The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  “That is scarcely answering my question.”

  I nodded. “No. That is scarcely answering your question. I guess I just don’t like to admit that I played a hunch. The morning I was here, after I left you out in the orchid house, Mrs. Regan sent for me. She seemed to assume I was hired to look for her husband and she didn’t seem to like it. She let drop however that ‘they’ had found his car in a certain garage. The ‘they’ could only be the police. Consequently the police must know something about it. If they did, the Missing Persons Bureau would be the department that would have the case. I didn’t know whether you had reported it, of course, or somebody else, or whether they had found the car through somebody reporting it abandoned in a garage. But I know cops, and I knew that if they got that much, they would get a little more—especially as your driver happened to have a police record. I didn’t know how much more they would get. That started me thinking about the Missing Persons Bureau. What convinced me was something in Mr. Wilde’s manner the night we had the conference over at his house about Geiger and so on. We were alone for a minute and he asked me whether you had told me you were looking for Regan. I said you had told me you wished you knew where he was and that he was all right. Wilde pulled his lip in and looked funny. I knew just as plainly as though he had said it that by ‘looking for Regan’ he meant using the machinery of the law to look for him. Even then I tried to go up against Captain Gregory in such a way that I wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already.”

  “And you allowed Captain Gregory to think I had employed you to find Rusty?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did—when I was sure he had the case.”

  He closed his eyes. They twitched a little. He spoke with them closed. “And do you consider that ethical?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  The eyes opened again. The piercing blackness of them was startling coming suddenly out of that dead face. “Perhaps I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t. The head of a Missing Persons Bureau isn’t a talker. He wouldn’t be in that office if he was. This one is a very smart cagey guy who tries, with a lot of success at first, to give the impression he’s a middle-aged hack fed up with his job. The game I play is not spillikins.18 There’s always a large element of bluff connected with it. Whatever I might say to a cop, he would be apt to discount it. And to that cop it wouldn’t make much difference what I said. When you hire a boy in my line of work it isn’t like hiring a window-washer and showing him eight windows and saying: ‘Wash those and you’re through.’ You don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor. The client comes first, unless he’s crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut. After all you didn’t tell me not to go to Captain Gregory.”

  “That would have been rather difficult,” he said with a faint smile.

  “Well, what have I done wrong? Your man Norris seemed to think when Geiger was eliminated the case was over. I don’t see it that way. Geiger’s method of approach puzzled me and still does. I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance.19 I don’t expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don’t know much about cops. It’s not things like that they overlook, if they overlook anything. I’m not saying they often overlook anything when they’re really allowed to work. But if they do, it’s apt to be something looser and vaguer, like a man of Geiger’s type sending you his evidence of debt and asking you to pay like a gentleman—Geiger, a man in a shady racket, in a vulnerable position, protected by a racketeer and having at least some negative protection from some of the police. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to find out if there was anything putting pressure on you. If there was, you would pay him. If not, you would ignore him and wait for his next move. But there was something putting a pressure on you. Regan. You were afraid he was not what he had appeared to be, that he had stayed around and been nice to you just long enough to find out how to play games with your bank account.”

  He started to say something but I interrupted him. “Even at that it wasn’t your money you cared about. It wasn’t even your daughters. You’ve more or less written them off. It’s that you’re still too proud to be played for a sucker—and you really liked Regan.”

  There was a silence. Then the General said quietly: “You talk too damn much, Marlowe. Am I to understand you are still trying to solve that puzzle?”

  “No. I’ve quit. I’ve been warned off. The boys think I play too rough. That’s why I thought I should give you back your money—because it isn’t a completed job by my standards.”

  He smiled. “Quit, nothing,” he said. “I’ll pay you another thousand dollars to find Rusty. He doesn’t have to come back. I don’t even have to know where he is. A man has a right to live his own life. I don’t blame him for walking out on my daughter, nor even for going so abruptly. It was probably a sudden impulse. I want to know that he is all right wherever he is. I want to know it from him directly, and if he should happen to need money, I should want him to have that also. Am I clear?”

  I said: “Yes, General.”

  He rested a little while, lax on the bed, his eyes closed and dark-lidded, his mouth tight and bloodless. He was used up. He was pretty nearly licked. He opened his eyes again and tried to grin at me.

  “I guess I’m a sentimental old goat,” he said. “And no soldier at all. I took a fancy to that boy. He seemed pretty clean to me. I must be a little too vain about my judgment of character. Find him for me, Marlowe. Just find him.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “You’d better rest now. I’ve talked your arm off.”

  I got up quickly and walked across the wide floor and out. He had his eyes shut again before I opened the door. His hands lay limp on the sheet. He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look. I shut the door quietly and went back along the upper hall and down the stairs.

