The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  Regarding the opulence, it should be noted that, in general, only the wealthy could afford to hire private detectives, so Marlowe moves among them regularly, which affords him ample opportunity for sardonic descriptions like this one. In his next novel Marlowe will visit the ostentatiously decorated digs of one Lindsay Marriott. Of a sculpture that catches the detective’s attention, the dandy brags, “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.” Marlowe: “I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny.”

  2. The absence of color recalls the bloodless General and Carmen’s pallid face.

  “THIS ROOM HAD A WHITE CARPET”: FROM “THE CURTAIN”

  Again, Chandler smoothes out his earlier fiction. Here’s the original scene of Marlowe and Vivian’s initial encounter.

  This room had a white carpet from wall to wall. Ivory drapes of immense height lay tumbled casually on the white carpet inside the many windows. The windows stared toward the dark foothills, and the air beyond the glass was dark too. It hadn’t started to rain yet, but there was a feeling of pressure in the atmosphere.

  Mrs. O’Mara was stretched out on a white chaise longue with both her slippers off and her feet in the net stockings they don’t wear anymore. She was tall and dark, with a sulky mouth. Handsome, but this side of beautiful.

  She said: “What in the world can I do for you? It’s all known. Too damn known. Except that I don’t know you, do I?”

  “Well, hardly,” I said. “I’m just a private copper in a small way of business.”

  3. Just a hint. By the end of this chapter and his initial interview at the Sternwood mansion, Marlowe will decide that “It was going to rain hard.”

  In fact, heavy rains and flooding covered the LA area in February and March 1938. The Red Cross called it the fifth-largest flood in history, and the Los Angeles Times reported a death toll of more than thirty.

  4. These two sentences encapsulate the archetype of the femme fatale: the dangerous, seductive woman (literally, “deadly woman” in French. The phrase “luscious mantrap,” from the Pocket Book cover shown on this page, also works.). The character type has a long history in Western literature and folklore, from the legendary Lilith (and Eve, for that matter), Homer’s Circe and subsequent seductive sirens, through the biblical Salome (particularly as reworked by Oscar Wilde in his eponymous play of 1891), the Arthurian Morgan le Fay, and Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”—“the beautiful lady without pity.” The figure of the lovely, deadly lady became prominent in the nineteenth century, including in Chandler’s beloved Dumas: The Three Musketeers features a stunningly cruel femme fatale named Milady de Winter. And it became a cornerstone of storytelling in hard-boiled fiction and film noir. Among the droves, see, most iconically, The Maltese Falcon’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Nirdlinger, or Dietrichson in the film, portrayed with perfect treacherous allure by Barbara Stanwyck. (Chandler cowrote the script, based on the novel by James M. Cain.) Feminists have long pointed out that the archetype oozes male fear of female power and sexuality: see especially Mary Ann Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis.

  In Arthurian lore, Viviane is one of the names of the Lady of the Lake, Merlin’s mistress and terminal enchanter. An ambiguous figure in the medieval sources, the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, made her entirely evil in his enormously popular retelling of the story in Idylls of the King (1859–85). Chandler will put a murder-mystery spin on the sobriquet in the title of his fourth Marlowe novel, The Lady in the Lake (1943; the short-story version was published the same year as TBS, 1939).

  The femme fatale: beauty/sex/death (New Avon Library, 1943, cover art by Paul Stahr/Photofest)

  (Ballantine Books, 1971, cover art by Tom Adams)

  5. The architect Le Corbusier designed this piece of furniture, an upholstered sofa with a chair-like back, long enough to support the legs. Like Hammett, Chandler is a meticulous observer of interiors, from the boudoirs of the rich to dingy office buildings. Throughout his fiction objects and fashion choices tell tales of character and social class. Margaret Atwood’s 1994 prose poem “In Love with Raymond Chandler” is a paean to his decorator’s eye: “I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his cold blonde unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating crocodiles; of his chaises longues, with their malicious pillows.”

  6. Also known as symphonic poems, tone poems musically capture the mood or theme of poems, stories, and paintings.

  7. Chandler might as well be describing the silent film and flapper icon Louise Brooks (1906–85; see the photograph on this page). The flapper was a distinctive cultural persona for women of the 1920s particularly, associated with jazz, dancing, and the archetypal bobbed hair. But it was also an empowering countercultural role in which women flaunted their independence and violated the restrictions of conventional femininity, including those associated with public behavior, alcohol consumption, sex, and sexuality.

  Flapper icon Louise Brooks (from the collection of Thomas Gladysz and the Louise Brooks Society)

  8. Implying that she and Marlowe aren’t in a book themselves. As such, a gesture of verisimilitude: the appearance of actuality, or “real life,” within art.

