The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees. Her fingers clawed at her palm. She stared at me and chopped off a breath.

  “Is he sick? I could go up to the house,” I said impatiently. “I haven’t got forever.”

  “You—a—you—a—”2 her throat jammed. I thought she was going to fall on her nose. Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.3

  “No,” she breathed. “No. He’s out of town. That—wouldn’t be any use. Can’t you—come in—tomorrow?”

  I had my mouth open to say something when the partition door opened a foot. The tall dark handsome boy in the jerkin looked out, pale-faced and tight-lipped, saw me, shut the door quickly again, but not before I had seen on the floor behind him a lot of wooden boxes lined with newspapers and packed loosely with books. A man in very new overalls was fussing with them. Some of Geiger’s stock was being moved out.

  When the door shut I put my dark glasses on again and touched my hat. “Tomorrow, then. I’d like to give you a card, but you know how it is.”

  “Ye-es. I know how it is.” She shivered a little more and made a faint sucking noise between her bright lips. I went out of the store and west on the boulevard to the corner and north on the street to the alley which ran behind the stores. A small black truck with wire sides and no lettering on it was backed up to Geiger’s place. The man in the very new overalls was just heaving a box up on the tailboard. I went back to the boulevard and along the block next to Geiger’s and found a taxi standing at a fireplug. A fresh-faced kid was reading a horror magazine4 behind the wheel. I leaned in and showed him a dollar:5 “Tail job?”

  He looked me over. “Cop?”

  “Private.”

  He grinned. “My meat, Jack.” He tucked the magazine over his rear view mirror and I got into the cab. We went around the block and pulled up across from Geiger’s alley, beside another fireplug.

  There were about a dozen boxes on the truck when the man in overalls closed the screened doors and hooked the tailboard up and got in behind the wheel.

  “Take him,” I told my driver.

  The man in overalls gunned his motor, shot a glance up and down the alley and ran away fast in the other direction. He turned left out of the alley. We did the same. I caught a glimpse of the truck turning east on Franklin and told my driver to close in a little. He didn’t or couldn’t do it. I saw the truck two blocks away when we got to Franklin. We had it in sight to Vine and across Vine and all the way to Western. We saw it twice after Western. There was a lot of traffic and the fresh-faced kid tailed from too far back. I was telling him about that without mincing words when the truck, now far ahead, turned north again. The street at which it turned was called Brittany Place. When we got to Brittany Place the truck had vanished.

  The fresh-faced kid made comforting sounds at me through the panel and we went up the hill at four miles an hour looking for the truck behind bushes. Two blocks up, Brittany Place swung to the east and met Randall Place6 in a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with its front on Randall Place and its basement garage opening on Brittany. We were going past that and the fresh-faced kid was telling me the truck couldn’t be far away when I looked through the arched entrance of the garage and saw it back in the dimness with its rear doors open again.

  We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out. There was nobody in the lobby, no switchboard. A wooden desk was pushed back against the wall beside a panel of gilt mailboxes.7 I looked the names over. A man named Joseph Brody had Apartment 405. A man named Joe Brody had received five thousand dollars from General Sternwood to stop playing with Carmen and find some other little girl to play with. It could be the same Joe Brody. I felt like giving odds on it.

  I went around an elbow of wall to the foot of tiled stairs and the shaft of the automatic elevator. The top of the elevator was level with the floor. There was a door beside the shaft lettered “Garage.” I opened it and went down narrow steps to the basement. The automatic elevator was propped open and the man in new overalls was grunting hard as he stacked heavy boxes in it. I stood beside him and lit a cigarette and watched him. He didn’t like my watching him.

  After a while I said: “Watch the weight, bud. She’s only tested for half a ton. Where’s the stuff going?”

  “Brody, four-o-five,” he grunted. “Manager?”

  “Yeah. Looks like a nice lot of loot.”

  He glared at me with pale white-rimmed eyes. “Books,” he snarled. “A hundred pounds a box, easy, and me with a seventy-five pound back.”

  “Well, watch the weight,” I said.

  He got into the elevator with six boxes and shut the doors. I went back up the steps to the lobby and out to the street and the cab took me downtown again to my office building.8 I gave the fresh-faced kid too much money and he gave me a dog-eared business card which for once I didn’t drop into the majolica jar of sand beside the elevator bank.9

  I had a room and a half on the seventh floor at the back.10 The half-room was an office split in two to make reception rooms. Mine had my name on it and nothing else, and that only on the reception room. I always left this unlocked, in case I had a client, and the client cared to sit down and wait.

  I had a client.11

  1. The implication being that big men are big men, evidently—masculine and heterosexual.

  “Fairy” for a man thought to be homosexual or perceived to be effeminate is an Americanism that seems to have entered the language in the late nineteenth century among the gay underground: the transgender author Jennie June, born as Earl Lind, thought it derived as an expression of gratitude among sailors deprived of female companionship on long voyages. When a young sailor offered to take the place of the absent woman, he would be “looked upon as a fairy gift or godsend” and referred to as “the fairy” (Autobiography of an Androgyne, 1918).

