The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  I nodded. “That seems reasonable. Maybe you didn’t murder anybody at that. Where did you hide Geiger’s body?”

  He jumped his eyebrows. Then he grinned. “Nix, nix. Skip it. You think I’d go back there and handle him, not knowing when a couple carloads of law would come tearing around the corner? Nix.”15

  “Somebody hid the body,” I said.

  Brody shrugged. The grin stayed on his face. He didn’t believe me. While he was still not believing me the door buzzer started to ring again. Brody stood up sharply, hard-eyed. He glanced over at his guns on the desk.

  “So she’s back again,” he growled.

  “If she is, she doesn’t have her gun,” I comforted him. “Don’t you have any other friends?”

  “Just about one,” he growled. “I got enough of this puss in the corner game.”16 He marched to the desk and took the Colt. He held it down at his side and went to the door. He put his left hand to the knob and twisted it and opened the door a foot and leaned into the opening, holding the gun tight against his thigh.

  A voice said: “Brody?”

  Brody said something I didn’t hear. The two quick reports were muffled. The gun must have been pressed tight against Brody’s body. He tilted forward against the door and the weight of his body pushed it shut with a bang.17 He slid down the wood. His feet pushed the carpet away behind him. His left hand dropped off the knob and the arm slapped the floor with a thud. His head was wedged against the door. He didn’t move. The Colt clung to his right hand.

  I jumped across the room and rolled him enough to get the door open and crowd through. A woman peered out of a door almost opposite. Her face was full of fright and she pointed along the hall with a clawlike hand.

  I raced down the hall and heard thumping feet going down the tile steps and went down after the sound. At the lobby level the front door was closing itself quietly and running feet slapped the sidewalk outside. I made the door before it was shut, clawed it open again and charged out.

  A tall hatless figure in a leather jerkin was running diagonally across the street between the parked cars. The figure turned and flame spurted from it. Two heavy hammers hit the stucco18 wall beside me. The figure ran on, dodged between two cars, vanished.

  A man came up beside me and barked: “What happened?”

  “Shooting going on,” I said.

  “Jesus!” He scuttled into the apartment house.

  I walked quickly down the sidewalk to my car and got in and started it. I pulled out from the curb and drove down the hill, not fast. No other car started up on the other side of the street. I thought I heard steps, but I wasn’t sure about that. I rode down the hill a block and a half, turned at the intersection and started back up. The sound of a muted whistling came to me faintly along the sidewalk. Then steps. I double parked and slid out between two cars and went down low. I took Carmen’s little revolver out of my pocket.

  The sound of the steps grew louder, and the whistling went on cheerfully. In a moment the jerkin showed. I stepped out between the two cars and said: “Got a match, buddy?”

  The boy spun towards me and his right hand darted up to go inside the jerkin. His eyes were a wet shine in the glow of the round electroliers.19 Moist dark eyes shaped like almonds, and a pallid handsome face with wavy black hair growing low on the forehead in two points. A very handsome boy indeed,20 the boy from Geiger’s store.

  He stood there looking at me silently, his right hand on the edge of the jerkin, but not inside it yet. I held the little revolver down at my side.

  “You must have thought a lot of that queen,”21 I said.

  “Go —— yourself,”22 the boy said softly, motionless between the parked cars and the five-foot retaining wall on the inside of the sidewalk.

  A siren wailed distantly coming up the long hill. The boy’s head jerked towards the sound. I stepped in close and put my gun into his jerkin.

  “Me or the cops?” I asked him.

  His head rolled a little sideways as if I had slapped his face. “Who are you?” he snarled.

  “Friend of Geiger’s.”

  “Get away from me, you son of a bitch.”23

  “This is a small gun, kid. I’ll give it to you through the navel and it will take three months to get you well enough to walk. But you’ll get well. So you can walk to the nice new gas chamber up in Quentin.”

  He said: “Go —— yourself.” His hand moved inside the jerkin. I pressed harder on his stomach. He let out a long soft sigh, took his hand away from the jerkin and let it fall limp at his side. His wide shoulders sagged. “What you want?” he whispered.

  I reached inside the jerkin and plucked out the automatic. “Get into my car, kid.”

  He stepped past me and I crowded him from behind. He got into the car.

  “Under the wheel, kid. You drive.”

  He slid under the wheel and I got into the car beside him. I said: “Let the prowl car24 pass up the hill. They’ll think we moved over when we heard the siren. Then turn her down hill and we’ll go home.”

  I put Carmen’s gun away and leaned the automatic against the boy’s ribs. I looked back through the window. The whine of the siren was very loud now. Two red lights swelled in the middle of the street. They grew larger and blended into one and the car rushed by in a wild flurry of sound.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  The boy swung the car and started off down the hill.

  “Let’s go home,” I said. “To Laverne Terrace.”

  His smooth lips twitched. He swung the car west on Franklin. “You’re a simple-minded lad. What’s your name?”

