The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  “Are they going to make a park of all this?” I asked.

  She dipped her chin down and gleamed at me.

  “It’s about time. The smell of that sump would poison a herd of goats. This the place you had in mind?”

  “Uh-huh. Like it?”

  “It’s beautiful.”8 I pulled up beside the loading platform. We got out. I listened. The hum of the traffic was a distant web of sound, like the buzzing of bees. The place was as lonely as a churchyard. Even after the rain the tall eucalyptus trees still looked dusty. They always look dusty. A branch broken off by the wind had fallen over the edge of the sump and the flat leathery leaves dangled in the water.

  I walked around the sump and looked into the pump-house. There was some junk in it, nothing that looked like recent activity. Outside a big wooden bull wheel was tilted against the wall. It looked like a good place all right.

  I went back to the car. The girl stood beside it preening her hair and holding it out in the sun. “Gimme,” she said, and held her hand out.

  I took the gun out and put it in her palm. I bent down and picked up a rusty can.9

  “Take it easy now,” I said. “It’s loaded in all five.10 I’ll go over and set this can in that square opening in the middle of that big wooden wheel. See?” I pointed. She ducked her head, delighted. “That’s about thirty feet. Don’t start shooting until I get back beside you. Okey?”

  “Okey,” she giggled.

  I went back around the sump and set the can up in the middle of the bull wheel. It made a swell target. If she missed the can, which she was certain to do, she would probably hit the wheel. That would stop a small slug completely. However, she wasn’t going to hit even that.11

  I went back towards her around the sump. When I was about ten feet from her, at the edge of the sump, she showed me all her sharp little teeth and brought the gun up and started to hiss.12

  I stopped dead, the sump water stagnant and stinking at my back.

  “Stand there, you son of a bitch,” she said.

  The gun pointed at my chest. Her hand seemed to be quite steady. The hissing sound grew louder and her face had the scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.

  I laughed at her. I started to walk towards her. I saw her small finger tighten on the trigger and grow white at the tip. I was about six feet away from her when she started to shoot.

  The sound of the gun made a sharp slap, without body, a brittle crack in the sunlight. I didn’t see any smoke. I stopped again and grinned at her.

  She fired twice more, very quickly. I don’t think any of the shots would have missed. There were five in the little gun. She had fired four. I rushed her.13

  I didn’t want the last one in my face, so I swerved to one side. She gave it to me quite carefully, not worried at all. I think I felt the hot breath of the powder blast a little.

  I straightened up. “My, but you’re cute,” I said.

  Her hand holding the empty gun began to shake violently. The gun fell out of it. Her mouth began to shake. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up towards her left ear and froth showed on her lips. Her breath made a whining sound. She swayed.

  I caught her as she fell. She was already unconscious. I pried her teeth open with both hands and stuffed a wadded handkerchief in between them. It took all my strength to do it. I lifted her up and got her into the car, then went back for the gun and dropped it into my pocket. I climbed in under the wheel, backed the car and drove back the way we had come along the rutted road, out of the gateway, back up the hill and so home.

  Carmen lay crumpled in the corner of the car, without motion. I was halfway up the drive to the house before she stirred. Then her eyes suddenly opened wide and wild. She sat up.

  “What happened?” she gasped.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Oh, yes it did,” she giggled. “I wet myself.”

  “They always do,” I said.

  She looked at me with a sudden sick speculation and began to moan.

  1. A reminder of a key theme: not just death versus life but moribundity versus liveliness, vitality. See note 7 on this page.

  2. Hearkens back to Marlowe’s quasi-militaristic self-description in the novel’s opening scene.

  3. Carmen is back to her default between the kitten and the tiger—for now.

  4. Marlowe’s question will prove more substantive than rhetorical before the novel is over.

  5. “Down” is no coincidence. (Note how the word echoes throughout this final encounter with Carmen.) The scene recalls the archetypal journey of the hero’s descent into the land of the dead, “one of those extraordinary undertakings which, like the fight with the monster, demonstrates his epiphanic nature. He enters and returns from a kingdom from which no ordinary mortal has ever returned….In Westerns the hell of the ancients is replaced by ‘devil’s gates’ or ‘death valleys’ which no one has ever crossed alive, but from which the hero re-emerges into the land of the living” (Brunel, Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes). In Chandler’s genre-bending mystery, the “devil’s gates” are replaced by the gates of the Gothic Sternwood mansion—the gates of the wealthy, which lead by a sunken driveway to murky fields of stagnant water, dusty trees, rusted equipment, and general decay and disuse. Even the sunshine is empty in the land of the dead.

  A view of the La Brea Tar Pits with oil derricks

  6. A return of the dreamy landscape from this page.

  7. At this point, Marlowe can indeed see the rusty cable connecting everything.

  8. Marlowe drops the cleverness of the witty response for outright sarcasm, knowing that both styles of humor will be lost on Carmen.

