The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  Ohls said hello to a deputy in green khaki and a man in plain clothes. The barge crew of three men leaned against the front of the wheelhouse and chewed tobacco. One of them was rubbing at his wet hair with a dirty bath-towel. That would be the man who had gone down into the water to put the chains on.

  We looked the car over. The front bumper was bent, one headlight smashed, the other bent up but the glass still unbroken. The radiator shell had a big dent in it, and the paint and nickel were scratched up all over the car. The upholstery was sodden and black. None of the tires seemed to be damaged.

  The driver was still draped around the steering post with his head at an unnatural angle to his shoulders. He was a slim dark-haired kid who had been good-looking not so long ago. Now his face was bluish white and his eyes were a faint dull gleam under the lowered lids and his open mouth had sand in it. On the left side of his forehead there was a dull bruise that stood out against the whiteness of the skin.

  Ohls backed away, made a noise in his throat and put a match to his little cigar. “What’s the story?”

  The uniformed man pointed up at the rubbernecks on the end of the pier. One of them was fingering a place where the white two-by-fours had been broken through in a wide space. The splintered wood showed yellow and clean, like fresh-cut pine.

  “Went through there. Must have hit pretty hard. The rain stopped early down here, around nine p.m. The broken wood’s dry inside. That puts it after the rain stopped. She fell in plenty of water not to be banged up worse, not more than half tide or she’d have drifted farther, and not more than half tide going out or she’d have crowded the piles. That makes it around ten last night. Maybe nine-thirty, not earlier. She shows under the water when the boys come down to fish this morning, so we get the barge to hoist her out and we find the dead guy.”

  The plainclothesman scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. Ohls looked sideways along his eyes at me, and twitched his little cigar like a cigarette.

  “Drunk?” he asked, of nobody in particular.

  The man who had been toweling his head went over to the rail and cleared his throat in a loud hawk that made everybody look at him. “Got some sand,” he said, and spat. “Not as much as the boy friend got—but some.”

  The uniformed man said: “Could have been drunk. Showing off all alone in the rain. Drunks will do anything.”

  “Drunk, hell,” the plainclothesman said. “The hand throttle’s11 set halfway down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.”

  Ohls looked at the man with the towel. “What do you think, buddy?”

  The man with the towel looked flattered. He grinned. “I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide. First off the guy plowed an awful straight furrow down that pier. You can read his tread marks all the way nearly. That puts it after the rain like the Sheriff said. Then he hit the pier hard and clean or he don’t go through and land right side up. More likely turned over a couple of times. So he had plenty of speed and hit the rail square. That’s more than half-throttle. He could have done that with his hand falling and he could have hurt his head falling too.”

  Ohls said: “You got eyes, buddy. Frisked him?” he asked the deputy. The deputy looked at me, then at the crew against the wheelhouse. “Okey, save that,” Ohls said.

  A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came down the steps from the pier. He picked out a fairly clean spot on the deck and put the bag down. Then he took his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck and stared out to sea, as if he didn’t know where he was or what he had come for.

  Ohls said: “There’s your customer, Doc. Dove off the pier last night. Around nine to ten. That’s all we know.”

  The small man looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, peered at the bruise on the temple, moved the head around with both hands, felt the man’s ribs. He lifted a lax dead hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall and watched it fall. He stepped back and opened his bag and took out a printed pad of D.O.A. forms and began to write over a carbon.

  “Broken neck’s the apparent cause of death,” he said, writing. “Which means there won’t be much water in him. Which means he’s due to start getting stiff pretty quick now he’s out in the air. Better get him out of the car before he does. You won’t like doing it after.”

  Ohls nodded. “How long dead, Doc?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Ohls looked at him sharply and took the little cigar out of his mouth and looked at that sharply. “Pleased to know you, Doc.12 A coroner’s man that can’t guess within five minutes has me beat.”

  The little man grinned sourly and put his pad in his bag and clipped his pencil back on his vest. “If he ate dinner last night, I’ll tell you—if I know what time he ate it. But not within five minutes.”

  “How would he get that bruise—falling?”

  The little man looked at the bruise again. “I don’t think so. That blow came from something covered. And it had already bled subcutaneously while he was alive.”

  “Blackjack,13 huh?”

  “Very likely.”

  The little M.E.’s man nodded, picked his bag off the deck and went back up the steps to the pier. An ambulance was backing into position outside the stucco arch. Ohls looked at me and said: “Let’s go. Hardly worth the ride, was it?”

  We went back along the pier and got into Ohls’ sedan again. He wrestled it around on the highway and drove back towards town along a three-lane highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with pink moss.14 Seaward a few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf and far out a white yacht looked as if it was hanging in the sky.

  Ohls cocked his chin at me and said: “Know him?”

  “Sure. The Sternwood chauffeur. I saw him dusting that very car out there yesterday.”

  “I don’t want to crowd you, Marlowe. Just tell me, did the job have anything to do with him?”

  “No. I don’t even know his name.”

