The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  I sat down again. She didn’t move. Her eyes came down millimeter by millimeter and looked at the gun.

  “It’s harmless,” I said. “All five chambers empty. She fired them all. She fired them all at me.”

  The pulse jumped wildly in her throat. Her voice tried to say something and couldn’t. She swallowed.

  “From a distance of five or six feet,” I said. “Cute little thing, isn’t she? Too bad I had loaded the gun with blanks.” I grinned nastily. “I had a hunch about what she would do—if she got the chance.”

  She brought her voice back from a long way off. “You’re a horrible man,” she said. “Horrible.”

  “Yeah. You’re her big sister. What are you going to do about it?”

  “You can’t prove a word of it.”

  “Can’t prove what?”

  “That she fired at you. You said you were down there around the wells with her, alone. You can’t prove a word of what you say.”

  “Oh that,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of trying. I was thinking of another time—when the shells in the little gun had bullets in them.”

  Her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness.

  “I was thinking of the day Regan disappeared,” I said. “Late in the afternoon. When he took her down to those old wells to teach her to shoot and put up a can somewhere and told her to pop at it and stood near her while she shot. And she didn’t shoot at the can. She turned the gun and shot him, just the way she tried to shoot me today, and for the same reason.”

  She moved a little and the gun slid off her knee and fell to the floor. It was one of the loudest sounds I ever heard. Her eyes were riveted on my face. Her voice was a stretched whisper of agony. “Carmen!…Merciful God, Carmen!…Why?”8

  “Do I really have to tell you why she shot at me?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were still terrible. “I’m—I’m afraid you do.”

  “Night before last when I got home she was in my apartment. She’d kidded the manager into letting her in to wait for me. She was in my bed—naked. I threw her out on her ear. I guess maybe Regan did the same thing to her sometime. But you can’t do that to Carmen.”

  She drew her lips back and made a half-hearted attempt to lick them. It made her, for a brief instant, look like a frightened child. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up slowly like an artificial hand worked by wires and its fingers closed slowly and stiffly around the white fur at her collar. They drew the fur tight against her throat. After that she just sat staring.

  “Money,” she croaked. “I suppose you want money.”

  “How much money?” I tried not to sneer.

  “Fifteen thousand dollars?”

  I nodded. “That would be about right. That would be the established fee. That was what he had in his pockets when she shot him. That would be what Mr. Canino got for disposing of the body when you went to Eddie Mars for help. But that would be small change to what Eddie expects to collect one of these days, wouldn’t it?”

  “You son of a bitch!”9 she said.

  “Uh-huh. I’m a very smart guy. I haven’t a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals, I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up. I do all this for twenty-five bucks a day—and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many nice girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers. And that makes me a son of a bitch. All right. I don’t care anything about that. I’ve been called that by people of all sizes and shapes, including your little sister. She called me worse than that for not getting into bed with her. I got five hundred dollars from your father, which I didn’t ask for, but he can afford to give it to me. I can get another thousand for finding Mr. Rusty Regan, if I could find him. Now you offer me fifteen grand. That makes me a big shot.10 With fifteen grand I could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes.11 I might even take a vacation without worrying about losing a case. That’s fine. What are you offering it to me for? Can I go on being a son of a bitch, or do I have to become a gentleman, like that lush that passed out in his car the other night?”12

  She was as silent as a stone woman.

  “All right,” I went on heavily. “Will you take her away? Somewhere far off from here where they can handle her type, where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her? Hell, she might even get herself cured, you know. It’s been done.”

  She got up and walked slowly to the windows. The drapes lay in heavy ivory folds beside her feet. She stood among the folds and looked out, towards the quiet darkish foothills. She stood motionless, almost blending into the drapes. Her hands hung loose at her sides. Utterly motionless hands. She turned and came back along the room and walked past me blindly. When she was behind me she caught her breath sharply and spoke.

  “He’s in the sump,” she said. “A horrible decayed thing.13 I did it. I did just what you said. I went to Eddie Mars. She came home and told me about it, just like a child. She’s not normal. I knew the police would get it all out of her. In a little while she would even brag about it. And if dad knew, he would call them instantly and tell them the whole story. And sometime in that night he would die. It’s not his dying—it’s what he would be thinking just before he died. Rusty wasn’t a bad fellow. I didn’t love him. He was all right, I guess. He just didn’t mean anything to me, one way or another, alive or dead, compared with keeping it from dad.”

  “So you let her run around loose,” I said, “getting into other jams.”

  “I was playing for time. Just for time. I played the wrong way, of course. I thought she might even forget it herself. I’ve heard they do forget what happens in those fits. Maybe she has forgotten it. I knew Eddie Mars would bleed me white, but I didn’t care. I had to have help and I could only get it from somebody like him….There have been times when I hardly believed it all myself. And other times when I had to get drunk quickly—whatever time of day it was. Awfully damn quickly.”

