The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  I walked around him carefully and lifted a phone book from a hook on the wooden frame of the window. I let it fall again, reached the telephone as far as it would go from the little dead man. I dialed information. The voice answered.

  “Can you give me the phone number of Apartment 301, 28 Court Street?”

  “One moment, please.” The voice came to me borne on the smell of bitter almonds. A silence. “The number is Wentworth two-five-two-eight. It is listed under Glendower Apartments.”

  I thanked the voice and dialed the number. The bell rang three times, then the line opened. A radio blared along the wire and was muted. A burly male voice said: “Hello.”

  “Is Agnes there?”

  “No Agnes here, buddy. What number you want?”

  “Wentworth two-five-two-eight.”22

  “Right number, wrong gal. Ain’t that a shame?” The voice cackled.

  I hung up and reached for the phone book again and looked up the Wentworth Apartments. I dialed the manager’s number. I had a blurred vision of Mr. Canino driving fast through rain to another appointment with death.

  “Glendower Apartments. Mr. Schiff speaking.”

  “This is Wallis, Police Identification Bureau. Is there a girl named Agnes Lozelle registered in your place?”

  “Who did you say you were?”

  I told him again.

  “If you give me your number, I’ll—”

  “Cut the comedy,” I said sharply, “I’m in a hurry. Is there or isn’t there?”

  “No. There isn’t.” The voice was as stiff as a breadstick.

  “Is there a tall blonde with green eyes registered in the flop?”23

  “Say, this isn’t any flop—”

  “Oh, can it, can it!” I rapped at him in a police voice. “You want me to send the vice squad over there and shake the joint down? I know all about Bunker Hill apartment houses, mister.24 Especially the ones that have phone numbers listed for each apartment.”

  “Hey, take it easy, officer. I’ll co-operate. There’s a couple of blondes here, sure. Where isn’t there? I hadn’t noticed their eyes much. Would yours be alone?”

  “Alone, or with a little chap about five feet three, a hundred and ten, sharp black eyes, wears a double-breasted dark gray suit and Irish tweed overcoat, gray hat. My information is Apartment 301, but all I get there is the big razzoo.”25

  “Oh, she ain’t there. There’s a couple of car salesmen living in three-o-one.”

  “Thanks, I’ll drop around.”

  “Make it quiet, won’t you? Come to my place, direct?”

  “Much obliged, Mr. Schiff.” I hung up.

  I wiped sweat off my face. I walked to the far corner of the office and stood with my face to the wall, patted it with a hand. I turned around slowly and looked across at little Harry Jones grimacing in his chair.

  “Well, you fooled him, Harry,” I said out loud, in a voice that sounded queer to me. “You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman.26 You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me.”

  I had to search him. It was a nasty job. His pockets yielded nothing about Agnes, nothing that I wanted at all. I didn’t think they would, but I had to be sure. Mr. Canino might be back. Mr. Canino would be the kind of self-confident gentleman who would not mind returning to the scene of his crime.

  I put the light out and started to open the door. The phone bell rang jarringly down on the baseboard. I listened to it, my jaw muscles drawn into a knot, aching. Then I shut the door and put the light on again and went across to it.

  “Yeah?”

  A woman’s voice. Her voice. “Is Harry around?”

  “Not for a minute, Agnes.”

  She waited a while on that. Then she said slowly: “Who’s talking?”

  “Marlowe, the guy that’s trouble to you.”

  “Where is he?” sharply.

  “I came over to give him two hundred bucks in return for certain information. The offer holds. I have the money. Where are you?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps you’d better ask him. Where is he?”

  “I can’t ask him. Do you know a man named Canino?”

  Her gasp came as clearly as though she had been beside me.

  “Do you want the two C’s or not?” I asked.

  “I—I want it pretty bad, mister.”

  “All right then. Tell me where to bring it.”

  “I—I—” Her voice trailed off and came back with a panic rush. “Where’s Harry?”

  “Got scared and blew. Meet me somewhere—anywhere at all—I have the money.”

  “I don’t believe you—about Harry. It’s a trap.”

  “Oh stuff. I could have had Harry hauled in long ago. There isn’t anything to make a trap for. Canino got a line on Harry somehow and he blew. I want quiet, you want quiet, Harry wants quiet.” Harry already had it. Nobody could take it away from him. “You don’t think I’d stooge for Eddie Mars, do you, angel?”

  “No-o, I guess not. Not that. I’ll meet you in half an hour. Beside Bullocks Wilshire,27 the east entrance to the parking lot.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I dropped the phone in its cradle. The wave of almond odor flooded me again, and the sour smell of vomit. The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change.

  I left the office. Nothing moved in the dingy corridor. No pebbled glass door had light behind it. I went down the fire stairs to the second floor and from there looked down at the lighted roof of the elevator cage. I pressed the button. Slowly the car lurched into motion. I ran down the stairs again. The car was above me when I walked out of the building.

