The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  25. One of Chandler’s most poetic—and profound—similes.

  26. Repeating her sister’s theatrical trick from her first meeting with Marlowe.

  27. What a line! Critic Anna Livia calls this line—along with “you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you” (on this page)—“gloriously outrageous in the best camp tradition.” “Camp” is an apt word, because there is some showmanship in Vivian’s actions, as Marlowe realizes.

  28. Perhaps, not able to sink her knifelike teeth into Marlowe, she must find another object for them to work on.

  29. Marlowe, the hero being tested, successfully resists Sexual Temptation Number One. (It would not have been a temptation if he didn’t enjoy it.) Note that it’s not personal chastity but professional conduct that motivates the detective. In his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler considers his hero’s sexuality: “He is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.”

  30. Caterpillars are cold-blooded. A response to Vivian’s comment that he’s “as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met” in Chapter Eleven.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The apartment house lobby was empty this time. No gunman waiting under the potted palm to give me orders. I took the automatic elevator up to my floor and walked along the hallway to the tune of a muted radio behind a door. I needed a drink and was in a hurry to get one. I didn’t switch the light on inside the door. I made straight for the kitchenette and brought up short in three or four feet. Something was wrong. Something on the air, a scent. The shades were down at the windows and the street light leaking in at the sides made a dim light in the room. I stood still and listened. The scent on the air was a perfume, a heavy cloying perfume.1

  There was no sound, no sound at all. Then my eyes adjusted themselves more to the darkness and I saw there was something across the floor in front of me that shouldn’t have been there. I backed, reached the wall switch with my thumb and flicked the light on.

  The bed was down.2 Something in it giggled. A blond head was pressed into my pillow. Two bare arms curved up and the hands belonging to them were clasped on top of the blond head. Carmen Sternwood lay on her back, in my bed, giggling at me.3 The tawny wave of her hair was spread out on the pillow as if by a careful and artificial hand.4 Her slaty eyes peered at me and had the effect, as usual, of peering from behind a barrel. She smiled. Her small sharp teeth glinted.5

  “Cute, aren’t I?” she said.

  I said harshly: “Cute as a Filipino on Saturday night.”6

  I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems.7 I reached down and moved a knight,8 then pulled my hat and coat off and threw them somewhere. All this time the soft giggling went on from the bed, that sound that made me think of rats behind a wainscoting in an old house.

  “I bet you can’t even guess how I got in.”

  I dug a cigarette out and looked at her with bleak eyes. “I bet I can. You came through the keyhole, just like Peter Pan.”9

  “Who’s he?”

  “Oh, a fellow I used to know around the poolroom.”

  She giggled. “You’re cute, aren’t you?” she said.

  I began to say: “About that thumb—” but she was ahead of me. I didn’t have to remind her. She took her right hand from behind her head and started sucking the thumb and eyeing me with very round and naughty eyes.

  “I’m all undressed,” she said, after I had smoked and stared at her for a minute.

  “By God,” I said, “it was right at the back of my mind. I was groping for it. I almost had it, when you spoke. In another minute I’d have said ‘I bet you’re all undressed.’ I always wear my rubbers in bed myself, in case I wake up with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it.”

  “You’re cute.” She rolled her head a little, kittenishly.10 Then she took her left hand from under her head and took hold of the covers, paused dramatically, and swept them aside. She was undressed all right. She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl. The Sternwood girls were giving me both barrels that night.11

  I pulled a shred of tobacco off the edge of my lower lip.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “But I’ve already seen it all. Remember? I’m the guy that keeps finding you without any clothes on.”

  She giggled some more and covered herself up again. “Well, how did you get in?” I asked her.

  “The manager let me in. I showed him your card. I’d stolen it from Vivian. I told him you told me to come here and wait for you. I was—I was mysterious.” She glowed with delight.

  “Neat,” I said. “Managers are like that. Now I know how you got in tell me how you’re going to go out.”

  She giggled. “Not going—not for a long time….I like it here. You’re cute.”

  “Listen,” I pointed my cigarette at her. “Don’t make me dress you again. I’m tired. I appreciate all you’re offering me. It’s just more than I could possibly take. Doghouse Reilly never let a pal down that way. I’m your friend. I won’t let you down—in spite of yourself. You and I have to keep on being friends, and this isn’t the way to do it. Now will you dress like a nice little girl?”12

  She shook her head from side to side.

  “Listen,” I plowed on, “you don’t really care anything about me. You’re just showing how naughty you can be. But you don’t have to show me. I knew it already. I’m the guy that found—”

  “Put the light out,” she giggled.

  I threw my cigarette on the floor and stamped on it. I took a handkerchief out and wiped the palms of my hands. I tried it once more.

  “It isn’t on account of the neighbors,” I told her. “They don’t really care a lot. There’s a lot of stray broads13 in any apartment house and one more won’t make the building rock. It’s a question of professional pride. You know—professional pride. I’m working for your father. He’s a sick man, very frail, very helpless. He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts. Won’t you please get dressed, Carmen?”14

  “Your name isn’t Doghouse Reilly,” she said. “It’s Philip Marlowe. You can’t fool me.”

