The Big Sleep Summary: Raymond Chandler's First Philip Marlowe Novel
What The Big Sleep is about
Published in 1939, The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler's first novel and the first case for Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles private investigator who would become one of crime fiction's defining figures. The setup is simple enough. A wealthy, elderly client called General Sternwood hires Marlowe to deal with a blackmailer. A bookseller named Arthur Geiger is putting pressure on Sternwood's younger daughter, Carmen, who has been blackmailed once already by a man called Joe Brody. Sternwood wants the problem to go away quietly.
What follows is not a tidy chain of clues. Chandler sends Marlowe through a pornography-lending library disguised as a bookstore, a staked-out house in the rain, a body in a car driven off a pier, a casino run by a gangster, and a repair shop out in Rialto with a house hidden behind it. The blackmail job is solved fairly early. The thing that will not leave Marlowe alone is a separate matter entirely: Sternwood's elder daughter Vivian is married to an Irish bootlegger called Rusty Regan, and Regan has vanished. Nobody hired Marlowe to find him. He keeps looking anyway.
The novel is famous for the tangle of its plot. Characters double-cross each other, secrets surface at awkward moments, and the connections between the Sternwood household and the city's criminal trade turn out to run deeper than the first job suggested. Unusually for a crime novel, the central mystery is left unresolved, a point that has been argued over ever since.
The main characters
Philip Marlowe is a heavy-drinking, laconic private investigator. He takes a job, takes a beating and keeps going. What separates him from the people around him is not cleverness but refusal. He turns down money, he turns down sex, he will not be frightened off a case and he will not sell information to the highest bidder. Offered the chance to look away, he declines.
General Sternwood is old, ill and rich, a man who made his money in oil and now sits among his orchids watching his daughters burn through what is left of the family name. He has affection for Rusty Regan, his daughter's missing husband.
Carmen Sternwood is the younger daughter: wild, childlike, drugged, dangerous. She is the reason Marlowe is hired and she creates most of the trouble he walks into.
Vivian Sternwood is the elder sister, in a loveless marriage to Regan, a gambler at Eddie Mars's casino, and far better at concealment than Carmen. She tries to find out what Marlowe is really doing, and tries more than once to manage him.
Eddie Mars runs the casino and owns a good deal more than that. He is Geiger's landlord, and his wife Mona is said to have run off with Regan. His enforcer, Lash Canino, is the book's most straightforwardly frightening presence. Around them circle Agnes the bookstore clerk, Joe Brody, the chauffeur Owen Taylor, Carol Lundgren and the small-time hustler Harry Jones.
The themes
The title is a euphemism for death, and death sits under every scene. The closing pages return to the idea of sleeping the big sleep, where it no longer matters to the dead where they lie or who put them there. Chandler is interested in what that knowledge does to the living.
Corruption is the other engine. Money protects the Sternwoods from consequence. Blackmail, pornography, gambling and bootlegging form an economy that the respectable city depends on and pretends not to see. The police in the novel are not villains so much as realists; they would rather a missing man simply ran away than open a case that reaches into money.
Against that, Chandler sets a private code of morality. Marlowe is not virtuous in any conventional sense. He drinks, he lies to the police when it suits him, he does violence. But he has a line he will not cross, and the book is largely a test of where that line sits. Justice in The Big Sleep is rarely the same thing as the law.
The ending, explained
Stop here if you do not want it.
After killing Canino and freeing himself, Marlowe returns Carmen's gun to her and agrees to teach her to shoot. In an abandoned field she turns the weapon on him. He has loaded it with blanks. The shock brings on an epileptic seizure. Marlowe then tells Vivian what he has worked out: Carmen made advances to Rusty Regan, Regan refused her, and she shot him. Eddie Mars, who had been financing Geiger, helped Vivian dispose of the body, invented the story about his own wife running away with Regan, and then blackmailed Vivian over it. Vivian says she did it all to spare her father the knowledge of what his daughters are. She agrees to have Carmen committed.
Why it still matters
The Big Sleep set the template for the hardboiled detective novel and gave the genre its voice: terse, wry, alert to class and place. Los Angeles in the book is not scenery but a character, a city of oil money, hillside houses and rain-slicked streets. It has been filmed twice, in 1946 and 1978. In 1999 it was voted 96th in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, and in 2005 Time magazine included it in its list of the 100 best novels. It suits readers who want crime fiction with real prose behind it, and anyone curious about where the modern detective story came from.