  It was raining hard again. I walked into it with the heavy drops slapping my face. When one of them touched my tongue I knew that my mouth was open and the ache at the side of my jaws told me it was open wide and strained back, mimicking the rictus of death carved upon the face of Harry Jones.28

  1. The sleazy office building interior borrows from Chandler’s 1936 Black Mask story “Goldfish”: “The Quorn Building was a narrow front, the color of dried mustard, with a large case of false teeth in the entrance. The directory held the names of painless dentists, people who teach you how to become a letter carrier, just names, and numbers without any names.”

  2. shyster: Most commonly applied to unscrupulous lawyers, the word is probably derived from the German scheisser, meaning “worthless person.”

  BEING AND NOTHINGNESS: CHANDLER’S DESCRIPTIONS BY NEGATION

  Chandler loved the rhetorical effect of stating, definitively and decidedly, that nothing was happening and no one was doing anything. One might say that the action of his novels gets punctuated by its absence, although it is also true that by announcing a lack of action, Chandler is using negation positively, effectively integrating negative space into the grooves of his narrative. Darkness and light.

  FROM FAREWELL, MY LOVELY:

  “There’s a nice little girl,” I told myself out loud, in the car, “for a guy that’s interested in a nice little girl.” Nobody said anything. “But I’m not,” I said. Nobody said anything to that either.

  FROM THE HIGH WINDOW:

  I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

  [Editors’ note: James Crumley uses this as the epigraph of his wonderful, Chandleresque novel The Mexican Tree Duck.]

  FROM THE LITTLE SISTER:

  [The telephone] was dark and sleek in the fading light. It wouldn’t ring tonight. Nobody would call me again. Not now, not this time. Perhaps not ever.

  I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not ev
en thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket.

  I pulled the phone towards me and dialed Mavis Weld’s number. It rang and rang and rang. Nine times. That’s a lot of ringing, Marlowe. I guess there’s nobody home. Nobody home to you. I hung up. Who would you like to call now? You got a friend somewhere that might like to hear your voice? No. Nobody.

  Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop….Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.

  3. A study in contrast with the luxurious interiors of the fabulously wealthy Sternwoods, the nouveau-riche Mars, and the stylish Geiger. (And how’d they get their money?) How the other half lives.

  4. The well-appointed henchman, understated, menacing, and on his way up the ladder, is part of gangster lore. Canino may be partly inspired by Joe Adonis and Vito Genovese, two gunmen who later became bosses. And he may owe a little something to Al Capone, who prided himself on personal elegance and started out as a triggerman himself. Capone was a celebrity between his rise in the late 1920s and his incarceration for tax evasion in 1932. In that year the film Scarface fictionalized his rise and fall; it was directed by none other than future TBS film director Howard Hawks. Of course, Canino may also be drawn from movie characters like the cool killer Guino Rinaldo in Scarface, as played by George Raft (see note 34 on this page).

  5. According to the 1935 criminal lexicon The Underworld Speaks, “Crab the act” means “something went wrong on the job.” Mars is worried about what Jones told Marlowe. This implicates Mars in something, of course. And it’s about to implicate Marlowe, who unwittingly told Mars that Jones was following him (at the end of Chapter Twenty-One). That’s why Mars “looked jarred” back then.

  6. peeper: Detective, as in Private Eye, from Private I, investigator.

  7. shatting on her uppers: Completely broke.

  8. shill: Someone “hired to entice customers” (Mencken). A front person or sales representative for something illicit or unsavory.

  9. two centuries: See note 14 on this page.

  10. We have seen that, contrary to the stereotype, Marlowe goes through the novel without carrying a gun.

  11. Chicago overcoat: A variation on “cement overcoat” or “cement shoes”—weights to drown a mob victim. The technique dates from the mid-1930s, in legend if not in fact. According to Chandler himself, the term was invented by crime writers rather than mobsters.

  12. See note 24 on this page.

  13. yellow: Cowardly; an Americanism of uncertain origin.

  14. front for that twist: Cover for that woman.

  15. jakeloo: A variation on “jake,” meaning everything’s okay.

  16. dip the bill: Have a drink (“bill” for nose, like a duck’s beak).

  17. bond stuff: A high grade of alcohol, distilled according to government regulations (and, as such, bonded to pay tax).

  18. The specific lady would be Mrs. Prendergast, the original “blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window,” on downing her fourth glass of rye in “Mandarin’s Jade.” Since moths devour ermine and other fur, it’s a particularly nasty toast coming from Canino in this context.

  19. Brutally ironic—unless of course one considers Harry Jones’s actions in the light of the chivalric code, in which case it isn’t ironic at all.