  9. Marlowe’s choice of the rusty can is appropriate, as we will soon see.

  10. That is, all five chambers.

  11. One of the few plot clues that Chandler provides the reader. It’s still not enough for the aspiring mystery-solver to deduce what’s going on, and so slight that at first glance the reader might not even notice it.

  12. Carmen’s animalistic side is returning. Although a medical explanation will be given shortly, here she seems almost a ghastly changeling, a were-beast: the femme fatale as a young Miss Hyde.

  13. Why? Marlowe’s flair for the theatrical here counterproductively puts himself in a position of having to dodge that last blast. (Blanks are only harmful at very close range.)

  BUT IS IT “NOIR”?

  We created it, but they love it more in France than they do here. Noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction.

  JAMES ELLROY

  The tone is bleak and cynical, the streets are mean, and there is a black-and-white grittiness to the work that reminds us of old movies. There’s a poor sap, dangerous dames, and a rogue’s gallery of tough guys. The popular term is “noir,” and while its roots are in the American hard-boiled novels and films of the 1920s through the ’40s, it stretches through French films of the 1950s and ’60s and has blossomed in a renaissance of films, cable TV series, novels, and story anthologies on the market now. But just what is “noir”? Fans and scholars disagree over classification.

  The term originated with the “Série Noire” (“Black Series”), a French imprint of the publisher Éditions Gallimard, founded in 1945 to publish hard-boiled crime fiction. It was “Noire” simply because of the collection’s generic black covers. American authors translated into French included Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, Chester Himes, and Jim Thompson.

  Although the term was coined earlier, credit goes to French film critic Nino Frank for popularizing “films noirs” to describe the style of a group of American films that were shown in French theaters in the summer of 1946. The World War II–era movies had to wait to be shown until then because
American films were not shown during the Nazi occupation of France. Frank’s article specifically concerned four films, all adapted from American novels: Murder, My Sweet (from Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, directed by Edward Dmytryk); Double Indemnity (novel by James M. Cain, directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay cowritten by Chandler); The Maltese Falcon (from Hammett’s novel, directed by John Huston); and Laura (novel by Vera Caspary, directed by Otto Preminger). Published in L’Ecran français that summer of 1946, Frank’s article pinpointed the “rejection of sentimental humanism,” the “social fantastic,” and the “dynamism of violent death” as film noir themes. He also called attention to the “American proclivity for criminal psychology and misogyny.” Frank: “These ‘dark’ films, these films noirs, no longer have anything in common with the ordinary run of detective movies.” He pointed out that the films had less to do with the solution of a crime than they did with the psychology and human frailties of the characters.

  Is The Big Sleep “noir”? Genre scholars and categorizers don’t tend to think so. In his introduction to the excellent anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, Otto Penzler explains, “In fact, the two subcategories of the mystery genre, private detective stories and noir fiction, are diametrically opposed, with a mutually exclusive philosophical premise….Noir works, whether film, novels or short stories, are existential, pessimistic tales about people…who are seriously flawed and morally questionable.” For Penzler, Marlowe’s central heroism and redeeming code of ethics wash the noir off of TBS. But the reader might fruitfully ask this question again after the novel closes.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The gentle-eyed, horse-faced maid let me into the long gray and white upstairs sitting room with the ivory drapes tumbled extravagantly on the floor and the white carpet from wall to wall. A screen star’s boudoir, a place of charm and seduction, artificial as a wooden leg.1 It was empty at the moment. The door closed behind me with the unnatural softness of a hospital door. A breakfast table on wheels stood by the chaise-longue. Its silver glittered. There were cigarette ashes in the coffee cup. I sat down and waited.

  It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

  She went past me in long smooth strides and sat down on the edge of the chaise-longue. There was a cigarette in her lips, at the corner of her mouth. Her nails today were copper red from quick to tip,2 without half moons.

  “So you’re just a brute after all,” she said quietly, staring at me. “An utter callous brute.3 You killed a man last night. Never mind how I heard it. I heard it. And now you have to come out here and frighten my kid sister into a fit.”

  I didn’t say a word. She began to fidget. She moved over to a slipper chair and put her head back against a white cushion that lay along the back of the chair against the wall. She blew pale gray smoke upwards and watched it float towards the ceiling and come apart in wisps that were for a little while distinguishable from the air and then melted and were nothing. Then very slowly she lowered her eyes and gave me a cool hard glance.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I’m thankful as hell one of us kept his head the night before last. It’s bad enough to have a bootlegger in my past.4 Why don’t you for Christ’s sake say something?”

  “How is she?”

