The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  I made it back to Geiger’s house in something over half an hour of nimble walking. There was nobody there, no car on the street except my own car in front of the next house. It looked as dismal as a lost dog. I dug my bottle of rye4 out of it and poured half of what was left down my throat and got inside to light a cigarette. I smoked half of it, threw it away, got out again and went down to Geiger’s. I unlocked the door and stepped into the still warm darkness and stood there, dripping quietly on the floor and listening to the rain. I groped to a lamp and lit it.

  The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of embroidered silk were gone from the wall. I hadn’t counted them, but the spaces of brown plaster stood out naked and obvious. I went a little farther and put another lamp on. I looked at the totem pole. At its foot, beyond the margin of the Chinese rug, on the bare floor another rug had been spread. It hadn’t been there before. Geiger’s body had. Geiger’s body was gone.

  That froze me. I pulled my lips back against my teeth and leered at the glass eye in the totem pole. I went through the house again. Everything was exactly as it had been. Geiger wasn’t in his flounced bed or under it or in his closet. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. That left the locked door on the right of the hall. One of Geiger’s keys fitted the lock. The room inside was interesting, but Geiger wasn’t in it. It was interesting because it was so different from Geiger’s room. It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man’s toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks. The bed was narrow and looked hard and had a maroon batik cover. The room felt cold. I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole. I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door. I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged. Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

  It wasn’t the law. They would have been there still, just about getting warmed up with their pieces of string and chalk and their cameras and dusting powders and their nickel cigars. They would have been very much there. It wasn’t the killer. He had left too fast. He must have seen the girl. He couldn’t be sure she was too batty to see him. He would be on his way to distant places. I couldn’t guess the answer, but it was all right with me if somebody wanted Geiger missing instead of just murdered. It gave me a chance to find out if I could tell it leaving Carmen Sternwood out. I locked up again, choked my car to life and rode off home to a shower, dry clothes and a late dinner. After that I sat around in the apartment and drank too much hot toddy5 trying to crack the code in Geiger’s blue indexed notebook.6 All I could be sure of was that it was a list of names and addresses, probably of the customers. There were over four hundred of them. That made it a nice racket, not to mention any blackmail angles, and there were probably plenty of those. Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer. I didn’t envy the police their job when it was handed to them.

  I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.7

  1. porte-cochere: A porch over the driveway where cars would drop off passengers. Only a mansion would have a porte-cochere.

  ROSS MACDONALD

  Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald, is generally regarded as Chandler’s heir in the genre of the California hard-boiled. The first appearance of detective Lew Archer was in the 1946 short story “Find the Woman.” Knopf published The Moving Target, the first Archer novel, in 1949. In the introduction to the 1967 omnibus edition Archer in Hollywood, Macdonald wrote: “Archer in his early days, though he was named after Sam Spade’s partner, was patterned on Chandler’s Marlowe. Chandler’s Anglo-American eye and my Canadian-American one [Macdonald was raised in Ontario] gave our detectives a common quality: the fresh suspicious eye of a semi-outsider who is fascinated but not completely taken in by the customs of the natives.” In the same piece he wrote that he and Chandler “shared, for related reasons, a powerful interest in the American colloquial language.”

  Later Archer novels have been called psychological thrillers for the way they delve into the emotional lives of the characters. Macdonald, who named Sigmund Freud as one of his greatest influences, took up Chandler’s themes of buried secrets, troubled families, and twisted emotional lives, and made them the focus of plots in which detective Archer plays the roles of sympathetic listener and counselor as much as crime solver. Although the later Archer evolves away from the Marlowe model, he is still very much in Marlowe’s territory, as the Southern California scenery, the hard-boiled language, the pithy dialogue, and the abundant similes remind us.

  The two writers had an uneasy relationship. Chandler was critical of The Moving Target, not because its opening resembled that of The Big Sleep—“All writers must imitate to begin with,” he wrote to James Sandoe in 1949, “and if you attempt to cast yourself in some accepted mould, it is natural to go to the examples that have attained some notice or success”—but because of a certain literary pretentiousness. “The thing that interests me is whether this pretentiousness…makes for better writing.” Chandler’s conclusion: “It does not.” As an example, he points to Macdonald’s use of metaphor, calling his description of a car “acned with rust” “a very simple example of the stylistic misuse of language.”

  Macdonald, for his part, attempted to distance himself from Chandler’s influence as his career progressed. In his essay “The Writer as Detective Hero” (1973), he criticizes Chandler’s early works for their “angry puritanical morality”: “The goats are usually separated from the sheep by sexual promiscuity or perversion. Such a strong and overt moralistic bias actually interferes with the broader moral effects a novelist aims at.” He also disagrees with Chandler’s offhand attitude toward plot, writing that “the structure must be single, and intended” (the italics are Macdonald’s), and criticizes Marlowe as “limited by his role of the hard-boiled hero.” By contrast, he says, his Archer “is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge.”

  2. Nobody walks in LA, yet Marlowe is on foot again. Where is he? Geoff Nicholson points out that Chandler is a master of describing locations that sound very specific and yet cannot be precisely located (see note 19 on this page). The reader is again tempted to follow Marlowe: possible within the confines of the novel but impossible in real-life LA. Attempting the walk himself, Nicholson writes: “There are no ten curving blocks, there is no suitably placed gas station.” Nicholson’s best guess is that Geiger lives on Kirkwood Terrace, off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Of course, the city has changed dramatically since Chandler’s day. Biographer Judith Freeman, looking for addresses where the Chandlers once resided, found that many no longer exist.

  Laurel Canyon map (courtesy of the Canyon Crier)

  3. Fairy-tale or “storybook” houses were all the rage in the 1920s, fanciful evocations of medieval Europe by way of Hollywood set design. The famously eccentric “Witch’s House” of Beverly Hills started out as a Hollywood set and was used in the silent film Hansel and Gretel, among others. This poetic description recalls the fairy-tale landscape in Chapter Four. Interiors and exteriors are at play in TBS: the Sternwood mansion, Geiger’s nice suburban home, and these wealthy estates house various forms of degeneracy and decay, while our hero represents the rain-drenched permanent outsider. It’s as existential as it is Grimm.

  It is also political. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf reflects poignantly on this division. Her twilight view of domestic interiors seen from the sidewalk leads her to wonder, “What was the truth about these houses…dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid…at nine
o’clock in the morning?” Woolf comments from the outside, excluded from membership in patriarchal “Oxbridge” by gender. Marlowe comments from the outside, excluded by class.

  Storybook Hollywood

  4. Marlowe is drinking rye whiskey, made from a mash containing at least 51 percent rye grain. It was popular before and during Prohibition, but by the 1940s most preferred bourbon. In recent years, small distilleries have produced rye, bringing it back into favor.

  5. hot toddy: Whiskey mixed with hot water and sugar.

  6. Again Marlowe drinks while working, although here (and nowhere else) “too much.” Chandler disputed the characterization that Marlowe was “always full of whisky”: “When he wants a drink he takes it openly and doesn’t hesitate to remark on it. I don’t know how it is in your part of the country,” he wrote a correspondent, “but compared with the country-club set in my part of the country he is as sober as a deacon.”

  7. Dream sequences had figured prominently in some of the great detective stories, from several Wilkie Collins works, including The Moonstone (1868; both T. S. Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges called it the first proper detective novel), to Hammett’s Red Harvest (1927) and The Glass Key (1930). Ross Macdonald became its master with dreamscapes such as this one, from 1958’s The Doomsters: “I was dreaming of a hairless ape who lived in a cage by himself. His trouble was that people were always trying to get in. It kept the ape in a state of nervous tension. I came out of the sleep sweating, aware that somebody was at the door.” Dream sequences of agonizing racial tension punctuate Chester Himes’s hard-boiled masterwork If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945).

  DIAL M FOR MURDER, MEURSAULT, MÉNALQUE, AND MARLOWE

  The French Existentialists looked out at the same dark, haunted world as American hard-boiled writers like Cain, Hammett, and Chandler. The Americans were just being translated into French in the 1940s in what the French publisher Éditions Gallimard called “Série Noire” because of the books’ generic black covers. But even before the Série Noire published Chandler in 1947, and before Boris Vian translated The Big Sleep as Le grand sommeil in 1948, Albert Camus had pointed to American detective writers as a prime influence on his portrayal of the quintessential existential outsider, L’Étranger, in 1942. In a fascinating literary turnabout, Alfred A. Knopf, the original publisher of Chandler and Hammett and Cain in book form, became the American publisher of French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, including The Stranger in 1946. Editor Blanche Knopf made that happen.

  Marlowe has something in common with Camus’s profoundly alienated Meursault. However, there’s an idealism that Marlowe retains as the outsider looking in: he is an ethical, not an emotional, outsider, which makes him an archetypal hero. As the Routledge Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes puts it, “heroes tend to be antisocial and outside the law.” It is an act of will, a refusal to accept conventional morality, that keeps Marlowe outside the lit windows of those inaccessible houses on the hillside. He is not “beyond good and evil” in the Nietzschean sense that Camus might have intended for Meursault, or as Simenon makes the mentally disheveled Kees Popinga in The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938). In fact, both of these morally rudderless characters had a predecessor in André Gide’s L’immoraliste (1902), which finds its hero Ménalque in a quandary of absolute freedom. “Knowing how to free yourself is easy,” Ménalque tells Michel; “knowing how to live free is the hard part.” Marlowe is beyond social definitions of right versus wrong, because social institutions and forces like police, politics, and power reward a self-interested form of “right” that is itself wrong in Marlowe’s eyes. Marlowe is outside the law while carrying his own lawfulness within him. Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Rousseau might say that he “gives the law to himself” (which is the literal meaning of the word “autonomous”). Closer to home, folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote of the bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, “I love a good man outside the law, just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.” Woody’s version joined the canon of American Robin Hoods, from romanticized Western outlaws like Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to 1930s mobsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger, as folk heroes of the Depression—and beyond.