  “Owen Taylor. How do I know? Funny about that. About a year or so back we had him in the cooler on a Mann Act rap. It seems he run Sternwood’s hotcha daughter, the young one, off to Yuma.15 The sister ran after them and brought them back and had Owen heaved into the icebox.16 Then next day she comes down to the D.A. and gets him to beg the kid off with the U. S. ’cutor.17 She says the kid meant to marry her sister and wanted to, only the sister can’t see it. All she wanted was to kick a few high ones off the bar and have herself a party. So we let the kid go and then darned if they don’t have him come back to work. And a little later we get the routine report on his prints from Washington, and he’s got a prior back in Indiana, attempted hold-up six years ago. He got off with six months in the county jail, the very one Dillinger bust out of.18 We hand that to the Sternwoods and they keep him on just the same. What do you think of that?”

  “They seem to be a screwy family,” I said. “Do they know about last night?”

  “No. I gotta go up against them now.”

  “Leave the old man out of it, if you can.”

  “Why?”

  “He has enough troubles and he’s sick.”

  “You mean Regan?”

  I scowled. “I don’t know anything about Regan, I told you. I’m not looking for Regan. Regan hasn’t bothered anybody that I know of.”19

  Ohls said: “Oh,” and stared thoughtfully out to sea and the sedan nearly went off the road. For the rest of the drive back to town he hardly spoke. He dropped me off in Hollywood near the Chinese Theater20 and turned back west to Alta Brea Crescent. I ate lunch at a counter and looked at an afternoon paper and couldn’t find anything about Geiger in it.

  After lunch I walked east on the boulevard to have another look at Geiger’s store.

  1. Day two. Chandler i
s reversing what Victorian art critic John Ruskin famously called the “Pathetic Fallacy,” where natural conditions reflect the emotions of the speaker. Day one was overcast and rainy, but Marlowe was chipper and sober; now the sun shines brightly on his hangover.

  2. Of course, Chandler isn’t going to simply state that Marlowe woke up dehydrated and hungover. A motorman’s glove would be dry and leathery and wouldn’t taste very good.

  3. Coffee, like alcohol, is a beverage of substance in the Marlowe stories. In The Long Goodbye, he gushes, “Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.” “Anyone can make good coffee in this country,” Chandler wrote, “although it seems quite impossible in England.”

  4. LA’s citywide morning newspapers were the Los Angeles Times and, on weekends, the Examiner (later the Herald Examiner).

  Los Angeles Times front page for March 24, 1939

  5. Marlowe’s ex-colleague from the DA’s office. Ohls plays the stock part of the private detective’s inside man. This is a business relationship but also a friendship based on mutual respect. (Remember, it was Ohls who put Marlowe in touch with the General.) Notice the lack of wisecracking between them. This is replaced with an easy informality and good-natured needling between men who are comfortable working together. Chandler rarely used recurring characters, but Ohls appears in “Finger Man” and in The Long Goodbye.

  A possible model for the Ohls character is Leslie White, who was an investigator at the DA’s office in the twenties. (See note 3 on this page.) He was part of the gangbusting unit that tracked down Ralph Sheldon, a Chicago gangster who surfaced in LA in the late twenties. He was also involved in the investigation of the Ned Doheny/Hugh Plunkett murder-suicide case at Greystone in 1929. White wrote about the case in his book Me, Detective. Elements of the lurid crime involving the son of an oil baron and his secretary enter into Chandler’s work, especially The High Window (1942). White also had a career as a pulp writer, wrote screenplays, and provided the story for the Boris Karloff horror classic The Man They Could Not Hang (1939).

  6. dame: Now possibly the quintessential buzzword of hard-boiled lingo, the American slang usage ironizes the original, respectful meaning of the term, which is “lady” in the aristocratic sense. (Keats’s belle dame is a beautiful lady, not a gorgeous dame.) It comes from domina, the female of dominus, “lord,” and is still used as an honorific in Britain. Chandler, who would have known its provenance, uses it relatively neutrally in TBS; as Mencken says, it was “rather contemptuous” in most other American contexts.

  7. Okey: One variant spelling of this very common Americanism.

  8. This is the first of more than a half-dozen times that Marlowe declares this—the second if you include his dance around the subject with Vivian in Chapter Three. Not Looking for Rusty Regan could almost be the title of the novel. The actual title will resonate profoundly with this declared anti-quest.

  Here Chandler inverts the romance trope of the quest, in which the hero journeys to defeat a dragon or monster, destroy a magic ring, or find something or someone: the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, or that damsel in distress referenced in Sternwood’s stained glass.

  But he’s also reversing the polarity on a couple of mystery devices: the red herring and the MacGuffin. The MacGuffin (or McGuffin or Maguffin) is the thing that captivates the protagonist—and the reader—and propels the story forward. In a 1939 lecture at Columbia University, Alfred Hitchcock said that “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” In Chandler’s next novel (Farewell, My Lovely), it will indeed be a stolen jade necklace; in the following (The High Window), a rare gold coin. It can be a jewel-encrusted statue of a bird; a mysterious name like “Rosebud”; or the Holy Grail itself. Quentin Tarantino never tells you what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994), making it the Platonic Ideal of the MacGuffin. The repeated assumption that Marlowe is looking for Rusty, and his repeated denials, function as a rhetorical MacGuffin in the gap where the real thing should be: awfully suspicious, these repeated denials.

