The Big Sleep

When it came to death and where someone spends their eternal rest, literature's most hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe , was pretty cynical. "What does it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or a marble tower?" author Raymond Chandler's legendary protagonist asked not long after Marlowe had plugged a bad guy in "The Big Sleep." When it came time for Chandler's big sleep, however, his sentiments were different. The man who put Los Angeles on the literary map with...Read Full Story

The thought would have hit gumshoe Philip Marlowe as soon as the bus pulled up: "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Actually, what I really had was a notebook, a pen and a digital recorder — oh yeah, and a seat on Esotouric's Raymond Chandler Bus Tour. I had decided to learn whether L.A. really is, as Chandler's hard-bitten detective Philip Marlowe once said, "just a big dry sunny...Read Full Story

The thought hit as soon as the bus pulled up: "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Actually, what I really had was a notebook, a pen and a digital recorder. Oh yeah, and a seat on Esotouric's Raymond Chandler Bus Tour, having decided to learn whether L.A. really is, as Chandler's hard-bitten detective Philip Marlowe once said, "just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style...Read Full Story

T he Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse … For more @: T he Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler For more Books...Read Full Story

NOTW: THE BIG SLEEP AND “THE LITTLE BI*CH” Musings On Some Thoughts By David Thomson Posted by Don Malcolm on 10/10/2005, 12:29 am We still don’t know how much torment and difficulty accompanied the process that created The Big Sleep, despite the evidence contained in the 1945 version unearthed several years ago. We’ve learned of the careful stitching of existing and new footage that resulted in the “delightfully incoherent” final version, but we don’t know how much actual time and trouble it...Read Full Story