59 pages 1 hour read

The Big Sleep

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939

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Important Quotes

“The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.”


(Chapter 2, Page 4)

Chandler describes the greenhouse where the aging General Sternwood spends his days. Hot and dank, the place reeks of the corruption of wealth and entitlement. Designed to intimidate, it uses medical necessity to force guests to adapt simply to have an audience with the owner. Chandler often uses environments as a characterization tool: Here, Sternwood is connected with putrid rot and decay—rather than being a place that fosters life and growth, the greenhouse reminds Marlowe of “the newly washed fingers of dead men.”

“This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air already.”


(Chapter 3, Page 11)

This famous description uses Vivian Sternwood’s sitting room to describe her character. It suggests someone of wealth who’s a bit spoiled and self-indulgent, with expensive tastes that follow solid principles of aesthetics but verge on the overdone. Vivian thus is intelligent and perceptive but driven by greed. The all-white decor also helps her to feel a purity she can’t find in her daily life. The rain that threatens beyond the windows suggests trouble brewing, however.

“I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”


(Chapter 3, Page 13)

Both Vivian and Carmen Sternwood try to flirt with Marlowe, but he doesn’t take the bait—one of his defining features is sexual abstention. The author thus establishes quickly his detective’s independence of character, lack of fear, and saucy personality. Marlowe has the makings of a noble but roguish hero.

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”


(Chapter 8, Page 29)

Marlowe finds Geiger lying dead in his house; when Marlowe returns later, the body is gone. Bodies can be weirdly hard to move, and Marlowe knows it wasn’t moved by the police. The heaviness, though, comes mainly from the moral weight of the crime.

“It was Bernie Ohls, 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.”


(Chapter 9, Page 30)

Ohls, an old work friend of Marlowe, is an honest police investigator. Marlowe, already stressed from covering up a murder, compares unfavorably his own doubtful morals to the chipper goodness of straight-shooting Ohls. Marlowe’s obvious hangover alone isn’t up to Ohls’s standards, so Marlowe rues what Ohls’s opinion would be if Ohls knew everything.

“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.”


(Chapter 9, Page 32)

As Marlowe rides to a crime scene with Ohls, the beautiful, bright day contrasts with the shadowy nature of Marlowe’s work, and with the rain storm that marked the onset of the novel’s plot. The mild climate forms a pleasant surface under which lurk dark passions and evil doings.

“We went into the rest of my suite, which contained a rust-red carpet, not very young, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Quints rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses, with seal-brown hair and sharp black eyes as large as mammoth prunes. There were three near-walnut chairs, the usual desk with the usual blotter, pen set, ashtray and telephone, and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it.”


(Chapter 11, Page 40)

Marlowe’s faded office communicates a great deal about this character. He doesn’t earn much money, which means that he’s not good at his job or too honest. The emphasis on the fact that the furnishings are “usual” suggests that Marlowe is practical and doesn’t care about appearances—qualities that are meant to read as particularly masculine. The Quints are the first surviving quintuplets, born in Canada in 1934 and immediately made into a merchandising opportunity; Marlowe’s calendar is most likely a promotional freebie.

“‘He had a police record.’ She shrugged. She said negligently: ‘He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.’”


(Chapter 11, Page 41)

Vivian’s sister, Carmen, almost married Owen Taylor, a young criminal who loved her. Here, Vivian conflates LA’s rich and its criminals: All that separates them is “a police record,” not their actions. Although Vivian is a sheltered, privileged woman, she is cynical about the dark underpinnings of her family’s opulent lifestyle—a jaded resignation that aligns with Marlowe’s views.

“Yes. I like roulette. All Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life. The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check.”


(Chapter 11, Pages 42-43)

Vivian’s bitterness is seemingly rooted in her father’s disregard for his safety—his physical incapacity comes not just from age but from an accident in a rich man’s sport. However, we will later learn that Vivian is highlighting the family’s gambling proclivities to throw Marlowe off the scent when it comes to her patronage of Eddie’s Mars’s casino. In reality, the clue is in the last sentence of the passage: Her wealth has indeed enabled her to buy “a rain check”—a way to protect Carmen from being accused of murder. In return for Mars’s help, however, Vivian must give him her inheritance, so it makes sense that she steels herself to see Sternwood wealth as a random occurrence in the first place.

“[Carmen] tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick.”


(Chapter 12, Page 46)

Overindulged and experiencing a severe untreated neurological illness, Carmen is depicted without any sympathy. The novel often calls her “stupid,” dismantles any dignity by giving her childish descriptors (such as “cute little smile” and “not very bright little girl”), and highlights her impulse-control issues. Chandler’s misogyny and poor grasp of human physiology comes through here; readers are meant to see Marlowe’s decision to bring her blackmailers to justice despite his repulsion as a sign of his steadfast professionalism, but to modern readers his disdain for an ill woman may read as brutal and unpleasant.

“I went to the door and looked out. The cool night breeze was blowing peacefully down the hall. No excited neighbors hung out of doorways. A small gun had gone off and broken a pane of glass, but noises like that don't mean much any more.”


(Chapter 15, Page 65)

Ever cynical about society, Marlowe recognizes that the sounds of violence in a big city become background noise as neighbors keep their heads down. Instead of worrying about problems he hasn’t been paid to fix, he focuses on serving his client while leaving the rest of the world to its cruel devices.

“‘It’s obvious to anybody with eyes that that store is just a front for something. But the Hollywood police allowed it to operate, for their own reasons. I dare say the Grand Jury would like to know what those reasons are.’ Wilde grinned. He said: ‘Grand Juries do ask those embarrassing questions sometimes—in a rather vain effort to find out just why cities are run as they are run.’”


(Chapter 18, Page 83)

Trying to protect his client, Marlowe points out to DA Wilde that revealing details of Carmen’s scandals would unravel the police department’s own secrets and side deals. Wilde’s cheerful concurrence signals a man long accustomed to the dark underside of city government.

“I’m on a case. I'm selling what I have to sell to make a living. What little guts and intelligence the Lord gave me and a willingness to get pushed around in order to protect a client. It's against my principles to tell as much as I've told tonight, without consulting the General. As for the cover-up, I've been in police business myself, as you know. They come a dime a dozen in any big city. Cops get very large and emphatic when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same things themselves every other day, to oblige their friends or anybody with a little pull. And I'm not through. I'm still on the case. I'd do the same thing again, if I had to.”


(Chapter 18, Page 84)

Marlowe states his basic principles as a private eye. He has a conscience, a decent reputation with his clients, and the grim determination to protect them, even from the police. He’ll break rules if necessary, seeing himself as a guardian who is above the law.

“‘Mr. Cobb was my escort,’ she said. ‘Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten—when Larry Cobb was sober.’”


(Chapter 23, Page 106)

At Eddie Mars’s casino, Vivian wins a huge amount at the roulette tables, and then starts for home. Her date, a large, wealthy, blond man, is sleeping off his alcoholic stupor in Vivian’s car. With wicked panache, Vivian lampoons the man for Marlowe. Her dark sense of humor matches Marlowe’s.

“‘What’s a loogan?’ ‘A guy with a gun.’ ‘Are you a loogan?’ ‘Sure,’ I laughed. ‘But strictly speaking a loogan is on the wrong side of the fence.’ ‘I often wonder if there is a wrong side.’”


(Chapter 23, Page 109)

Vivian and Marlowe banter about his somewhat disreputable profession and her jaundiced attitude toward modern life. She’s bitter that, with all her wealth, she can’t find an honest, decent man to be with. Vivian and Marlowe find themselves staring across the lonely abyss of their personal disappointments; strangely, they see each other staring back.

“We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay on the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.”


(Chapter 23, Page 110)

Near midnight, coastal communities sleep while Marlowe and Vivian drive through them. Chandler uses atmospheric descriptions of nature and geography to highlight Marlowe’s literary bent. He’s a detective, so he tends to notice everything wherever he goes, but he also has the heart of a romantic, one who sees—when humans aren’t awake and busily mucking it up—the natural beauty of the ordinary. Here, the small details, mostly one-syllable words, and alliteration of S, B, and W sounds create a kind of rhythmic tone poem.

“I braked the car against the curb and switched the headlights off and sat with my hands on the wheel. Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness. ‘Move closer,’ she said almost thickly.”


