Hundred Book Challenge #5: "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chanler

… but who killed the chauffeur?

“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler is the first of the Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective novels.

I was about to say that if we ignore Dickens' “Bleak House” and the Sherlock Holmes stories... and some Poe and King and Christine I had no experience with detective novels before reading this. Obviously the fact that I've read all these others, including the fantastic Mrs. Marple books by Christine, I have quite a few detective novels under my belt. Still, “The Big Sleep” felt different. And for good reason, but I'll get to that in a bit. 

One side effect of this entire Hundred Book Challenge is the fact that I'm going to walk away from it with about a hundred thousand more books to read. After going through “The Big Sleep” I will have to read the other seven-odd novels that star this hard-living, hard-drinking detective.

Here's the thing: Marlowe isn't very cool. He is smart and almost every lady that comes across him tries to get him in bed, but he turns them away with a terse remark before going to a bar to drink and then going home to be alone. He seems to be constantly on the edge of falling into a deep depression. He is smart, but that intelligence alienates him from people. He is alone. He plays chess by himself. He drinks and drinks and drinks.

The story starts out as Marlowe is given a seemingly simple case: He is asked by a dying old rich man to figure out who is blackmailing one of his two wild daughters. Things spiral out of control into the seedy underbelly of 1930s Los Angeles complete with pornography, illegal gambling, murder, sex, betrayal and all the rest.

The story is pretty tight and the outcome is satisfying, but the mystery and the intrigue is not what makes this story run. That's where the chauffeur comes in. In a somewhat smaller story point a chauffeur dies. I try to follow these stories closely but at the end I couldn't figure out who was suppose to have killed him. I turned to the Internets and discovered that no one knows.

Here, I quote from Wikipedia:

In the case of "The Big Sleep", there is the famous question of who killed the chauffeur. When Howard Hawks made his film of the novel, the writing team were perplexed as to the answer. Hawks contacted Chandler to inquire and Chandler replied he had no idea. This exemplifies a difference between Chandler's style of crime fiction and previous authors. For Chandler the plot was almost secondary; what really mattered was the atmosphere and the characters. An ending that answered all the questions and neatly wrapped every plot thread up was less important to Chandler than having interesting characters who behave in believable ways.

Think about that for a second. It's like the polar opposite of most stories out there. Characters are stock and serve to forward plot. It's such a part of popular fiction that when it somewhat unnerving when we are presented with something different and more realistic.

Hard-boiled detectives are suppose to be cool, smooth characters not almost-broken men held together by a shaky morality and cheep whiskey. Much of his character building has been parodied and copied to death to the point where it's hard to remember this is one of the great originals.

Though it does play on my mind still. Who killed the chauffeur. Even though I know there is no answer the insidious little post-post-post modern dweeb inside me who scours the internet for story plot holes I can pull out when I want to be smarmy to my friends wish I knew just who killed the chauffeur. I suppose another point of the Hundred Book Challenge is to kill that guy and replace him with the guy who insists his friends read all these books he knows deep down they'll never ever read. Such is the life of a bookish person.

Maybe that's why Marlowe is so alone?

A couple of housekeeping things about this blog:

First, things have been a big sparse here lately. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what sort of blog this will be. Also, with my wife almost ready to burst with baby my mind has been on other things. Still, I'm not quitting here. Stick with me through the growing pains.

Second, I realize some time has gone by between my last Hundred Book Challenge entry and this one. I am still reading like crazy however. I am nearly complete with the 12-novel series “A Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell that Time Magazine considers one novel. If anything I've upped my reading time to include more things. After I get through that behemoth things will get a bit more regular.