Will I love The Big Sleep?

What’s not to love about this? I first experienced The Big Sleep by viewing the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the film, I admit I was a bit perplexed over some of the plot points.

Reading the book cleared up some, but not all, of my confusion, and yet it’s a book I would read again and again. The classic 1930s setting of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the noir elements, and the hard-boiled detective, Phillip Marlowe, are an unbeatable combination in my mind.

Although not a historical thriller written in the 21st century since the book debuted in 1939, it has become a template for writers of historical thrillers today that are set in the 1930s.

What I love is Chandler’s ability to create metaphors that paint an atmosphere so vivid, so intense, I become not just a reader but an observer, actually a part of the scene I’m observing. This is my goal and the goal of all writers.

Chandler is the master, and I learned from a master. I had to add this to my list, even though not a 21st… show more.

I could have chosen any Raymond Chandler novel for this list; he is such a brilliant stylist, one of the best in the language.

His lugubrious, heavy-drinking, first-person detective Philip Marlowe is my kind of fictional hero, a genre-defining character, perpetually alone though he yearns for the glamorous women he meets.

I love reading a thriller with a complex plot that has me trying to figure out who did what, where and when, and what or who may be connected in the main or subplot.

This was one of those books I had to read twice, not because I didn’t “get it” but because I admired the way Chandler weaved his characters around, like the actors in a Whitehall farce play. This is a book I kept turning back a few pages to keep up with the who, where, and when. Fantastic read.

The first novel about legendary private eye Phillip Marlowe is also the first mystery novel that ever made me cry when I turned the last page.

Marlowe’s poetic narration and bruised outsider’s voice offer a cynical but also strangely hopeful perspective on both the shady underworld types and the corrupt high-society folk who fill the “mean streets” down which Marlowe must walk (in Chandler’s much-quoted phrase).

Why hopeful when death–the big sleep–awaits us all? Because a man of principles like Marlowe can still bring a measure of justice in this unjust world, sometimes just by bearing witness.

Two aspects of this novel really shine: Philip Marlowe, the fearless, dogged private detective with unshakable integrity; and 1930s Los Angeles, with its wide variety of neighborhoods, landscapes, and the diverse socioeconomic classes who inhabit those places.

Throw in an intriguing mystery plot, and it’s easy to see why Chandler is considered a master of the genre. But mostly, I kept reading to see how far Marlowe would go to unravel the puzzle and how he would maintain his principles in a world that, by and large, doesn’t share them.

It’s rare to find a mystery in which a character… show more.

Chandler’s novel, first published in 1939, is a touchstone for anyone writing detective fiction.

Never mind that private detective Philip Marlowe never actually solves anything.

In addition to the famously unsolved murder that Chandler brushed off when told about it, there are plot holes you could drive a Buick Roadmaster through, and prose occasionally edged in purple. Never mind its shortcomings, The Big Sleep overall remains intoxicatingly hard-boiled, a much-imitated classic of the genre.

I have gone back to it many times since I first read it, seeing its flaws but loving its tough-as-nails sensibility. It played an important part… show more.

Most don’t think “comedy” when they think of Chandler, but I include his debut here to honor the sly wit behind the hard-boiled PI voice Chandler famously invented. Before him, nobody wrote sentences like, “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead,” but after him, every crime writer wanted a sprinkle of that. Of course, Chandler’s the all-time, undisputed champion of the simile, so adroit, so confident, that it’s okay if sometimes it feels like he’s playing beyond our grasp. “… show more.

The week I started working as a private investigator, a friend gave me The Big Sleep. I fell in love – with Raymond Chandler. To me, as a new PI, every word rang true. The book is set in Los Angeles, starring detective Philip Marlowe – “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it” – and I read it in Los Angeles, too, amid the sunstruck tangle of ambition and envy and deception and longing that makes the city such an easy place, I was learning, to be a private eye. Marlowe’s… show more.

This wasn't the first crime mystery novel I read, but The Big Sleep hooked me on Philip Marlowe as a character and the genre as a whole. Raymond Chandler created one of the most striking and engaging narrative voices in the superbly cynical and sharp-tongued Private Investigator. Marlowe's dialogue and observations have a poetic grittiness about them that reflect his toughness and the seedy world he’s steeped in, and yet, through his interactions with other characters and the values he espouses, I warmed to him as a big-hearted and sensitive character who is hard not to admire and want to… show more.