(Chapter 23, Page 111)

On their way back from Eddie Mars’s casino, Marlowe and Vivian stop to gaze at the ocean and kiss. Ever the existential poet-romantic, Marlowe notices how the world around him seems to align with his own thoughts. The waves roll in, uncertain whether to advance or retreat, illustrating the way he experiences his sexual desire at this moment—he is both attracted to Vivian and also completely committed to self-repression. The description also plays with the idea of murkiness: The air is foggy rather than see-through, the water is not fully liquid, but “creamed,” which implies congealed cloudiness, and Vivian’s voice is “thick” with desire.

“The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don't play at it.”


(Chapter 23, Page 112)

Marlowe likes and admires Vivian, but he won’t put up with the way she turns everything into a joke—though this is often his approach to dangerous situations as well. He thinks that she is expressing the meaningless of her idle, rich life; in reality, it’s a cover for her exhaustion about her debt to Mars. Marlowe doesn’t realize that Vivian’s aggressively dismissive attitude toward her life is a way to cope with what she’s had to do to protect Carmen from murder charges.

“I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.”


(Chapter 24, Page 116)

With Vivian mad at him, criminals and paid-off police everywhere, and Carmen intruding into his bed, Marlowe feels that he’s in the wrong game. Like the chess puzzle he can’t solve with knights, he, too, is in a trap he can’t escape.

“‘Agnes must have something I didn't notice.’ ‘She's a grifter, shamus. I'm a grifter. We're all grifters. So we sell each other out for a nickel.’”


(Chapter 25, Page 124)

Marlowe learns details about Rusty Regan from Harry Jones, a small-time hustler who’s smarter than he seems. Jones puts his finger on the crime business: It’s all lies and fake promises and manipulations. When criminals aren’t laboring to rip off citizens, they’re busy defrauding each other. Marlowe can’t be too cynical when dealing with them.

“He would tell her to go out and wait. She wouldn't hear a shot. A blackjack is just as effective at short range. He would tell her he had left me tied up and I would get loose after a while. He would think she was that dumb. Nice Mr. Canino.”


(Chapter 29, Page 147)

As the novel’s alluring but inaccessible beauty, Mona is much smarter than the men around her. This allows Marlowe to suggest that Mona use Canino’s biases against him. Like Marlowe, who isn’t above slapping a woman with epilepsy as a way to calm her down, Canino believes in male superiority and will thus underestimate Mona—at the cost of his life.

“‘I’m a copper,’ he said. ‘Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style. […] Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way.’”


(Chapter 30, Pages 151-152)

Chief Gregory lives in the same corrupt world as Marlowe, a world where police sometimes must bend the rules—and, now and then, accept a gift or two—so that their work can get done efficiently. Still, Marlowe can’t insist on perfect behavior when he isn’t a paragon of virtue himself. Gregory’s sympathies are in the right place, but he makes no promises to Marlowe: He’s honest about being dishonest.

“The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantel had the same hot black eyes and the knight in the stained-glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.”


(Chapter 30, Page 155)

The novel’s knight motif recurs here in a different meaning of the word. Marlowe’s chess knights are trapped in a puzzle they don’t have good moves for. Here, the stained-glass warrior knight is equally stuck in a two-dimensional image, unable to reach his goal. Marlowe, whom we are meant to see as another long-questing knight figure, also hasn’t yet unraveled the mysteries of the two Sternwood daughters. The days of yore, when knights were glorious, have given way to the harsh realities of modern life, where knights are immobilized figures at the mercy of larger forces.

“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 […] 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.”


(Chapter 32, Page 169)

Marlowe explains to Vivian that he has risked his life and reputation to protect General Sternwood from the fact that his daughter Carmen murdered Regan. Unlike Carmen, whose neurological impairment arguably prevents her from understanding the consequences of her choices, Vivian has a conscience. However, her love for her sister means covering up a murder—the futile effort doesn’t detract from Vivian’s fundamentally good character, but does tie into the novel’s interest in Love as a Catalyst for Bad Decisions.

“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. 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.”


(Chapter 32, Page 171)

Marlowe reflects on the all-encompassing erasure that is death. The agonies and mistreatment that cause the death are the evil part; death itself is almost a relief. Marlowe killed a man righteously, in self-defense, but his vigilantism and conviction that he is above the law make his moral code suspect at best. In contrast, Regan, an ex-criminal committed to being loyal to his wife, didn’t deserve to be shot. Regardless, troubles no longer exist for Regan, Geiger, Brody, Taylor, Jones, or Canino. All their torments, self-inflicted or administered to others, at last are gone, and all are again as equal as they were before they were born.

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