  I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.15

  I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn’t know about it yet. It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.

  I said: “I’m going out in the kitchen and mix a drink. Want one?”

  “Uh-huh.” Dark silent mystified eyes stared at me solemnly, the doubt growing larger in them, creeping into them noiselessly, like a cat in long grass stalking a young blackbird.16

  “If you’re dressed when I get back, you’ll get the drink. Okey?”

  Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth. She didn’t answer me. I went out to the kitchenette and got out some Scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs.17 I didn’t have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger’s breath. She hadn’t moved when I got back with the glasses. The hissing had stopped. Her eyes were dead again. Her lips started to smile at me. Then she sat up suddenly and threw all the covers off her body and reached.

  “Gimme.”

  “When you’re dressed. Not until you’re d
ressed.”

  I put the two glasses down on the card table and sat down myself and lit another cigarette. “Go ahead. I won’t watch you.”

  I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman’s eyes.

  Then her lips moved very slowly and carefully, as if they were artificial lips and had to be manipulated with springs.

  She called me a filthy name.18

  I didn’t mind that. I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.19

  I couldn’t stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that.

  I said carefully: “I’ll give you three minutes to get dressed and out of here. If you’re not out by then, I’ll throw you out—by force. Just the way you are, naked. And I’ll throw your clothes after you into the hall. Now—get started.”20

  Her teeth chattered and the hissing noise was sharp and animal. She swung her feet to the floor and reached for her clothes on a chair beside the bed. She dressed. I watched her. She dressed with stiff awkward fingers—for a woman—but quickly at that. She was dressed in a little over two minutes. I timed it.

  She stood there beside the bed, holding a green bag tight against a fur-trimmed coat. She wore a rakish green hat crooked on her head. She stood there for a moment and hissed at me, her face still like scraped bone, her eyes still empty and yet full of some jungle emotion.21 Then she walked quickly to the door and opened it and went out, without speaking, without looking back. I heard the elevator lurch into motion and move in the shaft.

  I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets.

  I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely.22

  1. Webster’s Second defines “cloying” as “loathsome from excess.” The orchids in the Sternwood greenhouse had a cloying smell as well.

  2. Marlowe’s apartment has a wall bed, or “Murphy bed,” a mattress and frame encased in a closet that pulls out from the wall. It was common in small apartments in the days before sofa beds and, later, futons. A wall bed is also part of the furnishings at Sam Spade’s place on Post Street in San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.

  3. Sexual Temptation Number Two. Here again we have a scene where, in the 1946 film, Hawks had to skirt the Hays censors. According to film historian Bruce F. Kawin, the scene was written by William Faulkner. As with the scene in Geiger’s house, Carmen/Martha Vickers is fully clothed, sitting on a chair, but she is still intent on seducing Marlowe. There is a little Chandler-style witty dialogue. Carmen is more articulate than we’d expect from the novel or even from earlier scenes in the film, but she still has the childlike habit of biting her thumb. When Marlowe/Bogart tells her to take her thumb and get out, she shows him that she’s been biting the white queen from the chessboard. Bogart throws her out and displays the same rage that we see in the novel, violently washing his hands and then destroying the chess piece. Thus the unfilmed script. In the finished scene, Vickers bites her thumb and then, taking a page from Agnes’s book, Marlowe’s hand.

  4. Carmen’s posed self-display recalls Vivian’s similarly affected nonchalance when Marlowe meets her with her legs “arranged to stare at” (this page).

  5. In keeping with the previously established theme, and hinting at the feline fury to come.

  6. Between 1920 and 1930 thirty thousand Filipinos migrated to California. Most were single young men, who worked in agriculture and followed the crops. In the city the main work available to them was in low-level service jobs, and they often appear in the crime fiction of the era as restaurant and hotel workers. Marlowe’s slur references the prevailing view of Filipinos as dandies. Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino writer who immigrated to LA in the 1920s, addressed the stereotype in this 1937 letter:

  First of all, when we came to the United States, we were young. We work hard if there is work; we are not married (immigration laws do not include our women, excepting a few under rare circumstances); we have no dependents, no family ambitions to occupy our minds. We are not admitted to any American recreations except theaters and some tennis courts. Therefore we buy clothes, cars, spend all our money on our friends or girl acquaintances. We are very fond of dancing….In the city, a Filipino goes to work in his best clothes, no matter how menial the work….After work he does not return to his room or apartment or shared house; instead, he goes to his friend’s room, or to a restaurant, a gambling house, pool hall, or dance hall and does not return before midnight.

  John Fante offers a sympathetic portrayal of the Filipino immigrant’s life in his 1941 short story “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me.”

