The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  “I’d have to have a little dough,” Brody said. He turned his head a little to look at the green-eyed blonde. Not now green-eyed and only superficially a blonde.34 She was as limp as a fresh-killed rabbit.

  “No dough,” I said.

  He scowled bitterly. “How’d you get to me?”

  I flicked my wallet out and let him look at my buzzer. “I was working on Geiger—for a client. I was outside last night, in the rain. I heard the shots. I crashed in. I didn’t see the killer. I saw everything else.”

  “And kept your lip buttoned,” Brody sneered.

  I put my wallet away. “Yes,” I admitted. “Up till now. Do I get the photos or not?”

  “About these books,” Brody said. “I don’t get that.”

  “I tailed them here from Geiger’s store. I have a witness.”

  “That punk kid?”35

  “What punk kid?”

  He scowled again. “The kid that works at the store. He skipped out after the truck left. Agnes don’t even know where he flops.”36

  “That helps,” I said, grinning at him. “That angle worried me a little. Either of you ever been in Geiger’s house—before last night?”

  “Not even last night,” Brody said sharply. “So she says I gunned him, eh?”

  “With the photos in hand I might be able to convince her she was wrong. There was a little drinking being done.”

  Brody sighed. “She hates my guts. I bounced her out.37 I got paid, sure, but I’d of had to do it anyway. She’s too screwy for a simple guy like me.” He cleared his throat. “How about a little dough? I’m down to nickels. Agnes and me gotta move on.”

  “Not from my client.”

  “Listen—”

  “Get the pictures, Brody.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “You win.” He stood up and slipped the Colt into his side pocket. His left hand went up inside his coat. He was holding it there, his face twisted with disgust, when the door buzzer rang and kept on ringing.

  1. The 1930s were a golden age of radio, although Marlowe seems pretty unimpressed. “Bleating” is what sheep do.

  2. Not a promising description for an operator who thrives and survives on his wits. Marlowe will remain decidedly unimpressed by Brody’s intelligence throughout their brief encounter.

  3. That’s four “brown”s, with several more to follow, and steel wool hair. Chandler normally slings the ethnonyms around (“the Indian,” “the Mexican,” “the Jew”; see note 6 on this page for “Filipino”). By contrast, Brody’s features mark him as ambiguously “ethnic,” perhaps Eastern European (Brody is a traditional Hungarian last name). Shades perhaps of the “Levantine” Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon?

  4. A card game that dates back to the seventeenth century, notoriously vulnerable to cheating by the players but also by the dealers.

  5. One of Chandler’s low-level gangsters, Brody follows the money whenever and wherever possible. He sees himself as a smart, smooth operator, but as Marlowe points out, he’s too slow on the uptake to come out on top. Fittingly, a 1935 dictionary of underworld slang gives, for “Brody”: “To take a chance and lose; stupid.” It derives from a saloon-keeper who in 1886 allegedly jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge to win $200. Hence, “doing a Brody” (or “Brodie”).

  6. “Grift” is an integral word, key to the sensibility of the period and the hard-boiled genre alike. It derived from “graft,” originally nineteenth-century American slang for criminal activity in general and subsequently applied to the systematically corrupt politicians of the period. The “graft” was the private gain that was added to a public project. Consequently, a “grift” would be a way to make money illicitly, a scam of some sort, while a “grifter” would be one who lives by such scams: a con artist or a “hustler.” In the early twentieth century, the term was also applied to operators of rigged sideshows at carnivals (“carnies”). There is an aura of romance around the term, suggesting a fraternity of low-level outlaws who survive through cunning and creativity—who live by their wits, as opposed to violence. The über-hard-boiled writer Jim Thompson famously commemorated the type in The Grifters (1963):

  “You can usually play a fairly long stand in Los Angeles, because it ain’t just one town. It’s a county full of towns, dozens of ’em. And with traffic so bad and a lousy transportation system, the people don’t mix around like they do in New York. But”—he wagged a finger severely—“but that still doesn’t mean you can run wild, kid. You’re a grifter, see? A thief. You’ve got no home and no friends, and no visible means of support. And you damned well better not ever forget it.”

