The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  Local news headline

  TOO HOT TO PRINT?

  Was TBS based on a real news story too hot to print? A 1946 Pageant magazine article suggested that it was. “It is said that his first novel, revolving about a fat homosexual who ran a rental library of pornography, had its basis in unprintable fact,” wrote Irving Wallace, who interviewed Chandler for the article. The statement is provocative but unconfirmed, and as Loren Latker, creator of the Chandler website Shamus Town, writes, not much was in fact unprintable in the newspapers and scandal sheets of the day.

  15. “Racket” could refer to a host of organized illegal activities. In an American context, the connotation is organized crime (or “gangsters” or “mobsters”). The term was formalized by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 1970 (known by its Italian-sounding acronym, RICO), but the term dates from the eighteenth century in England.

  SIX1

  Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the sidewalk. Big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying giggling girls across the bad places.2 The rain drummed hard on the roof of the car and the burbank top3 began to leak. A pool of water formed on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.4 I struggled into a trench coat5 and made a dash for the nearest drugstore and bought myself a pint of whiskey. Back in the car I used enough of it to keep warm and interested.6 I was long overparked, but the cops were too busy carrying girls and blowing whistles to bother about that.

  In spite of the rain, or perhaps even because of it, there was business done at Geiger’s. Very nice cars stopped in front and very nice-looking people went in and out with wrapped parcels. They were not all men.7

  He showed about four o’clock. A cream-colored coupe stopped in front of the store and I caught a glimpse of the fat face and the Charlie Chan moustache as he dodged out of it and into the store. He was hatless and wore a belted green leather raincoat. I couldn’t see his glass eye at that distance. A tall and very good-looking kid in a jerkin8 came out of the store and rode the coupe off around the corner and came back walking, his glistening black hair plastered with rain.

  Another hour went by. It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street. Street-car bells jangled crossly. At around five-fifteen the tall boy in the jerkin came out of Geiger’s with an umbrella and went after the cream-colored coupe. When he had it in front Geiger came out and the tall boy held the umbrella over Geiger’s bare head. He folded it, shook it off and handed it into the car. He dashed back into the store. I started my motor.

  The coupe went west on the boulevard, which forced me to make a left turn and a lot of enemies, including a motorman who stuck his head out into the rain to bawl me out. I was two blocks behind the coupe before I got in the groove. I hoped Geiger was on his way home. I caught sight of him two or three times and then made him turning north into Laurel Canyon Drive. Halfway up the grade he turned left and took a curving ribbon of wet concrete which was called Laverne Terrace. It was a narrow street with a high bank on one side and a scattering of cabin-like houses built down the slope on the other side, so that their roofs were not very much above road level. Their front windows were masked by hedges and shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.

  Geiger had his lights on and I hadn’t. I speeded up and passed him on a curve, picked a number off a house as I went by and turned at the end of the block. He had already stopped. His car lights were tilted in at the garage of a small house with a square box hedge so arranged that it masked the front door completely. I watched him come out of the garage with his umbrella up and go in through the hedge. He didn’t act as if he expected anybody to be tailing him. Light went on in the house. I drifted down to the next house above it, which seemed empty but had no signs out. I parked, aired out the convertible, had a drink from my bottle, and sat. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but something told me to wait. Another army of sluggish minutes dragged by.

  Two cars came up the hill and went over the crest. It seemed to be a very quiet street. At a little after six more bright lights bobbed through the driving rain. It was pitch black by then. A car dragged to a stop in front of Geiger’s house. The filaments of its lights glowed dimly and died. The door opened and a woman got out. A small slim woman in a vagabond hat and a transparent raincoat. She went in through the box maze.9 A bell rang faintly, light through the rain, a closing door, silence.

  I reached a flash out of my car pocket and went downgrade and looked at the car. It was a Packard convertible, maroon or dark brown. The left window was down. I felt for the license holder10 and poked light at it. The registration read: Carmen Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood. I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.11

  At seven-twenty a single flash of hard white light shot out of Geiger’s house like a wave of summer lightning. As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream echoed out and lost itself among the rain-drenched trees. I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died.

