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

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