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THE BIG SLEEP (1939) is a seminal work in the hardboiled detective genre, and it’s among the best of the Raymond Chandler books. It showcases Chandler’s masterful use of sharp dialogue, complex characters and his gritty depiction of 1930s Los Angeles.

This classic hardboiled detective novel introduces private eye Philip Marlowe. Hired to resolve a blackmail scheme, Marlowe uncovers a web of corruption and murder. It revolutionized crime fiction, establishing a template for noir storytelling that continues to influence literature and film.

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Pulp Magazines and Black Mask

English detective stories “are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. … The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody thought of only two minutes before he pulled it off. But if the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Pulp magazines (printed on wood-pulp paper) were a cheap source of popular entertainment that sometimes mixed in subversive social commentary. The format was invented in 1882 as a vehicle for children’s adventure stories. By the 1920s, pulps specialized in detective stories, love stories, westerns, …. During the Depression, they provided a sense of escape. [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

“In 1931 my wife and I used to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast in a very leisurely way, and at night, just to have something to read, I would pick a pulp magazine off the rack. It suddenly struck me that I might be able to write this stuff and get paid while I was learning.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

“It took me a year to write my first story. I had to … learn to write all over again.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

The emotional basis of the standard detective story had always been that justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passagework. The denouement justified everything. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story, however, was that the scene outranked the plot. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

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