The Big Sleep

⚖The case for it

Marlowe is “a knight in tarnished armour” walking through a Los Angeles where everyone else has already sold out, and readers name the code rather than the case as what they come back for. Chandler snaps between clipped action and sudden ornament, the Sternwood greenhouse rendered in “medieval gothic” while the dialogue stays “a good steak” with “no mush” on it. The rain never stops and does real work. The dialogue is quotable enough that readers laugh out loud in grim scenes. Readers who love it say the loose plotting is beside the point, since scene and mood and observation are what Chandler was after all along.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The plot is “famously incoherent,” and the most quoted fact about the book is that Chandler, asked who killed the chauffeur, said he had no idea. He built it by stitching two of his own pulp stories together, which is why it runs two half-connected cases at once. Marlowe’s slurs at gay characters are constant enough that readers call the book “homophobic and misogynist,” and there is a pattern of “violence against women played for laughs” that readers find hardest to get past. Some finish and report “the story really didn’t go anywhere.” Marlowe works long past the point his client is satisfied, unexplained.

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings