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The Big Sleep
by: Raymond Chandler

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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780394758282
ISBN: 0394758285
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 234
Publication Date: July 12, 1988
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: July 12, 1988
Studio: Vintage
Sales Rank: 6389

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

"Chandler [writes] like a slumming angel and invest[s] the sun-blinded streets of Los Angelos with a romantic presence."
--Ross Macdonald

Amazon.com Review:
"His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." Published in 1939, when Raymond Chandler was 50, this is the first of the Philip Marlowe novels. Its bursts of sex, violence, and explosively direct prose changed detective fiction forever. "She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full."

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Classic hard-boiled fiction
It's hard to believe this was Chandler's first novel. It already displays all the best of the hard-boiled genre, and Chandler's work in particular. The central character has enduring appeal: a reasonably honest private investigator among the rich and famous with cesspit morals. The little guy standing up against corrupt, moneyed powers, and beating them at their own game - I can't imagine that core plot ever going out of fashion.

The timeless parts of the book keep the story popular today, but other parts seem frozen in time. The whole post-Prohibition sense dates the story, as do other the slang and other details. The slang, in particular, gets so thick that a modern reader might stumble more than once. I'm not complaining, though. Back then, it was very contemporary, even fashionable. ... Read More

Rating:

- Wealth- Porn-Murder- Missing Persons- Mental Illness
This was my first Raymond Chandler read and I liked it. The plot was based in southern california during the late 1930's. The same time the book was written. A dying, wealthy old general is being blackmailed. He engages the services of private investigator Philip Marlowe to get to the bottom of things. It's a quick moving read of 231 pages. The story stands up well to the test of time having been originally published about seventy years ago. I think most would agree that this is an excellent introduction to the author.

Rating:

- Tough going
Why is it that books that are labeled as "classics" often seem to disappoint? That's a question that has a longer answer than I'd care to write about here, but that thought did occur to me several times while reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I'm sure high expectations have something to do with it, and the story did seem to be a winner. Philip Marlowe, a private dick from L.A. is on a black mailing case involving a millionaire and his two insane daughters.

Here we find excellent prose, but a plot that is so hard to follow, I gave up about three quarters of the way through. I would have been able to keep up if I kept a notebook of all the characters (of which there are too many), and a history of what had happened thus far (too much too soon). Someone reading this for a college ... Read More

Rating:

- A Must Read
What more can or needs to be said about Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep? Not much. The Big Sleep was his first novel, introduced Philip Marlowe, and is often considered his best work. The Big Sleep is a good whodunit, but Chandler shines when he examines the corruption that bubble up from the underworld of pornography, drugs, and illegal gambling. Chandler also takes the reader on a tour of a now-long gone Los Angeles.

Is Chandler's work `literature'? Chandler thought so. Here's how Chandler defined literature: "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement ... Read More

Rating:

- A masterpiece not merely of hardboiled fiction but of the English language
THE BIG SLEEP is one of the great books of American Literature, not merely of hardboiled fiction. It is far from a perfect book. There are passages that are so over-the-top that they border on self-parody. The scenes in which women can't help themselves in the presence of Philip Marlowe are generally appalling. But the book's virtues are difficult to overstate. The prose frequently veers into the realm of genius. The characters -- even minor characters -- are brilliantly and unforgettably sketched. The L.A. of the late 1930s captures the time and place as perfectly as Berenice Abbott's photos of thirties New York. For many individuals, Raymond Chandler in this and subsequent novels created the L.A. that haunted film noir in the next two decades.

Chandler's prose both thrills and infuriates ... Read More

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