  There were, in fact, actual private detectives open for business at the time—the 1939 Los Angeles City Directory lists thirty-six agencies and operatives—but Marlowe, Chandler insisted, would not have been one of them. The author declared, “I have never been able to understand the criticism made by some idiots that the real private detectives are not like those of fiction. I know exactly what real private detectives are like”—“sleazy little drudge[s],” with “no more personality than a blackjack” and “about as much moral stature as a stop and go sign.” According to Chandler, Marlowe is a “fantastic creation”; he “does not and could not exist. He is the personification of an attitude, the exaggeration of a possibility.” That attitude: honesty and decency. The possibility: to do good in a corrupt world. The point was not trivial. In his 1944 manifesto “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler claimed for art “a quality of redemption.” The word means both salvation and liberation, no small matter. And he set the possibility for that redemption squarely on the shoulders of his protagonist. He famously wrote: “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.” Marlowe is often misidentified as an “antihero.” In fact, Chandler is drawing on the archetype of the hero writ large, with all the trappings: before the novel ends, we’ll get a tweaked version of a quest narrative; multiple obstacles to overcome, monsters to face, damsels in distress (some but not all of whom double as monsters and obstacles); the adherence to a moral code in the face of great temptation; and tests of strength and integrity. In Chandler’s words, his hero “must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” Perhaps he doesn’t really exist after all, except in books?

  THE NAME’S MARLOWE. SAM MARLOWE.

  A Jamaican-American detective named Sam Marlowe, who secretly advised both Chandler and Hammett? Seems a little far-fetched, but the possibility was explored in a November 2014 story in the Los Angeles Times. Reporter Daniel Miller, using as a source Louise Ransil, a former movie executive and screenwriter, investigated the story of Sam Marlowe, possibly the first licensed black private eye “west of the Mississippi.” He was, in fact, a licensed PI working in the Los Angeles area. According to Ransil and Marlowe’s family members, the real-life detective wrote to the authors after readin
g their stories in Black Mask, claiming they’d gotten details wrong and offering advice. According to Miller’s sources, Marlowe then became their adviser. Ransil claims to have seen letters that would prove the story to be more than a yarn, but they’ve gone missing—a real-life mystery. At the very least, a contemporary detective named Sam Marlowe is an uncanny coincidence.

  9. Marlowe gets called worse, usually by well-heeled adversaries, but not always. In The Long Goodbye, a tough con sneers, “You’re a piker, Marlowe. You’re a peanut grifter. You’re so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you.” Nor is he always involved in high-profile cases like this one. He has to take snooping jobs himself. In Farewell, My Lovely he looks for a barber who has left his wife: “It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.” He does draw the line at divorce work, however, unlike Sam Spade.

  10. Dashiell Hammett also liked to have his narrator comment on not commenting: letting statements go, allowing questions to hang. From Red Harvest: “I thought of a couple of wisecrack answers to that. I kept them to myself”; from The Dain Curse: “I was tempted to tell him what I thought of him, but there was no profit in that.”

  11. Grotesque foreshadowing.

  12. gusher: An apt metaphor, since it is also a term for the uncontrolled release of crude oil from a well.

  A gusher

  13. The maid (later named Mathilda) is rather a cypher in TBS, as in the homes of the wealthy generally. She has no lines of dialogue and little personality beyond subservience. Vivian doesn’t even speak to her, imperiously waving the glass for another drink.

  14. ritzing me: To be ritzed was to be treated with condescension by someone from the upper classes. The Ritz Hotels in Paris, London, and New York were considered the most fashionable and elegant at the time. Irving Berlin’s celebration of high-toned nightlife, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” became synonymous with the Roaring Twenties (even though it debuted in 1930). Vivian’s Jazz Age encoding is telling: she acts like the twenties are still roaring around her and the Depression has yet to hit.

  15. swell: “Fine, stylish, first rate, just right” (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

  16. Buick, made by General Motors, was then a luxury car. It is unclear whether she means that she would like to crush him or to buy him. Vivian gave Regan a Packard, another luxury car. Owen Taylor will soon wash up in the family’s Buick sedan, granted him for personal use on weekends.

  17. With the two words “for once,” Marlowe’s interior monologue calls attention to the effort it takes to signify cool. It indicates that we’re not in the head of a cardboard cutout tough guy but a character who—just like his readers—is aware of the impression he’s making. Chandler plays with the tropes of the genre by having Marlowe issue a running commentary on various characters’ (including his own) deliberate performance of hard-boiled gender roles throughout the book. We’ve already seen Carmen’s “trick” with her eyelashes, raising and lowering them like (appropriately) a theater curtain. Vivian’s legs are “arranged to stare at.” The men will be just as concerned to appear tough and manly as Vivian and Carmen are to appear sexy and alluring. It’s a key point: because the behavior is more artful than “natural,” there is room for critique when it works (“You made yourself over into just another flip hard-boiled modern cutie. Why?” Marlowe will ask Betty Mayfield in Playback), and unexpected ingenuousness and uncertainty when it doesn’t.

  Chandler particularly liked the trope of the one-handed match snick as a symbol of cool masculine mastery. In Farewell, My Lovely, the fire-breathing Moose Malloy works the trick: “Light flared at the end of his thumb. Smoke came out of his nose.” Others expend more effort. In the unforgettable opening scene of the film version of Double Indemnity (1944), Chandler has the mortally wounded Walter Neff fail to strike the match on his nail once before getting it lit. And watch for Harry Jones’s endearing fumbling with the trope later in this novel.