  There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them. The Geiger hideaway was perfectly silent again when I hit the gap in the hedge and dodged around the angle that masked the front door. There was an iron ring in a lion’s mouth for a knocker. I reached for it, I had hold of it. At that exact instant, as if somebody had been waiting for the cue, three shots boomed in the house. There was a sound that might have been a long harsh sigh. Then a soft messy thump. And then rapid footsteps in the house—going away.

  The door fronted on a narrow run, like a footbridge over a gully,12 that filled the gap between the house wall and the edge of the bank. There was no porch, no solid ground, no way to get around to the back. The back entrance was at the top of a flight of wooden steps that rose from the alley-like street below. I knew this because I heard a clatter of feet on the steps, going down. Then I heard the sudden roar of a starting car. It faded swiftly into the distance. I thought the sound was echoed by another car, but I wasn’t sure. The house in front of me was as silent as a vault. There wasn’t any hurry. What was in there was in there.

  I straddled the fence at the side of the runway and leaned far out to the draped but unscreened French window and tried to look in at the crack where the drapes came together. I saw lamplight on a wall and one end of a bookcase. I got back on the runway and took all of it and some of the hedge and gave the front door the heavy shoulder. This was foolish. About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door.13 All it did was hurt my shoulder and make me mad. I climbed over the railing again and kicked the French window in, used my hat for a glove and pulled out most of the lower small pane of glass. I could now reach in and draw a bolt that fastened the window to the sill. The rest was easy. There was no top bolt. The catch gave. I climbed in and pulled the drapes off my face.

  Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

  1. The next ten chapters follow Parts Two through Twelve of “Killer in the Rain” in sequence, scene by scene, with the differences necessitated by the weaving together of that story’s plot with “The Curtain.” Chandler’s strength, as he recognized, was in writing striking and memorable scenes, a skill he began to develop as the writer of these Black Mask stories. In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business, a 1950 collection of his short stories, he writes that the “technical basis of the Black Mask type of story…wa
s that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.” Chandler’s rewrites of these scenes for TBS show how the long form of the novel gave him room to linger over dialogue and description and to build atmosphere and suspense.

  Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan, sporting the famous mustache

  2. Rewriting also gave Chandler a chance to work on his style. This first paragraph is a good example of his sentence-by-sentence reworking of the earlier material from “Killer in the Rain”:

  The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.

  TBS’s version breaks this up into two much pithier sentences. Clive James, who compares the two passages in an essay on Chandler’s style in The World of Raymond Chandler, decides that “there is not much point in talking about how Chandler’s style developed” because the two passages are nearly identical. In fact, they are not: they are stylistically different, and their contrast shows how hard Chandler worked to hone his style and to make his sentences vigorously direct.

  In his letters, Chandler was quite open about valuing style over plot as a writer. He wrote in 1947, “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never heard of to convince them that by slow degrees the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”

  3. No relation to the city of Burbank, a few miles southwest of LA. Burbank was a tightly woven cloth that was used for soft tops in the 1920s and ’30s.

  4. According to the 1939 WPA Guide, the rainy season in Los Angeles “may begin as early as September or as late as January.”

  5. This scene marks the first appearance of the now-iconic raincoat—not for fashion but because it’s raining. It’s not a uniform: Marlowe does without the raincoat even though it’s misty in Farewell, My Lovely, for instance.

  6. Note Marlowe’s disciplined “use” of liquor, contravening the stereotype. Marlowe drinks within distinctly set parameters, unlike Vivian Regan, who “drinks her lunch out of a bottle,” or the even further-gone Carmen. The distinction is between (masculine?) mastery of the situation and the substance (“holding” your liquor), versus the (feminine?) loss of control that Vivian and Carmen represent—to Marlowe. In fact, however, Vivian never actually loses control, whereas the threat of hysteria (emotional, not chemical) runs just under Marlowe’s own surface tension, as we will see.

  Unlike Marlowe, Chandler was not a disciplined drinker. His “lost weekends” were one reason for his sacking at Dabney Oil, and his use of alcohol veered in and out of control throughout his life. After the death of his wife, Cissy, in 1954, his drinking worsened, despite the efforts of friends to help him gain some control.

