The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  “Clever guy,” I said. “He dropped it all right. Dropped it and fell on it. How come you know all this?”

  He shrugged impatiently. “I wish to Christ I didn’t know half the stuff that’s brought to me. Knowing other people’s business is the worst investment a man can make in my circle. Then if it was just Geiger you were after, you’re washed up on that angle.”

  “Washed up and paid off.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I wish old Sternwood would hire himself a soldier like you on a straight salary, to keep those girls of his home at least a few nights a week.”

  “Why?”

  His mouth looked sulky. “They’re plain trouble. Take the dark one. She’s a pain in the neck around here. If she loses, she plunges32 and I end up with a fistful of paper which nobody will discount at any price. She has no money of her own except an allowance and what’s in the old man’s will is a secret. If she wins, she takes my money home with her.”

  “You get it back the next night,” I said.

  “I get some of it back. But over a period of time I’m loser.”

  He looked earnestly at me, as if that was important to me. I wondered why he thought it necessary to tell me at all. I yawned and finished my drink.

  “I’m going out and look the joint over,” I said.

  “Yes, do.”33 He pointed to a door near the vault door. “That leads to a door behind the tables.”

  “I’d rather go in the way the suckers enter.”34

  “Okey. As you please. We’re friends, aren’t we, soldier?”

  “Sure.” I stood up and we shook hands.

  “Maybe I can do you a real favor some day,” he said. “You got it all from Gregory this time.”

  “So you own a piece of him too.”

  “Oh not that bad. We’re just friends.”35

  I stared at him for a moment, then went over to the door I had come in at. I looked back at him when I had it open.

  “You don’t have anybody tailing me around in a gray Plymouth sedan, do you?”

  His eyes widened sharply. He looked jarred. “Hell, no. Why should I?”

  “I couldn’t imagine,” I said, and went on out. I thought his surprise looked genuine enough to be believed. I thought he even looked a little worried. I couldn’t think of any reason for that.

  1. In his consideration of the genre, Jorge Luis Borges writes that “a detective story cannot be understood without a beginning, middle, and end.” This would be the middle. It is the turning point of the novel.

  2. The description borrows from the opening of “Goldfish,” Chandler’s Black Mask story from 1936:

  I wasn’t doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling. A warm gusty breeze was blowing in at the office window and the soot from the Mansion House Hotel oil burners across the alley was rolling across the glass top of my desk in tiny particles, like pollen drifting over a vacant lot.

  I was just thinking about going to lunch when Kathy Home came in.

  In revising this scene for TBS, Chandler gives it an existential twist: without the case to work on, life, to Marlowe, like his desk, is flat and empty.

  3. But he might have, since Marlowe did assert that he would “take him out” back in Chapter Two.

  4. That is, unopenable.

  5. Marlowe notes Norris catching his sarcasm: the case is far from closed to Marlowe.

  6. The stereotype has Marlowe slamming shots of whiskey indiscriminately (see note 6 on this page), but here again we see both his measured intake and his reflection upon it. The office bottle was not an unusual feature in the decor of the period. In a visit to Marlowe’s office in Farewell, My Lovely, the keen Anne Riordan doesn’t approve. “You’re not going to turn out to be one of those drunken detectives, are you?” she asks. “Why not?” Marlowe responds, taking up her reference to detectives as types. “They always solve their cases and they never even sweat.” But later in the same novel, when a seductive Helen Grayle plies him with Scotch and sodas and chides, “You’re not drinking,” he replies, “I’m doing what I call drinking.”

  7. See note 17 on this page.

  8. two-bit chiseler: “Two-bit” meaning cheap; small-time. Two bits were a quarter dollar. For “chiseler,” see note 32 on this page.

  9. hootch: More commonly “hooch,” short for “hoochinoo,” which is what American settlers in Alaska called the native Hutsnuwu tribe and their liquor. When local saloon-keepers started distilling their own, they called it by the same name; returning nineteenth-century gold-rushers brought the word down to the lower forty-eight, where it came to mean, generally, liquor illicitly made or obtained. An equivalent of “moonshine.”

  10. Las Olindas is a fictional name. There is a town called Olinda in Orange County, unrelated except by name—and perhaps by resonance: oil was discovered there in the late eighteenth century, and Edward L. Doheny was one of those who drilled it.

  11. Readers of crime fiction will recognize a much-used device in the PI who stays on the case even after being paid off or even fired by the client. It is difficult to name a fictional detective who, following Marlowe, hasn’t insisted on doing the same thing—thereby demonstrating that he or she is more than just a snoop for hire; that the PI answers to a higher call. Much of that comes after Chandler.

  So why doesn’t Marlowe take another drink and forget the whole mess? After all, as he’s just said, the blackmail angle (which he was hired to investigate) is tied up. All known crimes have been solved, and he’s about to be paid for his services. Why doesn’t the novel end here?

