Crimereads.com offers an excerpt and adaptation from the editor’s
introduction to The Annotated Big Sleep, a book about the late, great writer
Raymond Chandler’s first crime novel.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that “some literary antiquarian
of a rather special type may one day think it worthwhile to run through the
files of the pulp detective magazines” to watch as “the popular mystery story
shed its refined good manners and went native.” He might have said, as the
genre of detective fiction kicked out the Britishisms and became American. A
chief agent of this transformation was Raymond Chandler himself. The Big Sleep
was Chandler’s first novel, and it introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the
archetypal wisecracking, world-weary private detective that now occupies a
permanent place in the American imagination. If Superman or John Wayne is the
Zeus of American myth, and Marilyn Monroe is Aphrodite, then Marlowe is
Prometheus: the noble outsider, sacrificing and enduring for a code he alone
upholds.
But The Big Sleep does more than even Chandler intended it
to do. Partially by design and partly by happy contingency, the novel
dramatizes a cluster of profound subjects and themes, including human
mortality; ethical inquiry; the sordid history of Los Angeles in the early
twentieth century; the politics of class, gender, and sexuality; the explosion
of Americanisms, colloquialisms, slang, and genre jargon; and a knowing
playfulness with the mystery formula—all set against a backdrop of a
post-Prohibition, Depression-era America teetering on the edge of World War II.
For all this, The Big Sleep reads easy. And it’s a ripping good story.
In this annotated edition, we will trace the many veins of
meaning folded into Chandler’s intricate novel. He didn’t think of himself as
primarily a “mystery” writer—he called his stories only “ostensibly”
mysteries—but consideration of his work was confined within the limitations of
genre fiction during his lifetime and for decades thereafter. Chandler hated
being restricted by such notions. In a late letter to publisher Hamish Hamilton
he wrote: “In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary
merely because he is a mystery writer. . . . When people ask me, as
occasionally they do, why I don’t try my hand at a serious novel, I don’t argue
with them; I don’t even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be
useless. They wouldn’t know.”
Nowadays we don’t tend to be constrained by the same
distinctions between “high” and “low art” that haunted Chandler. He is taught
in university courses. He’s been canonized by the Library of America. Le Monde
voted The Big Sleep one of the “100 Books of the Century” in 1999, and in 2005
TIME Magazine included it in its list of 100 best English-language novels since
the magazine began in 1923. Before his death he would be lauded by authors as
eminent W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and Christopher
Isherwood. And The Big Sleep’s success moved from text to screen, with film
adaptations eliciting iconic performances from two of Hollywood’s greatest
leading men, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
You can also read my Crime Beat column on Raymond Chandler
via the below link:
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