  18. This announces the competition between Vivian and Marlowe for mastery over information, conversation, and sex. Or perhaps just for mastery. It continues in his office (Chapter Eleven), in his car (Chapter Twenty-Three), and back in her room again (in the last chapter, Thirty-Two). The game is afoot.

  Real-life private detectives (Los Angeles City Directory, 1939)

  19. Actually, he has now gotten something important out of her. This isn’t clear until later, but it’s an important clue to Marlowe that what Vivian really wants to know is whether he was hired to find Rusty.

  20. An aristocratic family in decline, an ancestral mansion teeming with secrets, an atmosphere of illness and unease, and a creepy butler: Chandler transplants elements of the Gothic novel and the classic English mystery into the Southern California landscape. Critic Edward Margolies has called it “Los Angeles Gothic.” The Gothic genre was just receiving some of its first critical attention as Chandler was writing TBS: Montague Summers’s The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel appeared in 1938. A decade earlier, Dashiell Hammett had experimented with combining elements of the Gothic and hard-boiled genres in The Dain Curse (1929), set in San Francisco and starring the Continental Op in a mystery involving a family curse, a religious cult, and a troubled young heiress, Gabrielle Dain Leggett.

  21. The Sternwood mansion overlooks the oil fields west of downtown that produced Los Angeles’s first great oil boom at the turn of the twentieth century. Just down the hill, crude oil still seeps to the surface at the La Brea Tar Pits, which first alerted prospectors to the presence of oil in the area. Three miles to the east, at the corner of Patton and Colton, Edward L. Doheny sank the first well in 1892, starting a rush that transformed the city almost overnight. More than a thousand wells were drilled over the next ten years to tap what proved to be two rich oilfields, the Los Angeles City Oil Field downtown and the Salt Lake Oil Field centered around La Brea and Wilshire. Derricks sprouted up in the midst of houses, gardens, and streets, and oil speculators, including Doheny, George Allan Hancock, and California’s “oil queen,” Emma Summers, made the first LA oil fortunes.

  Oil well locations, downtown Los Angeles (courtesy of the Prelinger Library)

  22. The equivalent passage in “The Curtain” gives Sternwood’s wells a more specific location: “Beyond the estate of the hill slopes down to the city and the old oil wells of La Brea, now partly a park, partly a deserted stretch of fenced in wild land.” Hancock Park was established in this area in 1924, when landowner and oil baron George Allan Hancock donated twenty-three acres of the old Rancho La Brea, including the Tar Pits, to LA County for a park and museum. By then the oil boom had moved to newly discovered oil fields in Signal Hill and Santa Fe Springs, and the La Brea wells were largely abandoned.

  Oil wells on the Pacific Coast, early twentieth century

  23. Sumps are drainage pools of oil and water formed by runoff from the oil extraction process. In one paragraph we are introduced to both the source of the Sternwood fortune and the cesspool it has left behind. As Bernie Ohls says in The Long Goodbye, “There ain’t no clean way to make a million bucks.” David Fine notes in Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction that in Chandler’s novels, the rich move up the hill to get away from the dirt they had to do to make their money. Here the dirt is quite literal. Of course fossil fuels themselves are formed by decomposing buried organisms, as Chandler, a former executive in the oil industry, would have been aware.

  Los Angeles’s great oil novel is Upton Sinclair’s polemical Oil!, published in 1927, which graphically depicts the greed, corruption, and exploitation at the heart of the oil industry. Oil money was the epitome of unearned wealth and exploited labor for Sinclair, and while Chandler’s novel is not as overtly political, the Sternwood sump is a stark reminder of the human and environmental cost of the extraction industry. Chandler knew the oil business
from the inside out, having worked for Joseph Dabney’s oil company from 1922 to 1932, during the peak years of the Signal Hill oil boom. Dabney Oil was one of the more prominent independent oil producers in the Los Angeles basin, operating seventeen wells on Signal Hill and several more in Kern County.

  Of the many downtown sump holes, the largest, belonging to Edward L. Doheny, was at the corner of Metcalf and Court Streets and was 150 by 130 feet wide, according to an 1897 Los Angeles Herald exposé on the effects of oil drilling. “That they are dangerous to health and even life is very evident,” the article reports.

  24. Readers familiar with mythology and fairy tales will recognize an old trick: the protagonist leaves something on the home side of the boundary to be crossed, or maintains a link with the outside in some other way: a trail of crumbs, or a thread leading out of the labyrinth, which these terraces, fences, and gates resemble. The maze motif will soon reappear outside of Geiger’s house.

  25. Marlowe doesn’t specify the make or model and is generally indifferent to what he drives throughout the stories. The retroactively Marlowe-ized detective in “Finger Man” (Black Mask, 1934) drives a nine-year-old Marmon touring car. The henchman Beasley cracks, “I used to own one of these, six years ago, when I was poor.”