  Critics have faulted Chandler for a plot structure that seems to have resulted from two stories being glued together: the plot of “Killer in the Rain” that ended several chapters ago, and the plot of “The Curtain” that is about to start up again. But this moment marks much more than a clumsy piece of patchwork. Marlowe will offer one plot-intrinsic explanation for it later in the novel (in Chapter Thirty). But there is another explanation, and it involves Chandler’s whole philosophy of art, and its relation to life.

  In the key essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and throughout his letters, Chandler takes a stand against dullness in both art and life. (One might compare Pound’s 1910 preface to The Spirit of Romance, which expounds on the thesis that “good art begins with an escape from dullness.”) Chandler insisted, “All men who read escape from something else”—“the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts”—“into what lies behind the printed page.” This escape, Chandler wrote, “has become a functional necessity….It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.” Chandler opposes the deadly rhythms of life to life-sustaining art. When Marlowe feels that “life was pretty flat,” reduced to watching soot blow across his empty desk, he must act, for that is what the hero does: “He is outside the story, and above it,” Chandler wrote. Marlowe occupies the role of hero in two senses: as an idea “outside the story,” he serves as inspiration to transcend the limitations of ordinary life; and as a part of the story, he is its central character, endowed by Chandler with a hero-heart (the term is Joseph Campbell’s, from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published five years after Chandler’s essay). Something remains to be found out; the hero doesn’t let it go. To repeat the words of “The Simple Art of Murder”: “The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure….If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.” Notice how Chandler has slyly slipped from aesthetic to ethical commentary here: from the story to the world.

  PHILIP MARLOWE, ESCAPEE

  Chandler, a cosmopolitan figure who moved ceaselessly throughout his life, even once he finally settled in California, found the possibility for heroism and adventure in the character of Philip Ma
rlowe, escapee from the ordinary. We don’t get many glimpses into the detective’s upbringing, but there is this biographical snippet, at a low moment in The Long Goodbye:

  Part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich—small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

  12. As previously noted, Los Angeles had some three hundred casinos in the 1930s. The more posh casinos were favored by the Hollywood crowd. The Clover Club on Sunset Boulevard was owned for a time by Guy McAfee, one of the possible models for Eddie Mars (see note 4 on this page and note 12 on this page). The Clover featured false walls to conceal illegal gambling. There were others, too, with names like the Colony, the Edgemont, and Montmartre. Beginning in the early 1930s, the LAPD staged haphazard raids, but the clubs flourished until the early 1940s, when racketeers like Bugsy Siegel found easier pickings in Las Vegas. For the site of Eddie Mars’s coastal club, Chandler may have had in mind Redondo Beach, a notorious center of gambling in the 1930s. Floating casinos like the Rex were anchored outside the three-mile limit, beyond the reach of the law. Siegel said they offered “restaurants, saloons, games and everything.”

  Newspaper advertisement for the Rex (Los Angeles Times)

  13. As the name indicates, a species of tree native to the central California coast. Elegant and decorative, they’ve been brought south to form part of the sumptuous landscaping and architecture of De Cazens’s former mansion and hotel.

  14. That is, instead of giving it the cinematic renovation that was spreading across Los Angeles at the time (and continues to). The original construction would have preceded the rise of Hollywood. In what follows we get another of Chandler’s famously detailed interiors (see note 5 on this page). The overall impression is one of great elegance, a generation out of date. Eddie Mars hasn’t done much redecorating since he took the place over.

  15. wainscoted: Paneled.

  16. Damask is an elegant woven fabric frequently used to upholster furniture or as a wall covering; this one seems to contain a classical design.

  17. Sèvres, in southwestern Paris, produces famously fine porcelain.

  18. samovar: An elaborate Eastern European or Middle Eastern kettle, most often for serving coffee.

  19. The one big addition (besides the gaming tables) that Mars has made is the bank-quality safe. A time lock provides extra security: it can be opened only at certain preset times, even with the correct combination.

  20. Marlowe already knows about Mars’s arrangement with the police. See note 12 on this page.

  21. More stock hard-boiled lingo from the tough guy acting hard.

  22. They all glisten on the next page, implying that they are manicured.

  23. Marlowe is saying that he visited Mars’s place to drink when procuring liquor was illegal, but he hasn’t been back since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Nightclubs that began as illegal speakeasies during Prohibition continued to be run by mobsters such as Eddie Mars after the repeal.

  24. It would be easy for a rapid reader to miss this brutally understated threat.

  Chandler loved such pregnant rhetorical minimalism, a different version of the understated style described in note 36 on this page. “How do you tell a man to go away in hard language?” he once asked. “Scram, beat it, take off, take the air, on your way, dangle, hit the road, and so forth. All good enough. But give me the classic expression actually used by Spike O’Donnell (of the O’Donnell brothers of Chicago, the only small outfit to tell the Capone mob to go to hell and live): what he said was ‘Be missing.’ The restraint of it is deadly.”