  “You’ll take her away,” I said. “And do that awfully damn quickly.”

  She still had her back to me. She said softly now: “What about you?”

  “Nothing about me. I’m leaving. I’ll give you three days. If you’re gone by then—okey. If you’re not, out it comes. And don’t think I don’t mean that.”14

  She turned suddenly. “I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know how to begin.”

  “Yeah. Get her out of here and see that she’s watched every minute. Promise?”

  “I promise. Eddie—”

  “Forget Eddie. I’ll go see him after I get some rest. I’ll handle Eddie.”

  “He’ll try to kill you.”

  “Yeah,” I said.15 “His best boy couldn’t. I’ll take a chance on the others. Does Norris know?”

  “He’ll never tell.”

  “I thought he knew.”

  I went quickly away from her down the room and out and down the tiled staircase to the front hall. I didn’t see anybody when I left. I found my hat alone this time. Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light. I got into my car and drove off down the hill.16

  What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water
were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.17 Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.18

  On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.19

  1. In his return to Vivian’s boudoir, Marlowe puts a finer point on his first impressions from Chapter Three.

  2. The symbolism will not be lost on the reader.

  3. Here Vivian removes the flirtatiousness from this accusation, repeated from their first meeting (“you big dark handsome brute!”).

  Hammett’s ever-flirtatious Gabrielle Dain Leggett to the Continental Op, who is offering her the morphine she’s trying to kick: “You are a brute, aren’t you?”

  Lounging pyjamas

  4. Implying that a private investigator would be worse than a bootlegger.

  5. Implicity suggests the significance of the place in connection with Rusty—“the breath of life” to the General.

  6. Carmen’s epilepsy is finally named. Invoking this disease does two things for the narrative. It provides a potential medical explanation for some of Carmen’s most outré behavior—the odd hissing and frothing at the mouth, and perhaps even her psychotic episodes and hypersexuality. (Certain forms of epilepsy seem to result in such behavioral disorders, though how much Chandler knew of the disease has never been thoroughly explored.) At the same time, the epilepsy explanation exoticizes Carmen as someone possessed, not fully in control of herself. Shades of the Gothic and of Freud’s uncanny: Freud included epileptics among psychotics, automata, even waxwork figures and “ingeniously constructed dolls” as instances where the distinction between the human and inhuman, the animate and inanimate, is blurred. In this view, epilepsy is a kind of possession. As Jeannette Stirling puts it in her study Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter, the epileptic body is “both recognisably human and alive but at the same time possessed of unpredictable and unknowable capabilities.”

  In Hawks’s film of the novel, the epilepsy angle is suppressed entirely. Carmen simply is the oversexed psychopath she seems to be. In the 1978 film, on the other hand, written and directed by Michael Winner, she’s not only epileptic but histrionically falls into a full grand mal seizure in her final scene.

  7. And if he had been secretly looking for Rusty Regan earlier in the novel, he isn’t looking for him by the time the reader learns that he was. Chandler’s narratological shell game with the reader, with the quest for Rusty Regan as the pea, is about to conclude, in the way that most shell games do: the pea was up Chandler’s sleeve all along.

  8. The scene smacks of melodrama—appropriately, because Vivian is still playacting.

  9. Marlowe has played his hand: he knows that Vivian knows. He wins the game that’s been unfolding between them since Chapter Three. What he wins he’s about to enumerate.

  10. big shot: “Big” was a big linguistic crop emerging from organized crime and Prohibition, including but not nearly limited to the still well-known “big house” for prison, “big boy” for gangland higher-ups (and the name given to cartoon hard-boiled detective Dick Tracy’s nemesis, based on Al Capone), and this term for an important or well-connected personage. (See note 2 on this page.)

  11. As Marlowe rightly notes, he is turning down a great deal: adjusted for inflation, fifteen thousand 1939 dollars is more than a quarter of a million dollars today.

  What has Marlowe made on this job? He turns down fifteen thousand dollars here, and another thousand from the General to find the missing Regan. He has offered to return the five-hundred-dollar payment he’s received, even though he spent two hundred of it on Agnes. Returning that payment would put him two hundred dollars—plus time and expenses—in the hole.

  12. Ironizing the association of gentility with class status, rather than with character.

  13. The Gothic horror of Vivian’s grotesque description raises the question: How would she know? Has she been visiting his corpse? And what point was Chandler making by having Rusty decay among the dead organisms that produced the Sternwoods’ wealth?

