The Big Sleep

"Right. I feel like I should hate this book. It’s written in the 1930s by a guy. There’s a femme fatale trope, which can be cringy, and the treatment of women? But it’s such a good story that I overlooked that, I guess. And that’s a problem with a lot of what was written during the 1930s. It’s problematic for many, many reasons. As you say, Chandler is the daddy of Noir. When I was first thinking about writing crime, I decided to go back and read the classics that I hadn’t read already. And this was one of the first things I picked up. The story just drags you through. That’s right. And the tone reminded me a lot of those old movies—in fact, this was made into a movie—and it helped get me a sense of the aesthetic of my own writing of that period. I have American characters in both of my last two books. I was trying to figure out how to write their dialogue. And I think that Chandler’s dialogue is really good—you can hear it just as it might be spoken."

"This was the first Raymond Chandler book I read. I’ve since then read all of them, including his short stories and pulp stories. In his own words, he “cannibalised” his short stories for longer novel formats. The Big Sleep introduces Philip Marlowe, his cynical detective. He meets General Sternwood, a very rich man in southern California, with two wild daughters—one who’s mentally ill and has run into problems. He hires Marlowe to figure out who’s blackmailing his younger daughter and make it all go away. In the course of that, Marlowe meets the older daughter, whose husband Rusty Regan has disappeared. Nobody knows what has happened to him. So, there are two plots: trying to figure out the blackmail plot, which is a little convoluted, and then whatever happened to Regan. At the end, it’s pretty much all resolved. The movie, which starred Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, was very different from the book in many respects. In the novel, the Lauren Bacall character—she played the elder Sternwood sister—was never really a love interest of Marlowe’s; he was more attracted to the wife of Eddie Mars, who was the gambler backing the blackmail scheme, and also knew what happened to Regan. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The best thing about The Big Sleep was the introduction of Philip Marlowe—this down-on-his-heels detective. It was really a character study. It spoke to me because he made mistakes, he failed along the way, he wasn’t the best, but he was dogged and he kept at it. He was conflicted as well. He had to solve crimes by very wealthy people who thought that they could do whatever they wanted to. The plot is a bit convoluted because he took it from one of his shorter stories, and when you cut and paste, things get a little rumpled. For example, while they were putting the movie together, no one could figure out who killed the chauffeur. The Nobel-winning novelist William Faulkner, who co-wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep, couldn’t figure it out either. Legend has it he wrote to Chandler seeking the answer, but it turns out Chandler didn’t know either. I loved that part of it. But, really, it’s Chandler’s prose—it’s the original use of language, the descriptions, and the interior monologue of Marlowe. Telling it in the first person was a great way to bring out Marlowe’s characters, his cynicism, his despair, but also his incredible wit. I love stories where you get so fully immersed into the head of the main protagonist you see everything through his point of view. It creates this bond between the character and the reader where you just want to follow this guy wherever he goes. I would completely agree with that. I’ve read the books over and over and I marvel at the original use of language in the books, the similes, the metaphors, what he was able to conjure up. He knew that area well. He made southern California into a character itself instead of just a piece of topography. He talks about the landscape, the ocean, the mountains and the canyons. Los Angeles is a big place, obviously, and you have this fictitious town of Bay City as well. But once you get out of there and into the canyons and mountain ridges where it becomes very isolated, it’s a great place for crime to happen. These stories were little jewels that he constructed. They are not “just mysteries”, if you want to use that phrase. They are works of literary art."

"I think the writing is just so beautiful. Raymond Chandler’s hopeless at plots, as we know. He said himself, if he couldn’t think of what to do, he brought in a man with a gun. But the language… I remember some years ago an American publisher got the rights to do a book called Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and got various contemporary crime writers to write a Philip Marlowe story . I was asked to do one – it was great fun. I was very excited, because it meant rereading all the books again. I found I could do the wisecracks, but I couldn’t do them as economically as he could. I think that’s what I admire in Chandler; he’s very economical with his words. And also he can do something that very few writers can do, he can actually use a joke to increase tension rather than release tension. Normally we think of comic relief: you build up the tension and then you break it with a joke. But Chandler could actually make the tension tighter with a joke, which I think is a great achievement. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I don’t think so. He’s an icon really; I don’t think he’s a real person. It’s just the quality of writing that keeps me going. And actually it was very influential. It’s interesting that Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler were both British. Agatha Christie was the godmother of the whodunnit tradition and Raymond Chandler was the godfather of the hard-boiled tradition – and I think very few people did it as well as he did. No. There could have been. I’m not anti-Agatha. A lot of contemporary crime writers are very anti-her. A lot of people criticise her, and say there’s no psychological depth. But that wasn’t what she was trying to do. She was producing these wonderful little clockwork toys which actually worked very well. The mechanism worked perfectly. The fact that she didn’t deal with the underbelly of society and deprivation in inner cities is neither here nor there. Yes, reputedly, towards the end. And she did create this Ariadne Oliver in some of her stories who was a version of herself, this crime writer who was saddled with this detective she was bored to tears by. Also, someone once worked out that Hercule Poirot, since he didn’t start investigating till he had retired from the Belgian police force, was 136 when he solved his last case."