  25. A particularly gauche example of Mars’s attempt to seem aristocratic.

  26. make a touch: Get money.

  27. Marlowe distinguishes between illicit grifter gains and honest wage labor.

  28. sheer lawn handkerchief: Very fine cotton fabric.

  29. If Marlowe can “break a hundred and ten,” he would be a pretty good golfer. The martial Eddie Mars, whose very name evokes the Roman god of war, is basically calling the detective a weekend warrior. Or he is giving Marlowe some respect. Take your pick: both interpretations are supportable.

  30. Marlowe continues to hedge on this question.

  31. Fittingly, Mars uses a gambling metaphor to describe Geiger’s operation.

  32. plunge: To gamble recklessly.

  33. In his own establishment Mars puts on more genteel airs than he did in Geiger’s living room, where his “veneer” eroded rather rapidly. Here the veneer remains fairly intact, including in certain affectations of phrasing (like this one, and the jaunty “I dare say”s).

  34. The scene is a study in counterpoint, featuring two versions of the knight, as it were: the haughty, gaudy gangster and the common man with a devotion to a code of honor. Neither will prove to be exactly a knight. But here Marlowe succeeds, humbly denying both monetary gain and flattery.

  35. Captain Gregory’s association with Mars is a key subterranean plot detail. It also carries a political significance, which will be brought to the surface when Marlowe and Gregory discuss the situation in Chapter Thirty.

  TWENTY-TWO1

  It was about ten-thirty when the little yellow-sashed Mexican orchestra2 got tired of playing a low-voiced, prettied-up rhumba3 that nobody was dancing to. The gourd player rubbed his finger tips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water.4 The pretense was as wasted as the music. Nobody was looking at them.

  The room had been a ballroom once5 and Eddie Mars had changed it only as much as his business compelled him. No chromium glitter, no indirect lighting from behind angular cornices, no fused glass pictures, or chairs in violent leather and polished metal tubing, none of the pseudomodernistic circus of the typical Hollywood night trap. The light was from heavy crystal chandeliers and the rose-damask panels of the wall were still the same rose damask, a little faded by time and darkened by dust, that had been matched long ago against the parquetry floor, of which only a small glass-smooth space in front of the little Mexican orchestra showed bare. The rest was covered by a heavy old-rose carpeting that must have cost plenty. The parquetry6 was made of a dozen kinds of hardwood, from Burma teak through half a dozen shades of oak and ruddy wood that looked like mahogany, and fading out to the hard pale wild lilac of the California hills, all laid in elaborate patterns, with the accuracy of a transit.

  It was still a beautiful room and now there was roulette in it instead of measured, old-fashioned dancing. There were three tables close to the far wall. A low bronze railing joined them and made a fence around the croupiers.7 All three tables were working, but the crowd was at the middle one. I could see Vivian Regan’s black head close to it, from across the room where I was leaning against the bar and turning a small glass of bacardi8 around on the mahogany.

  The bartender leaned beside me watching the cluster of well-dressed people at the middle table. “She’s pickin’ ’em tonight, right on the nose,” he said. “That tall black-headed frail.”9

  “Who is she?”

  “I wouldn’t
know her name. She comes here a lot though.”

  “The hell you wouldn’t know her name.”

  “I just work here, mister,” he said without any animosity. “She’s all alone too. The guy was with her passed out. They took him out to his car.”

  “I’ll take her home,” I said.

  “The hell you will. Well, I wish you luck anyways. Should I gentle up10 that bacardi or do you like it the way it is?”

  “I like it the way it is as well as I like it at all,”11 I said.

  “Me, I’d just as leave drink croup medicine,”12 he said.

  The crowd parted and two men in evening clothes pushed their way out and I saw the back of her neck and her bare shoulders in the opening. She wore a low-cut dress of dull green velvet. It looked too dressy for the occasion. The crowd closed and hid all but her black head. The two men came across the room and leaned against the bar and asked for Scotch and soda. One of them was flushed and excited. He was mopping his face with a black-bordered handkerchief. The double satin stripes down the side of his trousers were wide enough for tire tracks.

  “Boy, I never saw such a run,” he said in a jittery voice. “Eight wins and two stand-offs in a row on that red. That’s roulette, boy, that’s roulette.”

  “It gives me the itch,”13 the other one said. “She’s betting a grand at a crack. She can’t lose.” They put their beaks in their drinks, gurgled swiftly and went back.

  “So wise the little men are,” the barkeep drawled. “A grand a crack, huh. I saw an old horseface in Havana once—”

  The noise swelled over at the middle table and a chiseled foreign voice rose above it saying: “If you will just be patient a moment, madam. The table cannot cover your bet. Mr. Mars will be here in a moment.”