  14. This seems an odd resolution for a mystery story. The killer (of a murder not under investigation) is revealed and goes unpunished. One cannot imagine Hammett’s obdurate Continental Op, for example, or even—well, name your PI—allowing a murderer to evade justice.

  15. Remember when Vivian looked down her nose at Marlowe for using this “common” phrase, back in Las Olindas? With these two “yeah”s, Marlowe sticks to his verbal guns with a kind of staunch commoner integrity.

  16. One last look at the false fairy-tale landscape—“eerie,” Marlowe has said, and “creepy.” “Uncanny,” Freud says. (“Das Unheimliche”: the unhomely.) Marlowe’s experience resonates with Freud’s sense of the uncanny as the strangeness of the oddly familiar, the once-known but forgotten. Freud quotes Schelling: what “ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light.”

  17. The dust jacket synopsis of the first hardcover edition assured readers that the detective “clears the atmosphere and leaves the reader content that justice, though of an unexpected sort, will be done.” Our hero seems to think otherwise. Vivian has questioned the idea of clear moral boundaries all along, with Marlowe holding firm against her. But where does the detective, the dust jacket’s “healthy force amid the shadows and the whispers,” stand now?

  When the novel was published, it was widely received as immoral, not only because of its underworld and sexual content but also because of this irresolute resolution. The New York Times, for example, called it “excellent” for a “study in depravity.” Chandler, however, insisted that “the book had a high moral content.” Indeed, this ambiguous resolution can be looked at as part of the book’s moral outlook. What does one do when the lawful and the good part ways, when there are only varying levels of implication? The situation requires what French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir memorably called an “ethics of ambiguity” in her 1947 book of that name. Marlowe must choose the best course of action in an irreducibly morally ambiguous situation. It’s not a very satisfying solution for a mystery novel, perhaps, but here we can see the power of Chandler’s view that his complex stories of sly social criticism were only “ostensibly mysteries.”

  (University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society)

  18. This passage makes the title, in effect, “Death.” There is a resonance with the death-themed title of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a work predominantly about the living deeds of the great Arthurian knights. Chandler’s mortality play draws to a close.

  The penultimate paragraph is a kind of prose poem, with Shakespearean resonances. The association of sleep with death stretches back through millennia of literature, of course, but perhaps draws most directly on Hamlet’s hard-boiled soliloquy—the one where he is contemplating whether to be, or not to be:

  To die: to sleep;

  No more; and by a sleep to say we end

  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish’d….

  The anxiety-racked Hamlet longs to sleep the big sleep, as long as he doesn’t have to dream. Shakespeare returned to the theme in The Tempest, giving it a gentler expression: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” (Part of this quote was famously used for the last line of the film version of The Maltese Fal
con, though it doesn’t appear in the novel.)

  On rereading The Big Sleep when it was issued in paperback form, Chandler reflected, “I have been so belabored with tags like tough, hard-boiled, etc., that it is almost a shock to discover occasional signs of almost normal sensitivity in the writing.” Then again, Marlowe’s consideration of death as a release from the nastiness of life might be the most hard-boiled thing about the novel.

  Chandler’s prose poem here inverts a passage from a great novel by his fellow Nebraskan Willa Cather: not, as it happens, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), but another great novel of the American West, My Ántonia (1918):

  The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers….I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it…and I did not want to be anything more….Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

  Where Cather describes a nothingness that dissolves one into goodness and knowledge, Chandler solarizes it—or noir-izes it, as it were—into a kind of existential fatalism: knowledge brings culpability, and death releases one from the “nastiness” of life.

  Absence of action need not always appear so bleakly. In The High Window, Marlowe will say with a sigh: “Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.”

  The last line of Stephen Crane’s short story “The Five White Mice” (1898), which caps a drunken squabble, much violent posturing, and the threat of a shootout, is: “Nothing had happened.” “What happened?” Carmen asks Marlowe after trying to kill him. “Nothing,” he responds. Raising the question: What actually has happened in The Big Sleep? Rusty Regan has been dead all along; the police didn’t care and weren’t investigating his disappearance; and the gangsters were in on the cover-up. Pretty much everything that did happen would have happened anyway without Marlowe. Our hero has saved precisely nobody: the initial blackmailer (Geiger) is killed before Marlowe gets to him; his killer, Owen Taylor, is killed with no resolution; Joe Brody is killed in the detective’s presence; and Harry Jones is poisoned in the room next to him. And in no way does he save any of the putative “damsels in distress”: Carmen and Vivian end much as they began, and Mona Mars saves him. Marlowe may be said to be saving the General, the last big patriarchal figure; but the knowledge that would kill the old man was already being kept secret from him before Marlowe found it out. And, it is admitted rather anticlimactically, the General won’t last much longer even with Marlowe’s great morally compromising sacrifice.