Books

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939. First edition of Chandler’s first and most famous novel, with the rarely found original dust jacket. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone. Bruccoli A1.1.a. A very sharp example. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s first novel, “was a masterpiece right out of the gate and introduced a new kind of detective story, build on the hard-boiled foundation laid by Dashiell Hammett” (Johnson I:44). The novel was published when Chandler was 51, after years of apprenticeship in pulp magazines. “It’s my ambition,” he once said, “to write a mystery story without one word of explanation at the end. In The Big Sleep I almost succeeded.” This was the novel that announced Chandler’s literary coming-of-age and defined the mythic status of his wise-cracking detective Philip Marlowe. “Chandler is fun to read,” commented writer George Higgins. “He was also one hell of a writer, and…

The Big Sleep is a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first in his acclaimed series about detective Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles and follows Marlowe as he investigates a complex case involving blackmail, mystery, and murder, which begins with a wealthy general who is being blackmailed and needs Marlowe's help.