The Big Sleep

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

'I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.'

Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is blackmailing him. A broken, weary old man, Sternwood just wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. However, with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out. And that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler's first novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe.

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess

© Raymond Chandler 1988 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious
The New York Times Book Review
Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since
Paul Auster
Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude
Erle Stanley Gardner

[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision

New York Review of Books
Raymond Chandler is a master
New York Times

Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye

Los Angeles Times
Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist
The Boston Book Review
Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence
Daily Telegraph

User Reviews

Book 5.0
Narration 5.0
5.0
5.0
Excellent narration of a great Chandler story; the most famed of his stories because of the classic movie but not his very best, even though it remains a work of genius. Only Simenon is better in the grittier crime genre at painting an image in fewer words but what Chandler lacks in brevity he improves with descriptive comparisons which are laugh-out-loud funny. The film version of the Big Sleep has a finale so different from the novel it is almost a different story. I adore the movie. It is one of my all time favourites but the novel is so much better, especially because of the ending. Chandler's reputation is enhanced by the narration of Scott Brick who so brutally and beautifully captures the seediness of many of the characters you feel you need to take a bath. And that is praise.
Thomas Reilly 21/09/2025

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