Philip Marlowe, a private eye who operates in Los Angeles's seamy underside during the 1930s, takes on his first case, which involves a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder
I love this book. It's fast paced, tense and exciting. The characters are great. The dialogue is amazing. The plot gets more and more convoluted and nastier and nastier all the way through, and the wry first person monologue is just delightful.
I love this book. It's fast paced, tense and exciting. The characters are great. The dialogue is amazing. The plot gets more and more convoluted and nastier and nastier all the way through, and the wry first person monologue is just delightful.
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. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
Going into this book, I had a very surface level knowledge of "noir" as a genre, mostly gleamed from pop cultural osmosis. I liked the idea of what I thought this era of crime fiction was, and this particular title came up often as a strong example of the genre so I decided to give it a shot.
This is the first time in a long while I've picked up an "old" book outside of the …
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. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
Going into this book, I had a very surface level knowledge of "noir" as a genre, mostly gleamed from pop cultural osmosis. I liked the idea of what I thought this era of crime fiction was, and this particular title came up often as a strong example of the genre so I decided to give it a shot.
This is the first time in a long while I've picked up an "old" book outside of the literary classics you're forced to read in school. I knew going into it to expect it to be dated, and it very much is a product of its time; damn near every character is smoking indoors in every scene, multiple instances of drinking right before getting behind the wheel of a car, lusty women get slapped when being uncooperative, etc. The f-slur gets dropped a few times which was pretty jarring for me as a gay man, and there is a scene where the main character beats up a gay man (who, admittedly had brazenly committed a murder in just the previous chapter, so he kinda had it coming). On a lighter note, characters always said "okey" instead of "okay" among other strange turns of phrase that helped with the immersion of this now bygone era.
That said, this book absolutely did have what I was looking for, and in droves: rainy city streets where danger lurked around every corner, shifty characters you didn't know if you could trust, crooked cops and illicit venues hiding just behind the veneer of civilized society. I felt like I was getting hit over the head with trope after trope, but what would come across as trying too hard in a contemporary work felt natural here - that's just how things were back then.
The book is written in first person and sticks with one character throughout, who I unfortunately felt like came off as a bit of a Mary Sue. He never got flustered in tense situations (more than once he was unarmed and stared down the barrel of a gun in stride) and somehow all his gambles and leaps of logic always panned out in his favor. I know a protagonist has to be competent enough to move a story along, but I wish it felt more earned here. The story itself made up for it with enough twists and turns to keep me invested. The final reveal in the last two chapters felt like it came out of left field, like something I as a reader was never expected to piece together on my own, but I had so much fun in the middle of the book that I'm willing to overlook it.
I came into this book wanting to like it and came out the other side feeling satisfied enough to say that I did. What Raymond Chandler may have lacked in overall narrative structure he more than made up for in his prose with some of the best metaphors that I honestly should've done a better job writing down so I could include them here. Approach this book with the mentality that it is a dated-yet-authentic take on noir and you'll have a great time with it.
I picked this up because it’s a classic, but I’m mildly disappointed in the form. There are some beautiful scenes and compelling turns of phrase, but the plot felt like it had never been stretched out and examined entirely from end to end. I know it’s over 80 years old, but the racism, homophobia and misogyny still make it a series I’m not motivated to continue or to recommend.
This was my intro to one of The Greats of the hardboiled genre. As with all older books, I read it with a contemporaneous mindset, but still I'd hardly call it a masterpiece.
Raymond Chandler certainly had a thing for eye colour. I do not.
And while I read it with a 1939 Brain, it was hard not to notice as he breaks every rule espoused by modern writers with more consistency than a five-dollar milkshake. But he's "the master" so please disregard that 90% of the text is adverbs and similes. This is not a swipe at Chandler. I like similes (but not adverbs).
If you love the 'hard boiled dick' dimestore pulp genre (like Dashiell Hammet, Allan Pinkerton, etc), you'd probably consider reading Raymond Chandler.
Except Chandler isn't a dimestore pulp writer. He's a pretentious former oil executive who considers himself 'slumming'. It shows in the terrible writing.
Pinkerton was an actual detective. He wrote what he knew. Hammet was a Pinkerton man.
Chandler's contrived and ridiculous stories are based on reading other people's stories. His narratives are rambling, pointlessly misogynistic and racist, and completely shorn of any actual work on the main character's part.
