The Big Sleep – American Detective Fiction at its Most Seductive

“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, you were not bothered by things like that.”

Philip Marlowe -- the sardonic, morally ambiguous, and occasionally chivalrous fictional private detective created by American novelist Raymond Chandler -- came into existence with the 1939 hard-boiled mystery The Big Sleep. It is easy to understand Marlowe’s enduring, universal appeal: a world-weary loner and outsider who withhold certain moral codes while fighting against deep corruption and cirme. At the same time, this archetypal detective character of Depression and post-Prohibition era dabbles with a kind of unique Americanisms that has turned him into an iconic figure of American imagination (like the ‘noble Cowboys’ of Western genre, ‘Superman’, etc). Before Philip Marlowe, of course there were Dashiell Hammett’s archetypal gumshoes like the unnamed Continental Op (‘Red Harvest’) and Sam Spade (‘The Maltese Falcon’) who also scored high in terms of sarcastic repartee and ‘quote-worthy’ street-slang. However, Chandler’s universe emphasizes more on the atmosphere (the elaborate, unwinding prose beautifully sets up the mood) while it’s a bit light on mystery.

The Big Sleep’s insanely convoluted plot opens with a crippled, dying oil baron General Sternwood hiring the L.A. PI Philip Marlowe to handle a black-mailing scheme directed against the younger of his two troublesome daughters, Carmen Sternwood. Marlowe follows the ‘polite’ black-mailing note to a bookstore run by Arthur Gwynne Geiger. What starts off as a simple case of blackmailing, however, turns complex as two murders happen in quick succession (one of them is Geiger) and Marlowe get deeply pulled into intricate schemes of kidnapping, pornography, corruption, and extortion. Guns are often waved at Marlowe but the guy mostly bluffs his way around without getting fired at. The seedy city and its inhabitants keep throwing curve-balls at him. Even so he keeps himself composed, makes peace, and remains content with making $25 a day.

The Depression-era classic pulp fictions of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler later influenced the visual mood and narrative schemes of the misanthropic war-time and post-war Hollywood crime features, which was addressed as ‘Film-Noir’ by the French critics. Chandler’s second Philip Marlowe novel ('Farewell, My Lovely') was the first to be adapted into a movie titled ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944). Dick Powell played the central character. But it was Humphrey Bogart’s wry, cool persona that worked perfectly for the on-screen avatar of Marlowe in Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep (Elliott Gould was equally great in his turn as Marlowe in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of ‘The Long Goodbye’; Robert Montgomery, James Garner, and Robert Mitchum are some other actors who have portrayed Marlowe in films).

The Big Sleep could be relished for Chandler’s linguistic flourishes, his suave non sequiturs, and distinctly poetic evocation of the atmosphere. The first-half of the novel is lot troubling to follow as we constantly try to piece together each character’s angle, how they are connected to each other, and what their part is in the larger mystery. Geiger, Joe Brody, Owen Taylor, Lundgren, Eddie Mars, Harry Jones, Canino --- these names are repeated throughout the narrative and it took me sometime to understand who’s who and their tangled personal histories. The same problem afflicts Hawks’ movie adaptation too. It was said that Howard Hawks sent Chandler a telegram questioning ‘whether Owen Taylor, the General’s chauffeur, was murdered or he committed suicide?’, to which Chandler replied, “Dammit I didn't know either”. Yes, some of the mysteries aren’t answered, and if these loose ends are resolved it wouldn’t matter much since the answer to central mystery happens to be quite simple. The movie version of The Big Sleep, nevertheless, gained classic status due to Hawks’ meticulous direction and the presence of seductive central pair (Bogart and Bacall). 

Humphrey Bogart and Lauran Bacall in Howard Hawks' 1946 movie adaptation

 Likewise, Chandler’s novel despite all the convolutions is immensely enjoyable due to the terse dialogues and the manner with which the cagey and calculative Marlowe smoothly handles array of crazy situations. At some point in the novel, Marlowe emphatically declares, “I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it….” This pretty much suggests how the heroes of the era's hard-boiled fiction are wildly different from the idealized fictional sleuths (like Holmes or Hercule Poirot) since the social context of Chandler or Hammett repeatedly state how crime and corruption are very much in the fabric of society or governing bodies. Hence Marlowe, like his other hard-boiled detective counterparts stay morally ambiguous and understand that the world is possibly irredeemable. Overall, The Big Sleep is a riveting, preeminent novel of hard-boiled detective fiction that still holds up today.