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.   

Red Harvest – An Enduring Classic of Crime Fiction

“Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.”

Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective fiction with lean and concise prose style emphasizes less on crime-solving and rather deals with the heavy atmosphere of crime. Beneath the pulpy action, witticisms, and escalating body count, Mr. Hammett’s stories exhibits how crime is at the heart of bureaucratism and politics (or one could say the author treats, ‘politics-as-crime’). The backstory of Dashiell Hammett may be all too familiar for aficionados of hard-boiled literary style: the diverse jobs he did to be the ‘breadwinner’; his military service in the first and second World Wars; his stint as an operative in the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency; the association with communist party that eventually led him to be one of the victim of McCarthy era.

The history behind Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest was also equally fascinating. Hammett, the Pinkerton operative, was allegedly asked to off a union organizer but refused to do it. The author, refusing to murder somebody despite the lure of economic gain and nevertheless staying with Pinkerton (which is known for hiring strike-breaking goons), is said to have set off an inner conflict. An intriguing ‘Guardian’ article hints the author has transformed his personal conflict to design his ambiguous ‘Continental Op’ detective protagonist in Red Harvest. Never mind that the backstory relating to union organizer is more or less disproved and declared ‘mythic’. Though supposedly false, this story offers something to understand Hammett’s sardonic and morally chaotic nameless hero.

Originally serialized in ‘Black Mask’ magazine, the Continental Op first appeared in a 1923 story. Despite making appearance in numerous serialized stories, novels, and heralded as one of the first major fictional hard-boiled detectives, the Continental Op wasn’t as much popular with Hollywood like Raymond Chandler’s no-nonsense dick Philip Marlowe. Red Harvest also didn’t enjoy a major Hollywood adaptation (unlike Howard Hawks’ adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep), but it was cited as the chief influence behind Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) – movies that were powerful in their own right [Kurosawa, however, has supposedly cited 1942 adaptation of Hammett’s another great novel ‘The Glass Key’ as his influence]. Red Harvest does contain one of those labyrinthine, prototype stories that pit cops against crooks, in which the lines dividing the good and bad blurs.

The book opens with one of unforgettable Dashiell Hammett lines: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte…….. I didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.” The tough, American Midwest mining town is like any other urban jungle that’s caught in the quagmire of corruption. The private detective arrives there from San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective agency. He is summoned by the town’s newspaper mogul, Donald Willsson, and the reasons for it are not yet known. Unfortunately, Donald gets murdered before keeping up his appointment with the Op. Narrated in the first-person, we tag-along as the detective navigates through the power corridors of the town to find clues to the murder. He discovers that Donald’s father Elihu Willsson, the brazen industrialist don, has once solely controlled the town, but now forced to share his powers with a quartet of dangerous bootleggers, gun-runners, and gangsters whose violent expertise were once sought out to break the unions and strikers. The implacable, cool, and the morally ambiguous Continental Op not only solves Donald’s murder, but also smartly stirs up the conflict between the ‘powers-that-be’. And of course this self-destructive path is paved with booze, gun-fights, and callous women.

Published in the year of Great Depression, the bloodbath and deep-rooted corruption in Red Harvest now seems like a prophecy of what’s to come (the Anaconda Copper wars is particularly mentioned as the root for this tight and lucid story). Red Harvest is all about politics and bloodshed, and how one becomes synonymous for the other. The darkly humorous, eminently quotable, and street-smart authenticity of Hammett’s writing keeps us enthralled throughout (and the book is short and addictive enough to finish in one sitting). The Continental Op is a very interesting protagonist, later championed by the film-noir masterworks. He is a relentless pursuer of truth, not to right the wrongs, but it’s merely an obsession. The first-person narrative may obscure his motivations, but allows us to find psychological depth in what the Op details to perfection (the crime scene and gun fights) and what he omits (his true feelings). He occupies a grey area and often straddles between the official powers and underworld kingpins, plucking out the links between them (which nevertheless may get reinstated one way or another). Altogether, it’s great fun reading the tricks of one audacious individual in order to tear down the whole rotten and damned sociopolitical structure of a town.