The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a crime novel by the American writer Raymond Chandler, published in 1939. It is the first novel to feature the private investigator Philip Marlowe, and it is set in Los Angeles.

Marlowe is hired by a dying general, Guy Sternwood, who is being blackmailed and wants the matter handled quietly. The job introduces him to the general's two daughters, one recently widowed and the other wild and unreliable.

What begins as a blackmail case widens into a missing person and a growing pile of bodies, with the people involved lying to one another and to Marlowe. The plot is famously tangled, and the book is more concerned with atmosphere and with the code Marlowe works by than with tidiness. Marlowe works the case through the city's mansions, its casinos and its back alleys, and the bodies keep accumulating.

Chandler was writing in the hardboiled mode that Hammett had helped to establish, and Marlowe became his best-known character. The Big Sleep was adapted into a film in 1946 and again in 1978.