air beyond the glass was dark
too. It hadn't started to rain yet, but there was a feeling of pressure in the atmosphere.
from The Big Sleep
The room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall
to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all
over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white
carpet a yard from the window. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.
The windows stared toward the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air
already.
The second version pays closer attention to specific details, and it illustrates how Chandler's style had developed.
The paragraph from "The Curtain" is objective, giving the facts of how the room looked and the air felt--a style
that shows Chandler's debt to Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway. In The Big Sleep version of the
paragraph, though, this objective viewpoint has softened somewhat, allowing the narrator's judgments to color the
description. Note, for example, the repetition in "too big . . . too high . . . too tall" and loaded words such as
"doodads." Marlowe views Vivian Regan's room as overly lavish and decorated to the point of seeming decadent
and stripped of life. This viewpoint is expressed not didactically but through carefully-controlled description. It
shows Chandler's style at its maturity.
Publication & Reception
The Big Sleep was published in the United States on February 6, 1939 by Alfred A. Knopf, with a first printing of
5000 copies. Knopf promoted the book with a series of advertisements and review copies that linked Chandler
with Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, two successful hard-boiled novelists also published by Knopf. The
same connection was made on the dust jacket flaps:
Not since Dashiell Hammett appeared has there been a murder mystery story with the power, pace, and terrifying
atmosphere of this one. And like Hammett's this is more than a "murder mystery": it is a novel of crime and
character, written with uncommon skill in a tight, tense style which is irresistible.
Perhaps the most extreme case of generic reviewing was that of the Saturday Review of Literature, which printed
a grid-format called "The Criminal Record." Each book was given three boxes in the grid: "Crime, Place, Sleuth,"
a one sentence plot summary; "Summing Up," a vague impression of the overall story; and "Verdict," a one-word
judgment. The "Verdict" for The Big Sleep was simply, "Hammettic."
Although Chandler did not achieve immediate recognition as a literary author, The Big Sleep was a success. The
first American printing of 5,000 copies sold out quickly, and a second printing was required before the official
publication date. Sales were good in England as well, with Hamish Hamilton releasing a second printing of the
book within a month of its first publication. These figures hardly made him a best-seller, but in the mystery
market of the 1930s and 1940s only a hand full of books sold more than 5,000 copies. Alfred A. Knopf was very
pleased with the performance of the The Big Sleep and offered Chandler a contract for his next novel at a 20 per
cent royalty for the first 5000 copies and 25 per cent afterwards. (The standard contract of the day began with a
ten percent royalty, with an escalator to fifteen percent).