  This is the first of five slang terms for “gay” that Chandler uses, as if chasing the concept hysterically around the lexicon. Or perhaps as if trying to outdo Hammett, who used only three such terms in The Maltese Falcon. The others in TBS will be, in order of appearance: “fag,” “punk,” “queen,” and “pansy” (not to mention a comparison involving Julius Caesar). They are all derogatory, but not entirely interchangeable. See note 2 on this page, note 3 on this page, and note 6 on this page.

  2. Pornographer. Marlowe’s “snooty book collector” act has so impressed the clerk that she’s shocked at this “unveiling” (to reveal another act).

  3. Some of the most gleefully elaborate metaphorical descriptions in the novel describe the clerk’s efforts to smile (see also this page).

  4. Horror pulps popular in the 1930s included Horror Stories, Strange Stories, and Terror Tales. They vied with detective-themed (and fantasy- and adventure- and Western- and war- and “bizarre”- and romance-themed) pulps for the attentions of an enthusiastic, largely adolescent male mass readership. Genre fiction, so-called, was largely codified here. Chandler was a sly practitioner in pulp fiction, wryly commenting on its popularity on the one hand and its lowly social status on the other. In The Little Sister, Chandler ironically has the bald, burly, and decidedly unromantic George W. Hicks reading a “love-pulp.” In The High Window, a reader at a magazine rack haughtily sneers at Marlowe over the pages of The New Republic. “You ought to lay off that fluff and get your teeth into something solid, like a pulp magazine,” Marlowe sardonically remarks.

  Horror magazine, 1920s

  Pulps outnumber “legitimate” magazines at a newsstand in 1938 (courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  5. A little more than seventeen dollars now; the general equivalent of fla
shing a twenty today.

  6. Brittany Place and Randall Place are both fictional streets.

  Franklin Avenue and surrounding areas (courtesy of the Prelinger Library)

  7. As theorist Fredric Jameson has pointed out, Chandler calls our attention to an array of overlooked quotidian objects—mailboxes, ashtrays, spittoons—and makes us see them afresh. This may be a feature of detective fiction in general, but Chandler does it in a strikingly stylized way. His lobbies and offices, his waiting rooms and city streets present tableaus of impersonal commonality, a poetics of the scenes of our shared everyday lives.

  8. In Farewell, My Lovely, he gives a Hollywood address: “615 Cahuenga building, Hollywood. That’s on Hollywood Boulevard near Ivar. My phone number is Glenview 7537.” It’s across from a “Mansion House Hotel.” The Cahuenga building is fictional, but there are 1930s office buildings still standing at Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar. Marlowe’s office stays in the Cahuenga building throughout the later novels, though he regularly changes residences.

  Hollywood Boulevard, 1936

  9. “Killer in the Rain”: “I gave the driver too much money and he gave me a dirty card which I dropped into the brass spittoon beside the elevators.” The tiny change that Chandler makes for the novel reverses the effect of the scene: this time around Marlowe is impressed enough with the “fresh-faced kid” to keep his business card. For the film, Hawks turns the scene into another opportunity for boy/girl flirtation, as the kid becomes a woman, played by Joy Barlow, who enjoys a few moments of sexy banter with Marlowe. A female hack would have been a novelty at the time of TBS: women weren’t issued licenses to drive cabs before World War II.

  A majolica jar is an earthenware pot with a white tin glaze, often illustrated with bright colors, of Italian or Moorish design. Here it is used as an ashtray.

  “ ‘WAS IT SOMETHING?’ ”: FROM “KILLER IN THE RAIN”

  This scene in Chandler’s 1935 short story “Killer in the Rain” was considerably elaborated upon for its corresponding scene in The Big Sleep.

  She gave me what she thought was a smile of welcome, but what I thought was a grimace of strain.

  “Was it something?”

  I pulled my hat low over my eyes and fidgeted. I said: “Steiner?”

  “He won’t be in today. May I show you—”

  “I’m selling,” I said. “Something he’s wanted for a long time.”

  The silvered fingernails touched her hair over one ear. “Oh, a salesman….Well, you might come in tomorrow.”

  “He sick? I could go up to the house,” I suggested hopefully. “He’d want to see what I have.”

  That jarred her. She had to fight for her breath for a minute. But her voice was smooth enough when it came.

  “That—that wouldn’t be any use. He’s out of town today.”

  10. In The High Window it’s “two small rooms,” still at the back, but on the sixth floor. Did Marlowe change offices, or did Chandler misremember?

  11. A client (usually a beautiful woman) walks into the detective’s office: a scene that has been repeated in countless crime novels. Here Chandler is possibly giving a hat-tip to the opening of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

  Who’s in the saddle: Filming The Big Sleep

  The first film version of TBS was released in 1946. Much of the popular conception of the private eye comes from this visualization and the one given in The Maltese Falcon, released in 1941. The trench coat, the fedora, the gauntlet of dangerous dames, and the indispensable Humphrey Bogart now come to mind in connection with the detective genre. As we have noted, this isn’t the style as written by Chandler, but even fans who know better can’t help melding the two.