  What does all this mean for Marlowe? Of course he isn’t an outlaw (exactly), but he does live strictly by his own ethical code. And he breaks the law to do so, as angry police officers frequently remind him. In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre published his existential magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, which warns: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he forges for himself on this earth.” The key word here is “responsibilities.” Marlowe would understand that Sartre’s admonishment is not an ending but a beginning. Immense as it is, Marlowe accepts the challenge, and heads down the hill.

  NINE

  The next morning was bright, clear and sunny.1 I woke up with a motorman’s glove in my mouth,2 drank two cups of coffee3 and went through the morning papers. I didn’t find any reference to Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger in either of them.4 I was shaking the wrinkles out of my damp suit when the phone rang. It was Bernie Ohls,5 the D.A.’s chief investigator, who had given me the lead to General Sternwood.

  “Well, how’s the boy?” he began. He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.

  “I’ve got a hangover,” I said.

  “Tsk, tsk.” He laughed absently and then his voice became a shade too casual, a cagey cop voice. “Seen General Sternwood yet?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Done anything for him?”

  “Too much rain,” I answered, if that was an answer.

  “They seem to be a family things happen to. A big Buick belonging to one of them is washing about in the surf off Lido fish pier.”

  I held the telephone tight enough to crack it. I also held my breath.

  “Yeah,” Ohls said cheerfully. “A nice new Buick sedan all messed up with sand and sea water….Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a guy inside it.”

  I let my breath out so slowly that it hung on my lip. “Regan?” I asked.

  “Huh? Who? Oh, you mean the ex-legger the eldest girl picked up and went and married. I never saw him. What would he be doing down there?”

  “Quit stalling. What would anybody be doing down there?”

  “I don’t know, pal. I’m dropping down to look see. Want to go along?”

  “Yes.”

  “Snap it up,” he said. “I’ll be in my hutch.”

  Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the Hall of Justice in less than an hour. I rode up to the seventh floor and went along to the group of small offices used by the D.A.’s men. Ohls’ was no larger than the others, but he had it to himself. There was nothing on his desk but a blotter, a cheap pen set, his hat and one of his feet. He was a medium-sized blondish man with stiff white eyebrows, calm eyes and well-kept teeth. He looked like anybody you would pass on the street. I happened to know he had killed nine men—three of them when he was covered, or somebody thought he was.

  He stood up and pocketed a flat tin of toy cigars called Entractes, jiggled the one in his mouth up and down and looked at me carefully along his nose, with his head thrown back.

  “It’s not Regan,” he said. “I checked. Regan’s a big guy, as tall as you and a shade heavier. This is a young kid.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What made Regan skip out?” Ohls asked. “You interested in that?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “When a guy out of the liquor traffic marries into a rich family and then waves good-bye to a pretty dame6 and a couple million legitimate bucks—that’s enough to make even me think. I guess you thou
ght that was a secret.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okey,7 keep buttoned, kid. No hard feelings.” He came around the desk tapping his pockets and reaching for his hat.

  “I’m not looking for Regan,” I said.8

  He fixed the lock on his door and we went down to the official parking lot and got into a small blue sedan. We drove out Sunset, using the siren once in a while to beat a signal. It was a crisp morning, with just enough snap in the air to make life seem simple and sweet, if you didn’t have too much on your mind. I had.

  It was thirty miles to Lido9 on the coast highway, the first ten of them through traffic. Ohls made the run in three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a faded stucco arch and I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out. A long pier railed with white two-by-fours stretched seaward from the arch. A knot of people leaned out at the far end and a motorcycle officer stood under the arch keeping another group of people from going out on the pier. Cars were parked on both sides of the highway, the usual ghouls, of both sexes. Ohls showed the motorcycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night’s hard rain hadn’t even dented.

  “There she is—on the power barge,” Ohls said, pointing with one of his toy cigars.

  A low black barge with a wheelhouse like a tug’s was crouched against the pilings at the end of the pier. Something that glistened in the morning sunlight was on its deck, with hoist chains still around it, a large black and chromium car. The arm of the hoist had been swung back into position and lowered to deck level. Men stood around the car. We went down slippery steps to the deck.10