  “Carol Lundgren,” he said lifelessly.

  “You shot the wrong guy, Carol. Joe Brody didn’t kill your queen.”25

  He spoke three words to me and kept on driving.

  1. Banker’s Special: A short-barreled revolver first introduced in 1928, similar to the “detective’s special” from the previous year. Small and concealable, it was considered to be a powerful weapon for its size.

  2. In this context, a “sap” is a sucker, someone who falls for a con. Perhaps reminiscent of Sam Spade, who repeats “I won’t play the sap for you” to Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the final chapter of The Maltese Falcon.

  3. Brody was the first blackmailer that General Sternwood mentioned in Chapter One. From what he said on this page, it sounds like he and Carmen were romantically involved and that he was paid off to stop seeing her.

  4. squeeze: To extort money.

  5. The Fulwider Building is fictional.

  6. The ambitious Agnes is constrained by the gender limitations of her day to act through men—Joe Brody here, Harry Jones later. Even the Sternwood sisters’ wealth cannot buy them out of these constraints, as they are kept under their father’s umbrella. When she does act, Vivian moves through the emancipated male Eddie Mars; she tries but fails to appropriate Marlowe as her instrument as well. Of the female characters in TBS, only Carmen directly expresses her own autonomous social agency—and she, of course, is “crazy” and dangerous.

  The Joe/Agnes pair bears comparison to a pair in Hammett’s “Fly Paper” (1929), which features a couple of small-time grifters with a losing play. When the Continental Op foils their plan, the woman turns on the man and spits, “What a smart guy you are, to get me in a jam like this.”

  7. Doubly insulting to Brody, given that Agnes is agreeing with Marlowe’s disdainful assessment of his intelligence.

  8. poker pan: Poker face.

  9. dance off: Die by hanging.

  10. San Quentin is the oldest prison in California, built in 1852. The cells that were built for death row prisoners in 1927 and 1934 still house the condemned.

  11. take the air…dust: Go away.

  12. chinning: Talking.

  13. Marlowe is needling Brody, of course, but
Brody’s ambiguous ethnic identity lends extra force to this jab.

  WHO KILLED OWEN TAYLOR?

  Did Brody do it? Does Marlowe know? Did Chandler know? Is there a clue hidden in the text that will allow the reader to solve the mystery? Or did Chandler, who once claimed to be “fundamentally uninterested in plot,” just let the matter drop?

  The murdered chauffeur did inspire a well-known Hollywood anecdote, told variously by just about everyone involved. Lauren Bacall recalls in her autobiography: “One day Bogie came on the set and said to Howard, ‘Who pushed Taylor off the pier?’ Everything stopped.” As A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax write in Bogart, “Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwoods’ chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. ‘Dammit I didn’t know either,’ ” Chandler replied.

  Screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s account differs slightly: “I was down on the set one day and Bogart came up to me and said, ‘Who killed Owen Taylor?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ We got hold of Faulkner and he said he didn’t know, so they sent a wire to Chandler. He sent another wire back and said, ‘I don’t know.’ In the book it is never explained who killed Owen Taylor, so there we were.”

  Latter-day Marlowe Robert Mitchum had his own version of the story, as quoted in the June 1986 Special Anniversary Issue of L.A. Style:

  I met Chandler once. There was a bookstore. I think a man named Allen Wilson ran it. On Wilcox, I believe. They had a backroom crowd there. He was sort of apart from the rest. A lot of the writers used to get their mail there. If anybody got a check, they bought a bottle of sparkling burgundy or something. Chandler was a little distant. I thought he was a bit affected. I didn’t know at the time that he was sort of a stranger in this country, that he basically regarded himself as an Englishman. The fact that he wore gloves I thought was an affectation. I didn’t know that he had problems, chapped hands or whatever. He was in there one time, and got this message from Warner Bros. They didn’t know who killed Owen whatever-his-name-was, the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. So one of the guys said, “Just tell them you don’t know.” And apparently that’s what he did.

  Director Howard Hawks’s personal version confirms receipt of Chandler’s telegram stating that he didn’t know. So Hawks had his scriptwriters add a piece of dialogue in which a detective says, “So Taylor killed Geiger because he was in love with the Sternwood girl. And Brody followed Taylor, sapped him and took the photograph, and pushed him into the ocean. And the punk killed Brody.” But Hawks never shot this speech, and the crime is left unresolved.

  14. blow: Leave town.

  15. Nix: No, negative, stop; from the German nichts, nothing.

  16. Children’s parlor game in which the players compete for position. Marlowe also doesn’t want to play kids’ games when he sees the General again (see this page).

  17. This is another throwback to Chandler’s pulp training. Writing about the demand for action in early crime fiction, Chandler famously said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” But he was never sure what balance to strike. In a 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, he complained, “The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time.”