  But the aptly nicknamed “Rusty” might also be a version of the red herring (red-hairing?) device. This is the placing of an ersatz clue by the author that sends the reader down a blind alley and cloaks the true solution to the mystery. It’s the thing that neither the hero nor the reader should pursue but does. Rusty would seem to be a reverse red herring, or a red herring of a red herring—the thing Marlowe evidently should be pursuing but isn’t. Until, of course, he is.

  This red herring of a red herring, this negative space where the MacGuffin should be: Chandler is playing with the reader’s expectations of what a mystery will read like, even as he’s collapsing the mystery and romance genres and inverting romance conventions with the anti-quest. There is some high-level literary gamesmanship going on here, less reminiscent of conventional purveyors of mystery plots like Doyle, Christie, or Ellery Queen than of Melville, Borges, or Pynchon.

  9. Sunset Boulevard meets the Pacific Coast Highway (just the Coast Highway at the time of the novel) in Pacific Palisades, just north of Santa Monica. Ten miles farther north is the Malibu Pier, built in 1905, the closest match for Lido.

  Coast Highway (courtesy of Loren Latker, Shamus Town collection)

  Malibu Pier

  10. Foreshadowing the descent to the scene of death in the novel’s denouement.

  11. Many cars from the 1930s and ’40s featured a hand throttle, usually placed on or near the steering wheel, that could be used in place of the gas pedal.

  12. Chandler novels hardly qualify as police procedurals, but here we have honest working guys going about their business, relatively good-humoredly given the situation. Sean McCann in Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000) argues that Chandler’s first two novels reflect 1930s New Deal populism in idealizing a brotherhood of working men in opposition to gangsters and millionaires.

  13. blackjack: A club with a flexible handle, also called a sap, often filled with lead. The blackjack will return, looming over Marlowe in Realito.

  Blackjack, or sap (drawing by Matt Seneca)

  14. Possibly the pink flowering lipia grass that the 1939 WPA Guide mentions just south of Malibu in Castellammare.

  15. Like so many at that time, Owen Taylor comes from points east after trouble at home. He falls for Carmen and naively wishes to make an honest woman out of her, but he is foiled in his attempt when he comes up against the selectively enforced Mann Act, a law that made it illegal to transport “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Taylor is a part of the great American tradition of western migration (as was Chandler), another midwesterner coming to LA to find a better life. Chandler takes sociological fact and molds it to fit the conventions of what would later be called noir…but not quite. We do see a poor sap drawn in and felled by an evil woman, but here again Chandler puts a different spin on the genre. Taylor lacks the streak of larceny that doomed Walter Huff in Cain’s Double Indemnity (named Walter Neff in the film by Billy Wilder, cowritten by Chandler). Because Taylor’s aim is true, his death seems more tragic. He recalls the broken dreams that came out of the western migration. David Fine writes that “in the iconography of hard-boiled fiction, the end of the highway was the end of the dream. When the continent runs out, the dream runs out too.” Or, as Nathanael West writes in The Day of the Locust, “Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.”

  16. icebox: Jail.

  17. ’cutor: Prosecutor.

  18. Gangster John Dillinger famously escaped from the county jail in Crown Point, Indiana, in 1934 after threatening guards with a gun he had whittled out of wood (or so the story went).

  19. Except Marlowe
himself, who seems to be annoyed by the traces of Rusty he’s confronted with wherever he turns. Marlowe’s avowed disinterest in Regan is now so profound that it makes Ohls almost drive off the road.

  20. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard, near Highland. A Hollywood landmark, built in 1927 to capitalize on the success of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, built in 1922, also on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (Photofest)

  TEN

  The lean black-eyed credit jeweler was standing in his entrance in the same position as the afternoon before. He gave me the same knowing look as I turned in. The store looked just the same. The same lamp glowed on the small desk in the corner and the same ash blonde in the same black suede-like dress got up from behind it and came towards me with the same tentative smile on her face.

  “Was it—?” she said and stopped. Her silver nails twitched at her side. There was an overtone of strain in her smile. It wasn’t a smile at all. It was a grimace. She just thought it was a smile.

  “Back again,” I chirped airily, and waved a cigarette. “Mr. Geiger in today?”

  “I’m—I’m afraid not. No—I’m afraid not. Let me see—you wanted…?”

  I took my dark glasses off and tapped them delicately on the inside of my left wrist. If you can weigh a hundred and ninety pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best.1

  “That was just a stall about those first editions,” I whispered. “I have to be careful. I’ve got something he’ll want. Something he’s wanted for a long time.”

  The silver fingernails touched the blond hair over one small jet-buttoned ear. “Oh, a salesman,” she said. “Well—you might come in tomorrow. I think he’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Drop the veil,” I said. “I’m in the business too.”