  “Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. Fast asleep. She always goes to sleep. What did you do to her?”

  “Not a thing. I came out of the house after seeing your father and she was out in front. She had been throwing darts at a target on a tree. I went down to speak to her because I had something that belonged to her. A little revolver Owen Taylor gave her once. She took it over to Brody’s place the other evening, the evening he was killed. I had to take it away from her there. I didn’t mention it, so perhaps you didn’t know it.”

  The black Sternwood eyes got large and empty. It was her turn not to say anything.

  “She was pleased to get her little gun back and she wanted me to teach her how to shoot and she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money. So we went down there and the place was pretty creepy, all rusted metal and old wood and silent wells and greasy scummy sumps. Maybe that upset her. I guess you’ve been there yourself. It was kind of eerie.”

  “Yes—it is.” It was a small breathless5 voice now.

  “So we went in there and I stuck a can up in a bull wheel for her to pop at. She threw a wingding. Looked like a mild epileptic fit to me.”6

  “Yes.” The same minute voice. “She has them once in a while. Is that all you wanted to see me about?”

  “I guess you still wouldn’t tell me what Eddie Mars has on you.”

  “Nothing at all. And I’m getting a little tired of that question,” she said coldly.

  “Do you know a man named Canino?”

  She drew her fine black brows together in thought. “Vaguely. I seem to remember the name.”

  “Eddie Mars’ trigger man. A tough hombre, they said. I guess he was. Without a little help from a lady I’d be where he is—in the morgue.”

  “The ladies seem to—” She stopped dead and whitened. “I can’t joke about it,” she said simply.

  “I’m not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it just seems that way. It all ties together—everything. Geiger and his cute little blackmail tricks, Brody and his pictures, Eddie Mars and his roulette tables, Canino and the girl Rusty Regan didn’t run away with. It all ties together.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Suppose you did—it would be something like this. Geiger got his hooks into your sister, which isn’t very difficult, and got some notes from her and tried to blackmail your father with them, in a nice way. Eddie Mars was behind Geiger, protecting him and using him for a cat’s-paw. Your father sent for me instead of paying up, which showed he wasn’t scared about anything. Eddie Mars wanted to know that. He had something on you and he wanted to know if he had it on the General too. If he had, he could collect a lot of money in a hurry. If not, he would have to wait until you got your share of the family fortune, and in the meantime be satisfied with whatever spare cash he could take away from you across the roulette table. Geiger was killed by Owen Taylor, who was in love with your silly little sister and didn’t like the kind of games Geiger played with her. That didn’t mean anything to Eddie. He was playing a deeper game than Geiger knew anything about, or than Brody knew anything about, or anybody except you and Eddie and a tough guy named Canino. Your husband disappeared and Eddie, knowing everybody knew there had been bad blood between him and Regan, hid his wife out at Realito and put Canino to guard her, so that it would look as if she had run away with Regan. He even got Regan’s car into the garage of the place where Mona Mars had been living. But that sounds a little silly taken merely as an attempt to divert suspicion that Eddie had killed your husband or had him killed. It isn’t so silly, really. He had another motive. He was playing for a million or so. He knew where Regan had gone and why and he didn’t want the police to have to find out. He wanted them to have an explanation of the disappearance that would keep them satisfied. Am I boring you?”

  “You tire me,” she said in a dead, exhausted voice. “God, how you tire me!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not just fooling around trying to be clever. Your father offered me a thousand dollars this morning to find Regan. That’s a lot of money to me, but I can’t do it.”7

  Her mouth jumped open. Her breath was suddenly strained and harsh. “Give me a cigarette,” she said thickly. “Why?” The pulse in her throat had begun to throb.

  I gave her a cigarette and lit a match and held it for her. She drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out raggedly and then the cigarette seemed to be forgotten be
tween her fingers. She never drew on it again.

  “Well, the Missing Persons Bureau can’t find him,” I said. “It’s not so easy. What they can’t do it’s not likely that I can do.”

  “Oh.” There was a shade of relief in her voice.

  “That’s one reason. The Missing Persons people think he just disappeared on purpose, pulled down the curtain, as they call it. They don’t think Eddie Mars did away with him.”

  “Who said anybody did away with him?”

  “We’re coming to it,” I said.

  For a brief instant her face seemed to come to pieces, to become merely a set of features without form or control. Her mouth looked like the prelude to a scream. But only for an instant. The Sternwood blood had to be good for something more than her black eyes and her recklessness.

  I stood up and took the smoking cigarette from between her fingers and killed it in an ashtray. Then I took Carmen’s little gun out of my pocket and laid it carefully, with exaggerated care, on her white satin knee. I balanced it there, and stepped back with my head on one side like a window-dresser getting the effect of a new twist of a scarf around a dummy’s neck.