This is the one that started it all. Take to the streets of 1930s LA with Marlowe as your narrator.

On Carmen-- "Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her."

On the General-- "The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings."

On Vivian-- "She'd make a jazzy weekend, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet." ( )

Good detective fiction. ( )

I listened to the audiobook. Excellent narration by Elliott Gould.

The plot is much easier to follow than the movie, where it is impossible to understand. There are also many things in the book that don't make it into the movie, as you would expect. I need to watch the movie again now. I heard that there is a DVD release that has an extra - a scene that was cut from the movie - that is the missing key to understanding the plot.)

The writing is wonderful - so many perfect phrases. It bothered me at times that Marlow was too perfectly intuitive. How he is able to deduce what's happening from minimal facts. I had to just go with this aspect of the book. ( )

Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep

I have never read a book that had me onside with the narrator faster than this one. On page one he occupies his time waiting for a door to be answered by giving a goofy critique of the stained glass window above the door and I thought, "yes, I'm on your side." The big secret in private detective Philip Marlowe's character is that he actually thinks life is pretty good. Even getting punched in the face three times by a fist holding a roll of coins has something to take out of it - it at least gives him a good story to tell. It's this kind of mordant optimisim that makes Marlowe such a good companion for the two hundred or so pages of the novel. The quality of the zingers fades somewhat over the course of the novel, as does the pleasure of Marlowe's company, but then it's all over and I found myself satisfied but in no hurry to read the next one (I borrowed and omnibus of the first three Marlowe adventures).

The shortcoming of the novel is that apart from Marlowe's world view, it doesn't have anything particularly profound to say. Compared the the messy ethical dilemmas of a (author:John le Carre|1411964] novel - the other genre author I have read recently - The Big Sleep feels a bit thin. This is partly because of Marlowe's rather tedious and narrow moralism. As a gay man, I am pretty well calloused against homophobic slurs, but when the protagonist wins a fight purely because his opponent is gay, that's a bit much: "I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like." And any woman who enjoys sex is a dangerous lunatic. Anyone who uses pornography is a deviant. Etc.

The problem with reading all that shit in 2018 is that there's so much that could possibly be interesting that is erased. The criminal underbelly of LA might was well be orcs, for all the moral complexity they're given. Yes, at the time that criminal underbelly necessarily included men who had sex with men, as sodomy was illegal until 1962 in every state of the U.S., but are they in the same class as a hitman or blackmailer? Of course the biggest omission is the women, who have no agency and only the most primitive motives. Once again, it's the missed opportunities that upset me in this regard.

And the plot? It's as preposterous as most detective stories are. Everyone is madly drinking, driving, smoking, lying, shooting, punching and double-crossing in a rainy fortnight in Los Angeles. I finished reading the book an hour ago and I absolutely couldn't tell you who did what, but that's not the point. The action is lightning fast and the prose wonderfully butch and witty, making this a tremendously entertaining read. ( )

A classic, of course. I found the slang to be most entertaining, but I was surprised that when Marlow was talking to some "dame", a few of his expressions were opaque to me. Was he flirting, just being a wise-ass, or something else? It may be that nobody knows the answer - did people really talk this way? There is some homophobia and the usual noir misogyny, and like 19th century anti-semitism, it indicates that these ideas were so much a part of social thought that it didn't cross anybody's mind how repulsive they would become in time. On the other hand, some Republican presidential candidates and their followers still hold to them. ( )