  Incidentally, Thompson had a minor role in the 1975 film version of Farewell, My Lovely, with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe.

  7. sucker list: Here, the list of customers in the porn racket. The term was also used by salesmen to identify regular buyers. As in the exchange with Eddie Mars, Marlowe employs the lingo when it suits him.

  8. davenport: A large upholstered sofa.

  9. crab-fashion: Sideways. Brody is keeping an eye on his unexpected guest.

  10. black Police .38: The classic law enforcement gun, manufactured by Colt.

  11. Put your hands up. Brody’s dialogue is even more riddled with gangster patois than that of Eddie Mars, as if to illustrate Sam Spade’s comment “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter” (The Maltese Falcon).

  Black .38 police special (from the collection of Benjamin Whitmer)

  12. These two sentences continue Marlowe’s—and Chandler’s—play with the generic types within hard-boiled fiction. For starters, by articulating this, Marlowe is telling the reader that he is not that guy. He’s not Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Cagney or George Raft. And not only does he differentiate himself from the tough guy in the pictures, but he snickers at those who mimic that type. By having Marlowe say this to the reader, via internal monologue, Chandler has his detective critique the very genre he’s playing in. This adds to the verisimilitude: Marlowe (not a real person) is saying, “That way of behaving is phony. Real people don’t act that way.” Chandler was intensely aware of the way in which Hollywood-produced language and images were becoming reality, and he critiques it at every opportunity. For two other examples, see note 18 on this page and note 26 on this page.

  In 1997’s The Untouchable, John Banville lifts this trope when his novice secret agent “narrows his eyes as the thrillers had taught him to do.” Banville, writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, went on to publish The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel in 2014.

  13. Again, against type. Marlowe keeps himself armed more regularly in subsequent novels but remains skeptical of the authority that conveys. “Guns never settle anything,” Marlowe will say almost twenty years later, in Playback. “They’re just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”

  14. gat: Originally short for “Gatling gun,” an early machine gun; by 1939 generic hard-boiled (or gangster film) lingo for any firearm.

  15. Marlowe is implying that Brody killed Geiger as a way (we later find out) to get a sense of Brody’s reaction. He’s also indicating that regardless of his innocence, Brody could take the blame. Marlowe uses an ominous metaphor that the grifter Brody can appreciate: a check raiser was someone who raised the amounts on handwritten checks, a problem big enough that office supply companies sold mechanical check writers to prevent alteration. Some fraudsters used acids to wipe the check clean before rewriting it.

  16. More tough-guy patter.

  17. An appropriately theatrical entrance. Agnes, repeatedly referred to as “the blonde,” is not exactly a woman of class, hardly the siren type except possibly to other grifters like Brody or Harry Jones. She’s too crass to be kin to Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and not as sharp and manipulative as Cora Papadakis, the classic femme fatale with a “gaze of Scandi
navian iciness” in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). The mythology around blondes goes back. Émile Zola wrote in Nana, published in 1880: “She listened to his propositions, turning them down every time with a shake of the head and that provocative laughter which is peculiar to full-bodied blondes.” Classic celluloid blondes Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow (the original “Blonde Bombshell”) achieved fame in the 1930s. Both were midwesterners, from Indiana and Kansas, respectively, who went west to break into pictures. But Agnes is no Lombard or Harlow, either. She’s one of several low-level grifters, sad figures who populate Chandler’s Los Angeles, too small-time to be tragic. Foregoing all this literary and social resonance, the classic 1946 movie made Agnes into a brunette.

  18. Agnes turns the tables on Marlowe, who thought Vivian was “trouble” when he first saw her. Does this make Marlowe an homme fatal for the grifter set? Agnes will ultimately have reason to think so.

  19. That is, his ass.

  20. For this slang use of the verb “spot,” see note 6 on this page.

  21. egg-headed: Marlowe’s quick math here and his display of seeming erudition in the bookstore give Agnes the impression that he’s some kind of savant. Interestingly, it’s the opposite impression of the one Vivian has of him as a brute, beast, and killer.

  22. Seemingly a Chandlerism, in the “showed his teeth” vein (see note 3 on this page).

  23. pipe down: Shut up. According to Mencken, this was originally a nautical term, referring to the bosun’s last pipe calling sailors belowdecks for the night.

  24. “Bum” entered American English from German (bummelyn, to waste time) in the nineteenth century, but it grew more widespread during the Depression, along with the related terms “tramp,” “hobo,” and so on. Webster’s Second editorializes just a bit with its definition: “A lazy, good-for-nothing sponger who will not work.”

  25. A “jag” is a period of unrestrained indulgence; a spree (usually a drunken one). This jag is “second-hand” because it involves pornographic representations of sex, not the real thing.

  26. dowagers: Elderly women.

  27. Marlowe refers to Hollywood’s well-known tolerance for vice.

  28. cheesehead: Mainly a slur against the Dutch before it was directed against, and then claimed by, Wisconsinites. Since Marlowe is neither Dutch nor from Wisconsin, we can assume that Agnes is simply riffing on “egg-head” in her reach for a colorful put-down.

  29. A painfully trite tough-guy line, standard fare in the pulp dialogue of the period: “Keep your chin down or I’ll knock it down”; “I’m gonna beat hell out of you”; “I want his brains smeared on the carpet. And make it snappy”; “I’ll stomp ya!” and so on. Chandler leavens his fiction with a revelatory layer: Brody knows his role and acts true to type, while Marlowe comments on the hackneyed, violent stylizations. (The first two quotations are from George Harmon Coxe, “Fall Guy,” Black Mask, 1936; the next two are from Stewart Sterling, “Ten Carats of Lead,” Black Mask, 1940, and Lester Dent, “Luck,” Black Mask, 1936, respectively.)

  Race Williams says it with lead: Black Mask, 1925 (© 2017 by Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.)

  30. whiffed: Killed, as “bop,” on this page.

  31. got the wind up: Got frightened or anxious. “Wind” as in something that blows, not what you do to a clock.

  32. lammed: To lam is to “depart hastily” (Mencken). Since this slang term flourished in the criminal underworld, “on the lam” came specifically to mean to flee from justice.

  33. step off for it: Be executed. Marlowe has grown cheerful about the possibility since “Killer in the Rain” (see following excerpt), perhaps because he has realized that he can use this threat as leverage to get the pictures back. He’s been playing chess with Brody and has put the man with the gun in check using nothing but his cunning.

  “LAST NIGHT IN THE RAIN”: FROM “KILLER IN THE RAIN”

  For the novel, Chandler elaborated and added shading to this much more straightforward scene from his 1935 story “Killer in the Rain.”

  “You shot Steiner to get it,” I said. “Last night in the rain. It was good shooting weather. The trouble is, he wasn’t alone when it happened. Either you didn’t see that, or you got scared. You ran out. But you had nerve enough to come back and hide the body somewhere—so you could tidy up on the books before the case broke.”

  The blonde made one strangled sound and then turned her face and stared at the wall. Her silvered fingernails dug into her palms. Her teeth bit her lip tightly.

  Marty didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t move and the Colt didn’t move in his hand. His brown face was as hard as a piece of carved wood.

  “Boy, you take chances,” he said softly, at last. “It’s lucky as all hell for you I didn’t kill Steiner.”

  I grinned at him, without much cheer. “You might step off for it just the same,” I said.

  Marty’s voice was a dry rustle of sound. “Think you’ve got me framed for it?”

  “Positive.”

  “How come?”

  “There’s somebody who’ll tell it that way.” Marty swore then. “That—damned little——! She would—just that—damn her!”

  I didn’t say anything. I let him chew on it. His face cleared slowly, and he put the Colt down on the table, kept his hand near it.

  “You don’t sound like chisel as I know chisel,” he said slowly, his eyes a tight shine between dark narrowed lids. “And I don’t see any coppers here. What’s your angle?”

