A review by rodney1946
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

adventurous mysterious fast-paced

4.5

In The Big Sleep, Chandler introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled, incorruptible private detective who would feature in a series of novels and stories. What chance did anyone have? It was as if Rembrandt had inked comic books, or Rodin had sculpted sex dolls: Chandler, a writer who could somehow dazzle while describing a bougainvillea in a Los Angeles streetscape, placed an impossible-to-dislike protagonist in intricate plots with drawn-out mysteries, surprise twists, seductive dames, and enough corpses to keep the mortician’s wife in mink. The voice that croaks to life in The Big Sleep would be imitated many times over, but this was the book that first exposed readers to that combination of cynicism and wit. With time and a big-enough magnifying glass, you might spot an inconsequential loose end, but no matter. Chandler would be worth reading even if the plots were nonsense—for mood, for character, for sentence-by-sentence quality, and, most of all, for the lines. Here’s one to whet your appetite: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
                                                                 --------Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic's Great American Novels (March 14 2024)