Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

December 28th, 2010    Posted in Fiction, Kelly, Mystery

While reading The Big Sleep, I kept trying to put the novel into its historical place. How decadent were the General’s daughters? How would readers in the 1940s react to the characters? Eventually I gave up and just enjoyed the descriptions, one-liners, and double-crosses that fill the novel.

Two of my favorite one-liners from the novel:

-  I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and didn’t care who knew it.

- It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

After finishing The Big Sleep, it took me a few minutes to realize I never figured out who killed the chauffeur. Evidently I’m not the only person to miss that detail, as Raymond Carver did as well and he dropped that storyline. As I work towards my fifty-two books in one year challenge for 2011, I’ll have to check out another Philip Marlowe novel, as this novel was an enjoyable jump into hard-boiled detective fiction.

Reviewed by: Kelly

Book: The Big Sleep
Author: Raymond Chandler
Read: November 2010
Source: Library