In the Big Sleep his protagonist Marlowe does little more than drunk driving, drunk loitering, drunk tailing of people, acting like a tough guy, being a jerk to cops who are super super nice to him for no obvious reason, and falls into lucky outcomes. At one point, he gives a guy the 1930s equivalent of $3,500 (2/5th …
If you love the 'hard boiled dick' dimestore pulp genre (like Dashiell Hammet, Allan Pinkerton, etc), you'd probably consider reading Raymond Chandler.
Except Chandler isn't a dimestore pulp writer. He's a pretentious former oil executive who considers himself 'slumming'. It shows in the terrible writing.
Pinkerton was an actual detective. He wrote what he knew. Hammet was a Pinkerton man.
Chandler's contrived and ridiculous stories are based on reading other people's stories. His narratives are rambling, pointlessly misogynistic and racist, and completely shorn of any actual work on the main character's part.
In the Big Sleep his protagonist Marlowe does little more than drunk driving, drunk loitering, drunk tailing of people, acting like a tough guy, being a jerk to cops who are super super nice to him for no obvious reason, and falls into lucky outcomes. At one point, he gives a guy the 1930s equivalent of $3,500 (2/5th of his ~$9,000 bonus check for a week's work) for information totally unrelated to his case... just because? Good thing, too, because without that highly overpaid tip, the completely absurd plot wouldn't tie up so nicely.
Honestly, if you like the genre, Chandler is one of the larger names. Just be aware that you're in for a ride-along with someone who is basically just writing fanfic of better, more interesting stories.
I wasn't enjoying the first quarter or so of this; the ridiculous similes and tough-guy banter. I had always assumed Chandler would be indistinguishable from Hammett but the latter's characters were much more interesting and sympathetic.
What saved this novel from being a wreck for me was the epiphany (probably entirely within my own imagination) that the over-the-top embarrassing metaphors might serve as a mnemonic device for Marlowe; describing a shag rug that a badger could be lost in for days in order to lock the detail into his 'memory palace'. It may have been entirely unintentional, but rationalizing it this way made the clunky parts forgivable.
Really hard-boiled and funny, this book is stodgy and still fluffy. The protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is a detective who is hired by an old, decrepit man who has two young, mischievous daughters who are surrounded by mysterious circumstances and a web of lies.
This is extremely well-written, and the dialogue is superb. Marlowe is a sublime character with a lot of jagged edges, constantly under threat but always merely picking up 25 dollars a day, plus expenses (of which most are for whiskey).
A shining, exciting and polished example of detective noir at its best and most simple.
Really hard-boiled and funny, this book is stodgy and still fluffy. The protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is a detective who is hired by an old, decrepit man who has two young, mischievous daughters who are surrounded by mysterious circumstances and a web of lies.
This is extremely well-written, and the dialogue is superb. Marlowe is a sublime character with a lot of jagged edges, constantly under threat but always merely picking up 25 dollars a day, plus expenses (of which most are for whiskey).
A shining, exciting and polished example of detective noir at its best and most simple.
This was my first date with Raymond Chandler, at long last, and now that I've finished reading The Big Sleep, I look forward to many more. I really like detective Philip Marlowe. I enjoy his demeanour, the way he thinks, and the way he perceives people and his surroundings, but that's not why I rated this book so highly. I also enjoyed the story itself, which was atmospheric and engaging, but that's not the reason either. The reason is Raymond Chandler's masterful writing. It's a strong and confident voice from the get-go, painting a vivid picture of Los Angeles and its denizens in the 1930s. He had me snickering and smiling wryly from the first page. And, most of all, he whet my appetite for sudden turns of phrase so startlingly wonderful and well-composed that I had to stop and reread them multiple times before carrying on with the …
This was my first date with Raymond Chandler, at long last, and now that I've finished reading The Big Sleep, I look forward to many more. I really like detective Philip Marlowe. I enjoy his demeanour, the way he thinks, and the way he perceives people and his surroundings, but that's not why I rated this book so highly. I also enjoyed the story itself, which was atmospheric and engaging, but that's not the reason either. The reason is Raymond Chandler's masterful writing. It's a strong and confident voice from the get-go, painting a vivid picture of Los Angeles and its denizens in the 1930s. He had me snickering and smiling wryly from the first page. And, most of all, he whet my appetite for sudden turns of phrase so startlingly wonderful and well-composed that I had to stop and reread them multiple times before carrying on with the book. I'll be reading the rest of Philip Marlowe stories, with relish.
