![]() Chandler melded the two fathers to make a new character and also did the same for the stories’ two daughters. In each, there’s a strong father distressed by his wild daughter. Both stories were standalone tales, sharing no common characters, but they had similarities. The central plot of the novel comes from two stories, Killer in the Rain (published in 1935) and The Curtain (published in 1936). When he came to write The Big Sleep, Chandler “cannibalised” (his own description) his stories. The early stories have several Marlowe prototypes, LA settings, good and bad cops mixed into the regular crime cocktail of violence, drugs, sex and booze. A late starter, he came to this world as an outsider, a middle-aged English public schoolboy adrift in California. This was in the great days of the Black Mask… and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest.” Between these beginnings and 1938, when he began to write The Big Sleep, he wrote 21 Black Mask stories, developing and honing the qualities of his mature work. He explained this departure to his British publisher: “Wandering up and down the Pacific coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women’s magazines. A note on the textĬhandler published his first detective story, in the pulp fiction magazine Black Mask, at the end of 1933. To him, plot was always subordinate to character, mood and atmosphere. When Howard Hawks filmed the novel he asked, “Who killed the chauffeur?” and Chandler replied that he had no idea. It’s not flawless, and there are some loose ends. The plot, notorious for its complexity, soon spirals into a world of pornography, gambling and Hollywood lowlife. But The Big Sleep transcends its genre, moving WH Auden to write that Chandler’s thrillers “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”. In The Big Sleep – the title refers to the gangster euphemism for death – Marlowe is summoned to the home of old General Sternwood whose wild daughter, Carmen, is being blackmailed by a seedy bookseller. For instance: “It was a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” ![]() Chandler plays with this medieval conceit in surreal metaphors. ![]() He is a 20th-century knight who treads the mean streets of Hollywood and Santa Monica, and who also visits the houses of the stinking rich, with their English butlers, corrosive secrets and sinister vices. In Chandler’s stories, his protagonist also appears as “Mallory”. He once observed of his celebrated style: “I’m an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek.”Ĭhandler, like PG Wodehouse, who will feature later in this series, had been educated at Dulwich College, a school founded by Edward Alleyn, the great actor-manager whose company, the Admiral’s Men, included the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great rival. ![]() ![]() He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”Ĭhandler might have been describing Philip Marlowe, who made his debut in this first novel, after several appearances in Chandler’s pulp fiction stories. “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man… He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. ![]()
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