The Big Sleep (1939) – Raymond Chandler

Devil in a Blue Dress was a very fine book and I am looking forward to working my way through the other Easy Rawlins novels. The full series of Easy Rawlins books is

• Devil in a Blue Dress
• A Red Death
• White Butterfly
• Black Betty
• A Little Yellow Dog
• Gone Fishin'
• Bad Boy Brawly Brown
• Six Easy Pieces
• Little Scarlet
• Cinnamon Kiss
• Blonde Faith

(You'll notice that the titles follow a very simple pattern of including a colour. Those that don't follow that pattern, Gone Fishin' and Six Easy Pieces, actually sit outside the series somewhat. Gone Fishin' is a novel about Easy's youth and Six Easy Pieces is a collection of short stories rather than a novel.

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The Read On list for Mosley is

READ ON  Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Joe R Lansdale

which is quite interesting. Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes are big names in hardboiled fiction and African-American literature, respectively, one a genre and the other a body of literature, so in combining the two, Walter Mosley has created a fork in the trail.

(Joe R Lansdale incidentally is a bit of an absurbist as a novelist. One of his best known works – made into a movie a few years back – features an elderly Elvis battling an Egyptian mummy in a nursing home. However, he has written a series of novels about a crime-fighting duo Hap and Leonard, with Leonard being a gay black man, which often deals with the issue of racism, which surely has many parallels with Easy Rawlins' adventures.)

I have already read Chester Himes, and in fact I have visited all the writers of African-American literature that make a network around Walter Mosley. So it is now time to make a radical change of direction, into hardboiled detective fiction with Raymond Chandler.


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There is a lot to read in Chandler's Must Read list:

MUST READ  The Big Sleep, The Letters of Raymond Chandler, The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane, The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler by Tom Hiney

The two biographies and the book of correspondence suggests that Chandler's life is as interesting as his writing. However, it is his novels that I am interested in reading, so my choices are The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, both of which sound like metaphors for death. Going out and looking for these books, I found a collected works that includes

• The Big Sleep
• The High Window
• The Lady in the Lake
• The Long Goodbye
• Playback
• Farewell My Lovely

Imagining that I would like to read all of these eventually, I started at the beginning with The Big Sleep.

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In The Big Sleep, LA detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a millionaire to investigate some petty blackmailing involving his wayward daughter, but the story very quickly spirals into vice, murder, missing persons, hidden motives, madness, kidnapping, and so a little story about extortion becomes … well, I don't know if I really understand what really happened. The story is very convoluted and the main antagonist changes every couple of chapters. It is all a bit of a roller coaster; you do eventually get back to where you started, but the path there is exhilarating.

The story is very clever, but there is much more to the novel than just a clever story. I was expecting it to be a pulp story, and while it is racy and violent, the writing is magnificent. Poetic even. That is the only thing that surprised me about the book, however. While I knew nothing about the story before I read it, it felt utterly familiar. I felt I knew the characters, the setting, the themes. It was all full of clichés – though that shouldn't be held against Raymond Chandler as you get the feeling he is the originator of all those clichés.