  TBS was written at a time in American history when open racial and ethnic bias was acceptable. Slurs occur throughout Chandler’s work, as throughout the pulps, denigrating the various ethnic groups populating urban areas at the time (specifically, in Chandler’s LA, Mexican-, Chinese-, African-, Japanese-, Filipino-, and Native Americans). It is certain that Chandler was, in part, capturing the vernacular of the period: in order to be realistic, his characters needed to use the vocabulary that was spoken at the time. But the same casual bigotry is present at times in Chandler’s letters. As with much of American literature, the reader is faced with the challenge of reading work that is deeply flawed, but which is also the product of a racist and flawed society. This challenge surfaces with canonical works by such authors as Jack London, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as most early crime fiction. Serious readers of early noir can find a notable exception in the work of Dorothy B. Hughes, whose riveting novel In a Lonely Place (1947) was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart in 1950. Raoul Whitfield was a Black Mask writer known for his Filipino detective, Jo Gar.

  7. Chess here serves as a metaphor for the moral and intellectual complexity of the plot he’s embedded in. In The High Window, Marlowe explains that he’s playing against published tournament games in order to work out problems; however, Chandler did not think that “his chess comes up to tournament standard.” This was a feature of the detective’s personality that was added for his appearance in book form, adding a civilizing touch to Marlowe’s more hard-boiled forerunners in Chandler’s pulp stories.

  8. This move is pregnant with symbolism, as we shall soon see.

  9. A humorously ironic comparison: Peter Pan is the archetypal mischievous child in two novels and a play by J. M. Barrie (written between 1902 and 1911). Carmen is mischievous in a far less innocent way.

  10. Continuing the cat comparison. Playful and cute here, but watch for the turn.

  11. Marlowe describes their sexual advances via shotgun metaphor.

  12. Marlowe responds to not having the upper hand in the realms of class status, sexual contention, or the employer-employee relationship with a gender-based condescension: he can be a man where she’s a girl. In her study of the literary origins of queer personae, Anna Livia has delightf
ully suggested that “John Wayne, Philip Marlowe, and James Dean have contributed more to butch conversational ideologies than has any lived experience of male bosses, fathers, or colleagues.”

  13. stray broads: “Broad” for “woman” derives from “bawd,” the madam of a brothel (or “bawdy house”). With this term, Chandler has covered an impressive swath of what Mencken called Hollywood’s “Index Expurgatorius,” or forbidden words, reminiscent of comedian George Carlin’s bit “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television.” Mencken’s Index included not only the gaggle of slang words related to homosexuality previously noted, and “son of a bitch,” but “Christ” and “hell” used profanely. Salt with questionable ethnic references, and you get the feeling that our author rather likes to shock the middle classes. The hard-boiled genre came furnished with shocking content, of course, but TBS seems to particularly delight in its rhetorical transgressiveness.

  14. Never let it be said that Marlowe does not at least try politeness.

  15. An ironic consideration, given what we know about Marlowe so far. Our hero has already identified with the knight in the “stained-glass romance” adorning the book’s opening scene, and here he moves the chess piece most symbolic of chivalry. (The word “chivalry,” in fact, derives from the French chevalier, knight—literally, horseman. Not coincidentally, “Philip” comes from the Greek name “Philippos,” meaning lover of horses.) At this point Marlowe realizes that, though he might want to play the knight and save the lady in distress, this isn’t a chivalric romance. It’s not that kind of game, and she’s not that kind of “lady.” The knight move is the wrong move, both in Marlowe’s reality and in the literary game of genre that Chandler is playing (and playing with).

  It is now a commonplace of Chandler criticism that Marlowe represents a knight errant, or wandering knight, archetypal hero of the medieval Arthurian romances. The knight of romance travels in search of adventure and on quests in order to prove his courtesy, virtue, and valor—the knightly code of chivalric conduct. This meant passing tests of strength, courage, honor, and, yes, chastity. Chandler’s first detective (or, if you like, Marlowe’s original surname) was “Mallory,” a handshake away from the great medieval Arthurian mythographer Sir Thomas Malory, whose Morte d’Arthur is the basis of most of the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in English. In 1938, while Chandler was working on TBS, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone began the great retelling of Malory that would become The Once and Future King; the following year—the same year as TBS’s publication—the second installment, The Witch in the Wood, was published. This is not to say that Chandler got the idea from White, but that it was in the air. Indeed, as discussed in the introduction, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exploded with Arthurian reimaginings, from the poetry of Tennyson (among many other poets and novelists) through the illustrations of the Pre-Raphaelites and the work of book illustrators Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. The Sternwoods display some art from the trend. Importantly, the young Raymond Chandler was part of this neo-Romantic vogue: his initial forays into professional authorship between 1908 and 1912 are infused with the sensibility. A key example is his essay “Realism and Fairyland,” an impassioned defense of idealism in art against the demands of realism. Chandler grew up steeped in the Arthurian revival: there was even a painting of Sir Galahad by the symbolist painter George Frederic Watts hanging in the library at Dulwich College during Chandler’s time as a student. In The High Window (1942), Marlowe is called “the shop-soiled Galahad,” and the association of the detective with the knight archetype picks up steam from there. The likeness is not incidental: Galahad, of all Arthur’s knights, remains pure. It is he who will find the Holy Grail.