  The plot, already somewhat confusing in keeping with Chandler’s “style-over-plot” philosophy, was made more difficult when Warner Bros. insisted that director Howard Hawks recut the film. The final cut, perhaps even more than the novel, has led to the popular belief that Chandler’s plots are indecipherable. Manny Farber reviewed the film favorably for The New Republic but also said it “winds as crazily as a Greenwich Village street and involves so many secondary crimes and criminals that figuring it out makes you faint.” Some later critics argued that the plot does have an inner logic, with the possible exception of one famous loose end (see the “Who Killed Owen Taylor?” text box on this page).

  Hawks directed his screenwriters to be faithful to the book, but changes were made. Lauren Bacall’s character is morally cleaned up, to soothe the censors and to keep the actress’s image untarnished. She is no longer “Mrs. Regan,” she is not married to an ex-IRA bootlegger, and her involvement with the gangsters is softened. And of course Vivian and Marlowe fall in love, leading to a happy ending. It’s not, after all, a faithful rendering, but it is hard to quibble with Bogart and Bacall and brilliant dialogue like this, added almost a year after the original filming:

  VIVIAN: Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first. See if they’re front-runners, or come from behind….I’d say you don’t like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the back stretch, and then come home free.

  MARLOWE: You’ve got a touch of class, but I don’t know how far you can go.

  VIVIAN: A lot depends on who is in the saddle.

  The 1978 remake features Robert Mitchum, who also played Marlowe in the 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely. Although the film, oddly, takes place in London, there was an effort to be more faithful to the book, with direct quotes and a series of flashbacks to help explain the plot. Mitchum even dons a blue suit, albeit dark blue (see note 3 on this page). Despite all this and a rousing Jimmy Stewart cameo as Sternwood, the film falls flat. As Roger Ebert said in his review at the time, “The movie feels kind of embalmed in plot.”

  For their 1998 cult film The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers drew inspiration from both the Hawks adaptation and Robert Altman’s dramatic reenvisioning of The Long Goodbye (1973; it was scripted by Big Sleep coscriptwriter Leigh Brackett). In Altman’s film, Elliott Gould played Marlowe as a laid-back anachronism. Not far from that tree, The Big Lebowski features Jeff Bridges as “The Dude,” the next step in Marlowe’s Californicated evolution. Ethan Coen, in a 2000 interview, said that “we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much of it’s about LA.” And Joel Coen reiterates the popular belief about The Big Sleep: “It moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery. As well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” Or, as Hawks himself once put it in an interview, “There are some things that are unexplained. You don’t know who killed who or anything.”

  ELEVEN

  She wore brownish speckled tweeds, a mannish shirt and tie, hand-carved walking shoes.1 Her stockings were just as sheer as the day before, but she wasn’t showing as much of her legs. Her black hair2 was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.3

  “Well, you do get up,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy’s size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. “I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.”4

  “Who’s he?” I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain.

  “A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates.5 You wouldn’t know him.”6

  “Tut, tut,” I said. “Come into my boudoir.”7

  She stood up and said: “We didn’t get along very well yesterday. Perhaps I was rude
.”

  “We were both rude,” I said. I unlocked the communicating door and held it for her. We went into the rest of my suite, which contained a rust-red carpet, not very young, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate,8 an advertising calendar showing the Quints9 rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses, with seal-brown hair and sharp black eyes as large as mammoth prunes. There were three near-walnut chairs, the usual desk with the usual blotter, pen set, ashtray and telephone, and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it.10

  “You don’t put on much of a front,”11 she said, sitting down at the customer’s side of the desk.

  I went over to the mail slot and picked up six envelopes, two letters and four pieces of advertising matter. I hung my hat on the telephone and sat down.

  “Neither do the Pinkertons,”12 I said. “You can’t make much money at this trade, if you’re honest. If you have a front, you’re making money—or expect to.”

  “Oh—are you honest?” she asked and opened her bag. She picked a cigarette out of a French enamel case, lit it with a pocket lighter, dropped case and lighter back into the bag and left the bag open.

  “Painfully.”13

  “How did you get into this slimy kind of business then?”

  “How did you come to marry a bootlegger?”

  “My God, let’s not start quarreling again.14 I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here and at your apartment.”

  “About Owen?”

  Her face tightened sharply. Her voice was soft. “Poor Owen,” she said. “So you know about that.”

  “A D.A.’s man took me down to Lido. He thought I might know something about it. But he knew much more than I did. He knew Owen wanted to marry your sister—once.”

  She puffed silently at her cigarette and considered me with steady black eyes. “Perhaps it wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” she said quietly. “He was in love with her. We don’t find much of that in our circle.”