The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler – Who Cares Who Did It

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

When he lost his job as an oil company executive, Raymond Chandler found himself unemployed during the years of the Great Depression. Thrown back on an early interest in writing, he decided that crime fiction might pay the bills. In a business-like way he taught himself the genre’s formula by reading pulp magazines and the work of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was Chandler’s first novel.

Obviously, if you are a writer working during the Great Depression, and you don’t have any other income, you have to sell books and make money. Never mind poetic musings about life. If people like crime stories, that’s what you have to provide.

Looking back on his career, in his book Trouble is My Business, Chandler reminisced about trying to escape the limits of his chosen genre. While crime appeared to be his only option from a financial point of view – feeling ill-equipped to write romance for women’s magazines – he decided to join those who stretched the formula by writing stories where solving a mystery was not really the point. For Chandler, the perfect detective story ‘was one you would read if the end were missing’. Scene should outrank plot.

That was how I enjoyed The Big Sleep. The plot, involving a wealthy, grievously ill man, his wayward daughters and a blackmail attempt, is fairly confusing. I preferred to follow private detective Philip Marlowe, going about his work in long, lugubrious scenes, through rainy nights in 1930s Los Angeles. Marlowe’s character provides the interest. He is a detective living in a society of murky morals, where, for example, changing attitudes to Prohibition make the drinks business an illegal enterprise one day, a legitimate business the next. Certainties are hard to find. Marlowe responds by shrinking his personal world down to a small flat, and his work. And that’s it. From this little fortress he looks out at life, just as Raymond Chandler himself looks out from the tight confines of crime fiction. In a dark way, it’s almost cosy, in the sense that we have settled into our small corner, appreciating its limits even in resenting them.

For all the compulsive effort Marlowe puts into his work, even dreaming about it at night, he never gets a pay off, either financially or emotionally, at the end of it. In fact, there never really is an end. As he says to his client: ‘when you hire a boy in my line of work, it isn’t like hiring a window washer and showing him eight windows, and saying, “Wash those and you’re through”’.

There are, however, some dark consolations to be found in never reaching a satisfactory conclusion. When you are reading for scene rather than plot, the story’s point is not a few moments right at the end when the mystery is solved and justice apparently done. The point of the story is the whole thing, the long, atmospheric scenes which can be enjoyed in a leisurely way as Marlowe wanders through Hollywood fog. The journey becomes its own destination. I really enjoyed The Big Sleep in that respect. The term Big Sleep is a euphemism for death, the end of all our journeys. In that case it is definitely best to focus on scene rather than plot. Plot will provide a few moments of satisfaction: scene can last a lifetime.