  1. Day five, the final day of the novel. The brisk, blasé description reverses the buoyant, poetic opening of the novel. Marlowe has gone from hope and optimism to postclimactic, jaded indifference.

  2. The question is whether Captain Gregory had a strategy, or whether he is in league with Mars. Mars has already given Marlowe the answer (this page).

  3. With the following speech, Chandler lets Gregory indict himself, and law enforcement generally, far more effectively than having Marlowe didactically make the point would. Richard Rayner in A Bright and Guilty Place: “Chandler’s fiction abounds in…crooked D.A.s, violent cops, exhausted cops, disinterested cops, tough cops that can be greased but aren’t all bad”—and one might add fatalistic cops, resigned to the vast panoply of corruption and the underside of police work.

  4. A key passage that should not be passed over lightly. Gregory justifies himself by suggesting that power throughout the whole country is corrupt and that wealth is above the law. The point was conveyed visually on the original front of the hardback TBS dust jacket design: an American flag motif, with Jackson Pollock–like spatters dotting the red, white, and blue. The spatters are not just the obvious blood red but also flag blue. Writer Walter Mosley provides an eloquent gloss on both the image and the passage: “From our prisons to our ghettos, from our boardrooms to the Oval Office, from gangsta rap to the Patriot Act, America is a hard-boiled nation. To have faith is to be a fool. To expect justice is to accept tyranny. To rally round the flag is to support the torture of human beings while reading our children the Constitution.” Mosley’s essay is called “Poisonville,” after the town so-called in Hammett’s Red Harvest. Captain Gregory’s speech makes Poisonville no one town but the whole “wide, green and beautiful U.S.A.” As Chandler puts it in “The Simple Art of Murder,” i
t is “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities…a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing….It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.” Hard-boiled fiction as political critique: Poisonville, U.S.A.

  Poisonville, U.S.A.: The original dust jacket for The Big Sleep. Jacket art by Hans J. Barschel.

  5. Marlowe expresses his disapprobation with mock-deferential agreement and repetition. In The High Window he will allow himself more room. To Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze: “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience.”

  6. Marlowe is, of course, the exception to the hard-boiled wonderland that is Poisonville, Los Angeles, U.S.A. We have quoted the famous lines from “The Simple Art of Murder” elsewhere (see note 8 on this page), but they bear repeating in this context: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything.” And he takes a beating for it, time after time.

  7. Sherlock Holmes would pick up his violin. Spenser might jog along the Charles River. It’s a standard trope: the scene where the detective reflects, in search of the epiphany that will make sense of it all. This is about as conventional as Chandler gets in his mystery-genre storytelling.

  8. Lye is a corrosive chemical compound primarily used in cleaning. At least it’s not cyanide.

  9. Marlowe must do his own detective work to exonerate himself with the police.

  10. Marlowe can tell time again. He is restored to the privileged narratological seat, and back in linear chronology. It’s about the same time of morning as it was when the novel opened.

  11. Chandler wryly ties together various threads of the story within an ironically cheerful faux denouement: the sun is not only shining but dancing; the birds are singing, contra Keats (see note 7 on this page); Rusty Regan would be proud of the lawn; and the whole thing is as artificial as Disneyland on a Sunday in June.

  12. Perhaps appropriately, Marlowe has lost track of time: there have been four days since his initial appearance at the Sternwood mansion; this is the fifth. Marlowe can tell (voice) the time, but he cannot yet tell (discern) it. He’s not out of the woods yet.

  13. As if those frozen representations of the soldier and the knight might have changed. It is Marlowe, almost-soldier and almost-knight, but not quite either, who has changed. And who will change even more profoundly by the end.

  14. Henry the Eighth of England died in 1547. The bed appears regal and old.

  15. In the unlikely event the reader has missed the various indications of Sternwood’s moribund state, there is also “bloodless,” “gray,” “a little stiff,” “lifelessly,” “coldly,” and “closed his eyes.”

  16. So Marlowe was looking for Regan, based on a tacit understanding from General Sternwood (the “more than met the eye” element from the end of Chapter Three). Now it’s official.

  Chandler added this shifting cat-and-mouse game to the novel version of the story. In “The Curtain,” it is a much more direct business transaction: the General hires the detective to find his son-in-law at their first meeting. “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars—even if you only have to walk across the street. Tell him everything is all right here. The old man’s doing fine and sends his love. That’s all.” TBS makes the Rusty Regan thread an enigmatic narrative, weaving toward and away from the reader.

  17. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple gather up the suspects and retell the story in the parlor. Jim Rockford retreats to his trailer and talks things over with his father, “Rocky.” With the following exchange, Chandler is using another tried-and-true mystery device, a sort of catch-up space where the detective summarizes parts of the plot that will lead up to the solution. Of course, this being Chandler, the complications are complicated and the summary may not lead us to the conclusion. In 1977, the Rockford Files television series, starring James Garner (who played the title role in the 1969 film Marlowe), aired a send-up of the trope, “Irving the Explainer,” with a plot that featured more stopping and explaining than action.

