The Big Sleep

⚖The case for it

The murder that opens the book is only the door Chandler needs to get you inside. What he actually cares about is Philip Marlowe, the tarnished knight every hardboiled detective since gets measured against, and a Los Angeles where old money has gone soft and hired good lawyers to hide the smell. Marlowe walks through it wary and tired, worn down by years of people lying to his face. His voice, that dry running commentary, is the reason you keep reading, more than any case he cracks.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Stitched together from two earlier pulp stories, the plot never resolves; the famous unanswerable question about the chauffeur's killer is real, and not the only loose thread. The period bigotry is harder to wave off: Geiger's homosexuality registers as moral disease, and Carmen exists to be leered at, then loathed. Some of the similes have curdled into self-parody.

— the honest librarian