  Chandler believed that alcohol gave him the energy that allowed him to write. During a drying-out period (the duration is debatable), while attempting to complete the screenplay of The Blue Dahlia, Chandler came up against writer’s block. According to producer John Houseman, Chandler insisted that the best way to finish the script was to write while drunk. He wrote out his demands to Houseman: two Cadillac limousines to stand day and night outside his door to fetch a doctor if necessary and to take script pages to the studio; six secretaries on-site round the clock (two at a time in eight-hour shifts) to take dictation and type; and a direct line to and from the studio to be kept open day and night. Houseman agreed to the terms. When he stopped by the house the following day, Houseman said, he found Chandler passed out on the floor, with a short stack of neatly typed pages sitting next to him, ready to be delivered. The screenplay was completed in eight days.

  7. Women, too, were avid consumers of sex books. Louis Epstein of Pickwick Books recalled that “at least half of the customers for pornography were female….To this day the saying is that if it were not for the female public, most of the so-called erotic novels being circulated today probably wouldn’t make the grade.” Anti-pornography crusaders were particularly concerned about “indecent” books becoming widely available to women and young people.

  8. jerkin: A sleeveless jacket.

  9. The hedge has become a maze, an emblem of complexity, absorption, and getting lost; fitting here as the plot thickens.

  “THE ENTRANCE WAS A SORT OF MAZE”: FROM “KILLER IN THE RAIN”

  Another example of Chandler’s “cannibalization” technique, this time from a story first published in Black Mask in 1935.

  The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his gray-and-cream coupe in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.

  While he was doing this I had passed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.

  At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner’s hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty. Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its license read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerne Avenue. I went back to my heap. A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighborhood. Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner’s house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.

  There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a half pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.

  The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.

  At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps, going away into the back of the house.

  10. Cars of the period included a frame where the owner’s license was kept, on the shaft of the steering wheel or on the dashboard.

  1939 Chevrolet coupe

  11. The private home was part of California’s promise of better living to those who migrated from crowded cities in the east. Chandler, and later Ross Macdonald, taught us to associate it with pornographers; drug-dealing doctors; wealthy, broken families; and murder, sometimes decades old. David Lynch’s classic 1986 film Blue Velvet takes the theme of decay hiding behind bourgeois respectability to shocking ends.

  12. A gully is a small ravine of running water. Already protected by a hedge maze, the house is further set apart by this feature, like a miniature moat around a castle.

  13. Los Angeles houses were widely reviled for their flimsiness, which was a function of both the rapid construction of buildings as the population boomed and the materials used. Wood-frame and stucco homes were the cheapest and quickest to build, but, to those accustomed to brick and stone, insubstantial and transient—like life in general in the City of Dreams. Compare the sturdy old home built in an earlier era, probably around the turn of the century, that Marlowe visit
s later in the novel (see note 3 on this page).

  Vagabond hat (drawing by Matt Seneca)

  SEVEN

  It was a wide room, the whole width of the house.1 It had a low beamed ceiling and brown plaster walls decked out with strips of Chinese embroidery and Chinese and Japanese prints2 in grained wood frames. There were low bookshelves, there was a thick pinkish Chinese rug in which a gopher could have spent a week without showing his nose above the nap. There were floor cushions, bits of odd silk tossed around, as if whoever lived there had to have a piece he could reach out and thumb.3 There was a broad low divan of old rose tapestry. It had a wad of clothes on it, including lilac-colored silk underwear. There was a big carved lamp on a pedestal, two other standing lamps with jade-green shades and long tassels. There was a black desk with carved gargoyles at the corners and behind it a yellow satin cushion on a polished black chair with carved arms and back. The room contained an odd assortment of odors, of which the most emphatic at the moment seemed to be the pungent aftermath of cordite4 and the sickish aroma of ether.5

  On a sort of low dais at one end of the room there was a high-backed teakwood chair6 in which Miss Carmen Sternwood was sitting on a fringed orange shawl. She was sitting very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, her chin level, her small bright teeth shining between her parted lips. Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.