  20. Each of the deaths in the novel takes place across a defined barrier, with Marlowe in close proximity to all but one of them. Geiger is killed while Marlowe sits in a car outside, and the detective crosses a footbridge to get into the house; Owen Taylor drives through a wall at the pier’s end, and Marlowe must descend slippery steps to see his corpse; Brody is killed in the threshold of a doorway, with the killer outside and Marlowe inside the room; and now Harry Jones is killed with Marlowe listening on the other side of a door. Even the moribund General sat ensconced in the microclimate of his orchid room, fending off death. Marlowe will soon cross the border and find himself facing his own end.

  21. One of the lesser-known products of Los Angeles, cyanide was used to fumigate citrus trees and manufactured locally at a plant in Cudahy, south of Pasadena. Chandler first used cyanide as a poison in his 1935 story “Nevada Gas.” Nevada introduced the hydrogen cyanide gas chamber in 1924, hence the title implicitly means “gas chamber.”

  22. In the early days of phone service, numbers were routed through named exchanges. This number would actually be dialed (some readers will remember dialed phones) as “WE 2528.”

  23. flop: Flophouse, a cheap rooming house or hotel.

  24. At the time that Chandler was writing, Bunker Hill was a crowded, impoverished residential area near downtown Los Angeles. From the 1860s through the First World War it had been an exclusive neighborhood made up of Victorian mansions. As the wealthy moved to Pasadena and the West Side, the mansions were subdivided into rentals and eventually fell into disrepair. John Fante’s novel Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982) chronicles the down-and-out neighborhood just south of Pershing Square as it was in the 1930s. His distinctive character Arturo Bandini lives in Bunker Hill in Ask the Dust (1939). Chandler will later write, in The High Window (1942):

  Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there is still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.

  In the 1920s, Chandler himself lived on Bunker Hill, at the top of the Angels Flight funicular railway, with his mother. By then Bunker Hill had already gone into decline.

  Bunker Hill, 1920s

  25. To jeer at someone or tell them off (as in, “to razz”).

  26. Harry Jones sacrifices himself for the woman he loves, like the knight Marlowe allows himself not to be.

  27. Iconic art deco building at 3050 Wilshire Boulevard, completed in 1929 as part of the street’s development. The first department store built with its main entrance at the back—opening onto its large parking lot—it was designed to be a beacon to motorists. Kevin Starr calls it a “temple to the automobile.”

  Bullocks Wilshire

  28. A touch of the macabre. The rictus is death’s grimace or grin. That Marlowe is not aware of its appearance on his face until the rain hits his tongue and his jaws ache might show either his empathy for the murdered man, or his oncoming hysteria, or both.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Give me the money.”

  The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain pounded above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock’s green-tinged tower was far above us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping city.1 Her black-gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips.2 She leaned towards me.

  “I’m leaving, copper. I’m on my way. This is a getaway stake and God how I need it. What happened to Harry?”

  “I told you he ran away. Canino got wise to him somehow. Forget Harry. I’ve paid and I want my information.”

  “You’ll get it. Joe and I were out riding Foothill Boulevard3 Sunday before last. It was late and the lights coming up and the usu
al mess of cars. We passed a brown coupe and I saw the girl who was driving it. There was a man beside her, a dark short man. The girl was a blonde. I’d seen her before. She was Eddie Mars’ wife. The guy was Canino. You wouldn’t forget either of them, if you ever saw them. Joe tailed the coupe from in front. He was good at that. Canino, the watchdog, was taking her out for air. A mile or so east of Realito a road turns towards the foothills. That’s orange country to the south but to the north it’s as bare as hell’s back yard and smack up against the hills there’s a cyanide plant where they make the stuff for fumigation.4 Just off the highway there’s a small garage and paintshop run by a gee named Art Huck. Hot car drop, likely.5 There’s a frame house beyond this, and beyond the house nothing but the foothills and the bare stone outcrop and the cyanide plant a couple of miles on. That’s the place where she’s holed up. They turned off on this road and Joe swung around and went back and we saw the car turn off the road where the frame house was. We sat there half an hour looking through the cars going by. Nobody came back out. When it was quite dark Joe sneaked up there and took a look. He said there were lights in the house and a radio was going and just the one car out in front, the coupe. So we beat it.”

  She stopped talking and I listened to the swish of tires on Wilshire. I said: “They might have shifted quarters since then but that’s what you have to sell—that’s what you have to sell. Sure you knew her?”

  “If you ever see her, you won’t make a mistake the second time. Good-bye, copper, and wish me luck. I got a raw deal.”

  “Like hell you did,”6 I said, and walked away across the street to my own car.

  The gray Plymouth moved forward, gathered speed, and darted around the corner onto Sunset Place. The sound of its motor died, and with it blonde Agnes wiped herself off the slate for good, so far as I was concerned. Three men dead, Geiger, Brody and Harry Jones, and the woman went riding off in the rain with my two hundred in her bag and not a mark on her. I kicked my starter and drove on downtown to eat. I ate a good dinner.7 Forty miles in the rain is a hike, and I hoped to make it a round trip.