  18. spillikins: Refers to the game of jackstraws, in which players attempt to remove individual rods without upsetting the heap. A kids’ game requiring fastidiousness.

  19. Marlowe trenchantly makes two rather profound points here. On the one hand, he’s saying that he isn’t like the storybook detectives that Vivian refers to early in the book (see note 8 on this page). On the other hand, he’s saying that he’s not like the genteel, drawing-room detectives in that other kind of mystery fiction, written by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and “S. S. Van Dine” (Willard Huntington Wright) and selling in enormous quantities to a reading public that voraciously devoured detective yarns.

  Chandler wasn’t impressed with Doyle’s detective. In 1948 he wrote that Doyle’s “scientific premises are very unreliable, and the element of mystery to a sophisticated mind frequently does not exist.” Of the universally beloved The Hound of the Baskervilles, he wrote, “God, what tripe. It looks as if Lincoln was wrong. You can fool all of the people all the time.”

  Chandler was even harder on Van Dine’s Philo Vance, an enormously popular fictional detective in the 1920s and ’30s, whom Chandler called “probably the most asinine character in detective literature.” Hammett didn’t like him either. He said that Van Dine wrote “like a high-school girl who had been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  The butler appeared with my hat. I put it on and said: “What do you think of him?”

  “He’s not as weak as he looks, sir.”

  “If he was, he’d be ready for burial. What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”

  The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said.1 “And the soldier’s eye.”

  “Like yours,” I said.

  “If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”2

  “Thanks. How are the ladies this morning?”

  He shrugged politely.

  “Just what I thought,” I said, and he opened the door for me.

  I stood outside on the step and looked down the vistas of grassed terraces and trimmed trees and flowerbeds to the tall metal railing at the bottom of the gardens. I saw Carmen about halfway down, sitting on a stone bench, with her head between her hands, looking forlorn and alone.

  I went down the red brick steps that led from terrace to terrace. I was quite close before she heard me. She jumped up and whirled like a cat.3 She wore the light blue slacks she had worn the first time I saw her. Her blonde hair was the same loose tawny wave. Her face was white. Red spots flared in her cheeks as she looked at me. Her eyes were slaty.

  “Bored?” I said.

  She smiled slowly, rather shyly, then nodded quickly. Then she whispered: “You’re not mad at me?”

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  She put her thumb up and giggled. “I’m not.” When she giggled I didn’t like her any more. I looked around. A target hung on a tree about thirty feet away, with some darts sticking to it. There were three or four more on the stone bench where she had been sitting.

  “For people with money you and your sister don’t seem to have much fun,” I said.

  She looked at me under her long lashes. This was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back. I said: �
�You like throwing those darts?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That reminds me of something.” I looked back towards the house. By moving about three feet I made a tree hide me from it. I took her little pearl-handled gun out of my pocket. “I brought you back your artillery. I cleaned it and loaded it up. Take my tip—don’t shoot it at people, unless you get to be a better shot. Remember?”4

  Her face went paler and her thin thumb dropped. She looked at me, then at the gun I was holding. There was a fascination in her eyes. “Yes,” she said, and nodded. Then suddenly: “Teach me to shoot.”

  “Huh?”

  “Teach me how to shoot. I’d like that.”

  “Here? It’s against the law.”

  She came close to me and took the gun out of my hand, cuddled her hand around the butt. Then she tucked it quickly inside her slacks, almost with a furtive movement, and looked around.

  “I know where,” she said in a secret voice. “Down by some of the old wells.” She pointed off down the hill. “Teach me?”

  I looked into her slaty blue eyes. I might as well have looked at a couple of bottle-tops. “All right. Give me back the gun until I see if the place looks all right.”

  She smiled and made a mouth, then handed it back with a secret naughty air, as if she was giving me a key to her room. We walked up the steps and around to my car. The gardens seemed deserted. The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile. We got into the car and I drove down the sunken driveway and out through the gates.5

  “Where’s Vivian?” I asked.

  “Not up yet.” She giggled.

  I drove on down the hill through the quiet opulent streets with their faces washed by the rain, bore east to La Brea, then south. We reached the place she meant in about ten minutes.

  “In there.” She leaned out of the window and pointed.

  It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. A wide five-barred gate was folded back against a stump and looked as if it hadn’t been shut in years. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. It was empty and sunny now, but not yet dusty. The rain had been too hard and too recent. I followed the ruts along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land.6 Then the oil-stained, motionless walking-beam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over a branch. I could see the rusty old steel cable that connected this walking-beam with a half a dozen others.7 The beams didn’t move, probably hadn’t moved for a year. The wells were no longer pumping. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight.