The Big Sleep and Other Novels (Penguin Modern Classics)
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Big Sleep and Other Novels (Penguin Modern Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell My Lovely, on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Raymond Chandler's brilliant epitaph, The Long Goodbye.
About the Author
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his family when he was twelve. He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to some of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel. The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. It is in Marlowe’s long shadow that every fictional detective must stand – and under the influence of Raymond Chandler’s addictive prose that every crime author must write.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Marlowe speeds through five days in Los Angeles following a plot of Byzantine proportions among a feast of mouth-watering characters(Eddie Mars,the Sternwoods,Arthur Gwynn Geiger,Joe Brody,Lash Canino). The first paragraph is sublime and it goes on from there. Speed, economy, precision, fantastic evocation of place.
One liners to die for, 'She'd make a jazzy weekend,but she'd be wearing for a steady diet.' or 'Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in; although only one of them was dead' or 'What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?..You were dead,you were sleeping the big sleep..'. Sublime.
All of this is told in the first person with Marlowe's world-weary,sardonic,cynical mix in your head.
However, there seems to me to be a lull or hiatus after Brady is shot and Carol Lundgren is handed over to the police. On the one hand,how could Chandler keep the quality and pace going at such a sublime level but on the other hand is The Big Sleep really two short stories being welded into a single novel? You could quite easily stick a Part 1/Part 2 divider circa page 85/90. The whole premise for Part 2 is really the search for Rusty Regan and the reason given by Marlowe is that 'he thought' this was what General Sternwood really wanted (rather than sorting out the bribery).
The two long speeches by Marlowe to Vivian in the final chapter almost smack of Chandler trying to justify the 'Part 2' of the novel. It is interesting to note that Chandler wrote three times more short stories than novels. Thoughts anyone?
Other gripes are that Chandler is a maestro with the verbal banter but not so comfortable on the more physical side - witness Marlowe/Vivian after the heist at Eddie Mars' casino. Maybe this was also a Hays/censorship issue? Also there is some pretty aggressive homophobic stuff so be warned.
The overall novel is still a nailed on five star read. Please note that this edition is fantastic value as it includes Farewell My Lovely and The Long Good-bye so get three classics almost for the price of one!
If ever stranded on a Desert Island the first 90 pages would be amongst my top ten picks of anything I have ever read in any kind of literature - sublime.
One liners to die for, 'She'd make a jazzy weekend,but she'd be wearing for a steady diet.' or 'Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in; although only one of them was dead' or 'What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?..You were dead,you were sleeping the big sleep..'. Sublime.
All of this is told in the first person with Marlowe's world-weary,sardonic,cynical mix in your head.
However, there seems to me to be a lull or hiatus after Brady is shot and Carol Lundgren is handed over to the police. On the one hand,how could Chandler keep the quality and pace going at such a sublime level but on the other hand is The Big Sleep really two short stories being welded into a single novel? You could quite easily stick a Part 1/Part 2 divider circa page 85/90. The whole premise for Part 2 is really the search for Rusty Regan and the reason given by Marlowe is that 'he thought' this was what General Sternwood really wanted (rather than sorting out the bribery).
The two long speeches by Marlowe to Vivian in the final chapter almost smack of Chandler trying to justify the 'Part 2' of the novel. It is interesting to note that Chandler wrote three times more short stories than novels. Thoughts anyone?
Other gripes are that Chandler is a maestro with the verbal banter but not so comfortable on the more physical side - witness Marlowe/Vivian after the heist at Eddie Mars' casino. Maybe this was also a Hays/censorship issue? Also there is some pretty aggressive homophobic stuff so be warned.
The overall novel is still a nailed on five star read. Please note that this edition is fantastic value as it includes Farewell My Lovely and The Long Good-bye so get three classics almost for the price of one!
If ever stranded on a Desert Island the first 90 pages would be amongst my top ten picks of anything I have ever read in any kind of literature - sublime.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
I love these novels but I have some reservations about the Kindle edition.
The text is formatted with a wide left margin - I can't see any good reason for this. Table of contents only lists the 3 novels, and no chapter to chapter navigation (5 way navigation only moves novel to novel). All the free ebooks I've had from Project Gutenberg get this stuff right, so why can't Penguin Books? After all they're a major publisher, and charging almost as much for the ebook as the paperback edition.
The text is formatted with a wide left margin - I can't see any good reason for this. Table of contents only lists the 3 novels, and no chapter to chapter navigation (5 way navigation only moves novel to novel). All the free ebooks I've had from Project Gutenberg get this stuff right, so why can't Penguin Books? After all they're a major publisher, and charging almost as much for the ebook as the paperback edition.
50 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Ernest Hemingway, in between drinking gallons of booze and writing those cute short sentences of his, once observed that all American literature comes from Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn'. He was right in a sense. Twain's novel was the first to deal with the archetypal North American conflict between city and wilderness, the demands of civilisation and the lure of freedom. You can see Huck right up to the present day: in J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield perhaps, or in Lester Burnham in 'American Beauty'.
And he's right there in Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Forget your Poirots and your Marples. Forget even Sherlock Holmes. Marlowe is the greatest literary detective. What makes him great is his apartness; Chandler's novels are not really about solving mysteries - often the plots don't make a lot of sense - but about the tragedy within the man he created.
Marlowe is tragic. A noble, Arthurian figure (Chandler almost called him Malory, after the author of Morte d'Arthur, but rejected the name as too obvious) he is isolated in the decadent civilisation that surrounds him. He is, as Robert Graves might put it, the one good man in a wholly evil time.
His dilemma - whether to give in to the temptations of the world around him, or to pursue his lonely crusade - is at the centre of each of these novels, and in each novel is explored in a different way. They are all absorbing even though, as I've said, Chandler didn't really care a hoot about plot. (He once said that whenever he ran out of ideas he had a man walk into the room with a gun. So not much pre-planning and storylining going on there, then).
In an essay about detective fiction, Chandler wrote of Marlowe and his Los Angeles:
'Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.'
Such is Chandler's Marlowe. Read him, and be amazed.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Better on a page than on a Kindle
The Big Sleep like Chandler's other stories had a strong voice and sense of place. An enjoyable read. Read more
Published 1 month ago by WEN
Classic crime
I loved this. I could just hear the narrator's gritty first person voice. He spoke to me. If you like classic American crime this is for you.
Published 5 months ago by J. Mclennan
The Big Sleep etc
Classic Philip Marlow from Raymond Chandler. I have enjoyed the films for many years - but the books are so much more detailed and rounded.
An excellent buy.
An excellent buy.
Published 12 months ago by M. Frizelle
Long goodbye to the master
Finishing this set of novels is like losing a friend. The Long Goodbye also was Chandler's goodbye to his readers. Read more
Published on 21 Dec 2009 by reader 451
70 Big Ones & Not Out
If you're thinking of buying this book then you need no introduction to Raymond Chandler. At seventy years old, The Big Sleep is just one of a magnificent trio bundled together... Read more
Published on 8 April 2009 by David Sneath
First class writing
This is as it says on the cover a modern classic. Great humourous dialogue, equally intriguing and humourously written internal thought process, great plots and characters. Read more
Published on 4 April 2009 by Dogman
Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and Other Novels
Good to find this book via Amazon. I have been hunting for Raymond Chandler's novels for ages - he is considered "old hat" by most libraries, but his Philip Marlowe (Private I)... Read more
Published on 18 Mar 2009 by Mrs. M. O'connor
As Hard-boiled as it gets......
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. Read more
Published on 18 Oct 2007 by Bentley
It would be rude not to...
Enter the mind of Philip Marlowe a cynical, humane and perpetually sarcastic Los Angeles private dick. Read more
Published on 16 May 2003 by j grant
Crime comes of age
With the arrival of Raymond Chandler on the scene,the noir novel began in earnest.Dashiell Hammett had started the movement,with contributions to Black Mask magazine The... Read more
Published on 26 Feb 2001
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
