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The Big Sleep opens with my favourite paragraph in all crime fiction and doesn't let up until a wonderfully-written coda. It was one of the first crime novels I ever read, and is still one of the best.
Raymond Chandler didn't start writing stories until his forties, by which time he was a drunk, having lost a successful job as an oil-man. He picked up a pulp magazine, reckoned he could do better, and began to write. He was a World War One veteran, a victim of shell-shock (his wartime experiences left him with that taste for the bottle). He'd tried his hand at poetry and non-fiction, had fallen for a married woman, and lived in London and Ireland as well as the USA.
Which is another way of saying he'd seen life.
The Big Sleep is a story of sex, drugs, blackmail and high society narrated by a cynical tough guy, Philip Marlowe. As such, it provides the template for much of the urban crime fiction which came after, as well as most modern Hollywood thrillers. What sets it apart from the crowd, however, is the quality of the mind which conceived it. Chandler's pulp credentials show in the twisting of the plot, yet it reads with the simple inevitability of classical tragedy: General Sternwood, the ailing millionaire who needs Marlowe's help, is a king betrayed by his unruly daughters.
When the younger Sternwood daughter turns up naked in Marlowe's apartment, he concentrates instead on a chess problem, concluding that 'knights had no meaning in this game'. Marlowe, however, remains a knight of sorts – tarnished, to be sure, a knight errant. The work he does is dirty, but he maintains his own moral code. Marlowe encounters damsels in distress and plenty of monsters (usually in the guise of gangsters and corrupt authority figures). All of which shows just what a firm, literate grasp Chandler had of the genre within which he worked, even if no one noticed at first: the hardcover sales of his first two novels earned him only the equivalent of three months' oil salary.
Chandler described the American crime novel as being 'dark and full of blood' (as opposed to its 'lithe and clever' English equivalent), and said of Marlowe: 'I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated'. When he died, one obituary stated that 'in working the vein of crime fiction [Chandler] mined the gold of literature'. Few writers have come close to matching him.
The Big Sleep, however, is such fun to read, you probably won't notice how clever its author is being. Chandler remains the king of the one-liner. An example such as 'He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse' is both witty and full of subtle meaning, telling us much about the flunky's disappointed life. By the time Marlowe, at the end of the book, describes the 'bright gardens' outside the Sternwood mansion as having 'a haunted look', we realise that sunny and prosperous California is a tainted Eden, a place essentially dark and full of blood.
It's a world which has had no finer chronicler than Raymond Chandler.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, introduced by Ian Rankin, is out now, published by Penguin |
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