Bookstalling

From one point of view, reviewing The Big Sleep is a bit like reviewing a Raphael Madonna, albeit with fewer virgins. Nevertheless, even the most hallowed cases can be reappraised, especially when they are so frequently and shamelessly revisited. Evaluating one author’s mistimed jump on the Chandlerwagon, Martin Amis wrote: “it is no great surprise that Perchance to Dream isn’t much good. The great surprise (for this reviewer) is that The Big Sleep isn’t much good either: it seems to have aged dramatically”.

It’s true that The Big Sleep isn’t much good as a detective novel, despite its primogenitory status in the “hard-boiled” crime genre. Chandler himself was happy to admit that he didn’t really know what happened in the end, and I’m happy to admit that I didn’t really know what was happening throughout. The characters are beautifully sketched in physical terms, especially when the physique is beautiful:

She had lovely legs. I would say that for her. They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father.

Which shows the novel’s vein of sardonic humour: you initially think that “a couple of pretty smooth citizens” refers to her legs. Legs are something that Marlowe – Chandler’s “big dark handsome brute” of a private eye – never fails to notice, and yet for all his allure and alertness to women, there is a wounded chastity about him. He is cold-blooded not in seduction but in rejection, brutally batting away his client’s daughters with lines like “Don’t think I’m an icicle…I’m not blind or without senses. I have warm blood like the next guy. You’re easy to take – too damned easy.” Clearly, this is not an episode of Lewis.

In fiction, private dicks can always behave less ethically than their state-employed counterparts, and the “hard-boiled” genre is famous for smudging the line between the good guys and bad. In The Big Sleep, though, the hard-boiling reduces everyone to a Big Soup. However sharply Chandler draws the suits and the eyebrows, everyone – at least all the men – talk in the same underworld patois:

1. “I can believe that whatever you know about all this is under glass, or there would be a flock of johns squeaking sole leather about this dump.”
2. “Real money, they tell me. Not just a top card and a bunch of hay…His wife says he never made a nickel off old man Sternwood except room and board and a Packard 120 his wife gave him. Tie that for an ex-legger in the rich gravy.”
3. “You got the books, Joe. I got the sucker list. We ought to talk things over.”

One of these is Marlowe, one is a policeman, Captain Gregory, and one is racketeer supremo Eddie Mars. Unlikely as it may seem, The Big Sleep has us asking the (futile) question that we ask of Shakespeare: did anyone ever actually talk like this? Scorsese and De Niro are often accused of glamorizing the gangster life. Chandler glamorized the gangster lingo, writing a dictionary-defying poetic-demotic that is just that: written. It’s great, but its ubiquity does nothing for the definition of the characters amid the murk of the plot.

And to be honest, the dialogue isn’t Chandler’s true strength. It’s Marlowe the narrator who gets all the best lines, especially those that flaunt his talent for metaphor. “It was raining the next morning, a slanting grey rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads”; “The pug sidled over flatfooted and felt my pockets with care. I turned around for him like a bored beauty modelling an evening gown.” Very few sentences are allowed more than one comma: they snap shut like a loaded revolver. This, one suspects, is what has propelled The Big Sleep to the orders of “high literature”. It’s worth bearing in mind the words of Joel Cohen, who wrote The Big Lebowski by looking to Chandler’s “hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant”.

by Harry Cochrane

The Big Sleep is published by Penguin and is available here.