  I drew on my cigar and watched his gun hand. “The plate that was in Steiner’s camera. All the prints that have been made. Right here and right now. You’ve got it—because that’s the only way you could have known who was there last night.”

  Marty turned his head slightly to look at Agnes. Her face was still to the wall and her fingernails were still spearing her palms. Marty looked back at me.

  “You’re cold as a night watchman’s feet on that one, guy,” he told me.

  I shook my head. “No. You’re a sap to stall, Marty. You can be pegged for the kill easy. It’s a natural. If the girl has to tell her story, the pictures won’t matter. But she don’t want to tell it.”

  “You a shamus?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you get to me?”

  “I was working on Steiner. He’s been working on Dravec. Dravec leaks money. You had some of it. I tailed the books here from Steiner’s store. The rest was easy when I had the girl’s story.”

  “She say I gunned Steiner?”

  I nodded. “But she could be mistaken.”

  Marty sighed. “She hates my guts,” he said. “I gave her the gate. I got paid to do it, but I’d have done it anyway. She’s too screwy for me.”

  I said: “Get the pictures, Marty.”

  34. Whether she is a natural blonde or not, Agnes no longer acts like one. “Blonde” here is a behavior and a social identity, not a hair color.

  As Marlowe remarks in The Long Goodbye: “There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk.”

  35. “Punk” first appeared in Elizabethan England, initially meaning “prostitute,” then more widely naming the mistress of a criminal or soldier. By the American 1920s it had jumped genders and referred to a young male, generally a criminal or a ne’er-do-well, and frequently the male concubine of a prison inmate, hobo, or sailor. “I told you I didn’t like that punk,” Sam Spade growls of the youthful Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon.

  36. where he flops: Where he sleeps, consequently where he lives.

  37. bounced her out: Broke off seeing
her. (The sense of forcible ejection implicit in the phrase is retained in the current “kicked him/her to the curb.”)

  FIFTEEN

  He didn’t like that. His lower lip went in under his teeth, and his eyebrows drew down sharply at the corners. His whole face became sharp and foxy and mean.

  The buzzer kept up its song. I didn’t like it either. If the visitors should happen to be Eddie Mars and his boys, I might get chilled off1 just for being there. If it was the police, I was caught with nothing to give them but a smile and a promise. And if it was some of Brody’s friends—supposing he had any—they might turn out to be tougher than he was.

  The blonde didn’t like it. She stood up in a surge and chipped at the air with one hand. Nerve tension made her face old and ugly.

  Watching me, Brody jerked a small drawer in the desk and picked a bone-handled automatic out of it. He held it at the blonde. She slid over to him and took it, shaking.

  “Sit down next to him,” Brody snapped. “Hold it on him low down, away from the door. If he gets funny use your own judgment.2 We ain’t licked yet, baby.”

  “Oh, Joe,” the blonde wailed. She came over and sat next to me on the davenport and pointed the gun at my leg artery. I didn’t like the jerky look in her eyes.

  The door buzzer stopped humming and a quick impatient rapping on the wood followed it. Brody put his hand in his pocket, on his gun, and walked over to the door and opened it with his left hand. Carmen Sternwood pushed him back into the room by putting a little revolver against his lean brown lips.

  Brody backed away from her with his mouth working and an expression of panic on his face. Carmen shut the door behind her and looked neither at me nor at Agnes. She stalked Brody carefully,3 her tongue sticking out a little between her teeth. Brody took both hands out of his pockets and gestured placatingly at her. His eyebrows designed themselves into an odd assortment of curves and angles. Agnes turned the gun away from me and swung it at Carmen. I shot my hand out and closed my fingers down hard over her hand and jammed my thumb on the safety catch. It was already on. I kept it on. There was a short silent tussle, to which neither Brody nor Carmen paid any attention whatever. I had the gun. Agnes breathed deeply and shivered the whole length of her body. Carmen’s face had a bony scraped look and her breath hissed. Her voice said without tone: