The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I watched the 1946 adaptation of this a few weeks ago and finished the original novel after getting somewhat bogged down in the plot about halfway through.

The film turns out to be pretty faithful to the book, albeit with some changes of emphasis. In the book Marlowe does not really have a romance with Vivian, other than to try to get to the truth of what happened to her estranged husband Rusty Regan (a deliberate change from the original). I suspect that the screenplay was skewed to give more time to the Bogart and Bacall pairing).

Other elements of the story have somewhat more bite too. The bookseller Geiger turns out to be running a pornography lending library out of the back room of his shop, and it also turns out he was in a same sex relationship with a young man (giving them more of a reason for them to shoot Brody in a mistaken act of revenge). The compromising photos of Carmen are definitely much more compromising here - Marlowe discovers her naked and heavily drugged in Geiger’s house - something that would never have made it past the 1946 film censors.

She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

The plot is even more complicated, with several convincing theories of the case being proposed and reworked as the story progresses. As mentioned above, the story seems to come to a grinding halt half way through, with the photos recovered and the mystery of Geiger’s death solved. Case closed, right?

I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar cheque coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.

However, Marlowe seems determined to keep digging into the case of the missing Rusty and how that ties in with gangster Eddie Mars, his missing wife and the libidinous Carmen. Reading the wiki page, it seems that Chandler stitched together elements of this story from two other short stories with similar set ups (distressed fathers and wayward children).

The final conclusion is a satisfying explanation, but the joy is in Chandler’s laconic and evocative prose, with Marlowe being the cynical and dogged anti-hero determined to get to the truth, for his own satisfaction if no one else’s.

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.