  18. stucco: Thick plaster coating used to cover wall surfaces. An archetypal feature of LA architecture.

  19. electroliers: Electric lamps.

  20. Marlowe has a way of noticing male beauty (see the “Chandler, Marlowe, and the Boys” text box on this page).

  21. queen: Slang term for a gay man, related to the older British English word quean, a prostitute or “low” woman.

  22. The New York Times review complained that “the language used in this book is often vile, at times so filthy that the publishers have been compelled to resort to the dash, a device seldom employed in these unsqueamish days” (Isaac Anderson, The New York Times, February 12, 1939). Chandler borrows from The Maltese Falcon, in which the Carol character, Wilmer, repeats “—— off.” Where the pulps generally tended to avoid giving offense, Chandler and Hammett tested the limits in novel form.

  As for the squeamish dashes: publishers were put on trial for obscenity in the United States for bringing out such “obscene” works as Ulysses by James Joyce (publishers convicted in 1921) and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (banned in the United States upon its 1934 French publication; it was put on trial extensively in the early 1960s before finally being found innocent by no less a literary authority than the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964). Norman Mailer famously sidestepped the issue by spelling the word “fug” in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead. The landmark trial of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1957 opened the door to slightly more liberality in works of “redeeming social value,” but it was not until 1971 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in Cohen v. California) that the use of the word “fuck” is protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

  23. son of a bitch: Manifestly not an Americanism, this venomous epithet can be found in medieval Arthurian tales and in Shakespeare. The Sternwood sisters will, independently, agree with Carol.

  24. prowl car: Police squad car.

  25. Carol, like Owen Taylor, kills for love. If Geiger is Carol’s queen, is Carol his avenging knight? (See note 15 on this page for further consideration of the romance motif.)

  SEVENTEEN

  A moon half gone from the full glowed through a ring of mist among the high branches of the eucalyptus trees1 on Laverne Terrace. A radio sounded loudly from a house low down the hill. The boy swung the car over to the box hedge in front of Geiger’s house, killed the motor and sat looking straight before him with both hands on the wheel. No light showed through Geiger’s hedge.

  I said: “Anybody home, son?”

  “You ought to know.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Go —— yourself.”

  “That’s how people get false teeth.”2

  He showed me his in a tight grin.3 Then he kicked the door open and got out. I scuttled out after him. He stood with his fists on his hips, looking silently at the house above the top of the hedge.

  “All right,” I said. “You have a key. Let’s go on in.”

  “Who said I had a key?”

  “Don’t kid me, son. The fag gave you one. You’ve got a nice clean manly little room in there. He shooed you out and locked it up when he had lady visitors. He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men.4 Think I can’t figure people like him and you out?”

  I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch.5 It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy6 has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

  I threw the gun down at the kid’s feet and said: “Maybe you need this.”

  He stooped for it like a flash. There was nothing slow about his movements. I sank a fist in the side of his neck. He toppled over sideways, clawing for the gun and not reaching it. I picked it up again and threw it in the car. The boy came up on all fours, leering with his eyes too wide open. He coughed and shook his head.

  “You don’t want to fight,” I told him. “You’re giving away too much weight.”

  He wanted to fight. He shot at me like a plane from a catapult, reaching for my knees in a diving tackle. I sidestepped and reached for his neck and took it into chancery.7 He scraped the dirt hard and got his feet under him enough to use his hands on me where it hurt.8 I twisted him around and heaved him a little higher. I took hold of my right wrist with my left hand and turned my right hipbone into him
and for a moment it was a balance of weights. We seemed to hang there in the misty moonlight,9 two grotesque creatures whose feet scraped on the road and whose breath panted with effort.

  I had my right forearm against his windpipe now and all the strength of both arms in it. His feet began a frenetic shuffle and he wasn’t panting any more. He was iron-bound. His left foot sprawled off to one side and the knee went slack. I held on half a minute longer. He sagged on my arm, an enormous weight I could hardly hold up. Then I let go. He sprawled at my feet, out cold. I went to the car and got a pair of handcuffs out of the glove compartment and twisted his wrists behind him and snapped them on. I lifted him by the armpits and managed to drag him in behind the hedge, out of sight from the street. I went back to the car and moved it a hundred feet up the hill and locked it.

  He was still out when I got back. I unlocked the door, dragged him into the house, shut the door. He was beginning to gasp now. I switched a lamp on. His eyes fluttered open and focused on me slowly.

  I bent down, keeping out of the way of his knees and said: “Keep quiet or you’ll get the same and more of it. Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until you can’t hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you’re black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you’re going to breathe right now, but that you’re sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that breath you’re fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won’t be air you’ll get, it will be cyanide fumes. And that’s what they call humane execution in our state now.”

  “Go —— yourself,” he said with a soft stricken sigh.

  “You’re going to cop a plea, brother, don’t ever think you’re not. And you’re going to say just what we want you to say and nothing we don’t want you to say.”