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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I finished The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler today.  It's a good read, very well written.  I've not read much crime fiction, even less of the 1930's pulp fiction variety that Chandler transcends.  It's pretty clear though that there is before Raymond Chandler / Dashiell Hammett and after.  There is Philip Marlow and there is Sam Spade, archetypes of the hard-boiled, street-wise private investigator. 

I suppose Humphrey Bogart's movies, playing both characters, seared the genre in our minds.  They're how most of us know the world of seedy Los Angeles with its gamblers, racketeers, pimps and pornographers.  I was struck by the presence of rain in The Big Sleep (a trope used throughout Bladerunner, which is like a Marlowe story set one hundred years after the character first trod the streets).  And you wonder how anyone survived a drive in Marlowe's LA; everyone seems to be having a couple of stiff drinks before, during or just after jumping in to a car.

The writing has its problems, of course.  There are too many implausible coincidences and / or near misses.  Marlowe seems always to arrive somewhere just in time to see some plot moving arrival, departure or witnessing of death (Harry and the cyanide laced Scotch is the most unlikely of Marlowe's fortuitous arrivals).  Women are less than roundly drawn characters, used mainly (at least in this novel) as devices to mobilise or explain male action.  Homosexuality comes off rather badly too.

But it is well written.  Philip Marlowe is real, three-dimensional and has depth.  And Chandler certainly could turn a phrase:
  • "The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings."
  • "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." 
  • "His thick gray eyebrows had that indefinably sporty look."
  • "Tall, aren't you?" she said.
    "I didn't mean to be."
    Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
  • "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts "
Definitely worth reading.
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