The Big Sleep – Buch gebraucht kaufen

0140006524

(ISBN-13: 9780140006520)

wie neu

180x110x11 mm

220

England

18. Auflage

Taschenbuch

Englisch

The Big Sleep

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid....He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. This is the Code of the Private Eye as defined by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay The Simple Act of Murder. Such a man was Philip Marlowe, private eye, an educated, heroic, streetwise, rugged individualist and the hero of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. This work established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel, and his articulate and literary style of writing won him a large audience, which ranged from the man in the street to the most sophisticated intellectual.

Philip Marlowe was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and he didn’t care who knew it. He was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. He was calling on four million dollars.

The four million dollars (a paralysed old general, with his two beautiful daughters, one a gambler, the other a degenerate) is a prey to bloodsuckers…. Blackmailers, gangsters aund murderers.

And then it’s shoot-before-talk as Philip Marlowe hunks a fast gun through the gang-world of California.

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About the author:

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.

In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. Chandler's Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, are considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe.

Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".

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Quotes from Raymond Chandler:

"To say goodbye is to die a little." — Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6))

"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself." — Raymond Chandler (Long Goodbye)

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." — Raymond Chandler

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Reviews from readers:

"It is always a pleasure to revisit a good book and find it even better than you remember. But it is humbling to discover that what you once thought was its most obvious defect is instead one of its great strengths. That was my recent experience with Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

I had read it twice before—once twenty years, once forty years ago—and have admired it ever since for its striking metaphors, vivid scenes, and tough dialogue. Above all, I love it for its hero, Philip Marlowe, the closest thing to a shining knight in a tarnished, unchivalrous world.

But even though I recalled Chandler's metaphors with pleasure, I also tended to disparage them as baroque and excessive. Having read too many Chandler imitations and watched too many Chandler parodies, I had come to view his images as exotic, overripe things which could survive only in a hothouse—corrupt things like the orchids the aged and ever-chilly General Sternwood raises as an excuse for the heat.

This time through, I refused to let individual metaphors distract me, but instead allowed the totality of the imagery—including the detailed description of the settings—do its work. When I did so, I was not only pleased by the aptness of the descriptive passages but also surprised by the restraint of most of the metaphors. True, there are a few outrageous similes, but they are always used deliberately, for humor or shock, and often refer to the General's daughter Carmen, who deserves everything she gets. Overall, the sustained effect of the imagery is to evoke vividly and atmospherically the beauty and corruption of Los Angeles.

But, first and foremost, the author's imagery is the narrator Marlowe's too—as is also the case with Joseph Conrad's narrator Marlow—and because of this it reveals to us the heart of Marlowe's personal darkness: his place in the world, the person he wishes to be, and the profound distance between the two.

Chandler introduces us to Marlowe at the Sternwood's palatial mansion, a medieval gothic structure within sight of—but mercifully upwind from—the stinking detritus of Sternwood's first oil well, the foundation of the family fortune. Over the hallway entrance, a stained-glass window depicts a knight who is awkwardly—Marlowe thinks unsuccessfully—trying to free a captive maiden (her nakedness concealed only by her long cascading hair) from the ropes that bind her. Marlowe's initial impulse? He wants to climb up there and help. He doesn't think the guy is really trying.

Thus, from the first, the despoliation of L.A., the corruption of big money, and a vision of chivalric romance complicated by sexuality—a vision which encompasses both the urgency and impotence of knight-errantry--reflect Philip Marlowe's character and concerns. As the book proceeds, the ghost of Rusty Reagan, an embodiment of modern day romance (Irish rebel soldier, rum-runner, crack shot), becomes not only part of Marlowe's quest but also his double, another young man with “a soldier's eye” doing General Sternwood's bidding, lost in the polluted world of L.A. At the climax of the novel, everything that can be resolved is resolved, as Marlowe, the ghost of Reagan and one of the Sternwoods meet amidst the stench of the family's abandoned oil well.

Afterwards, though, all Marlowe can think about is Eddie Mars' wife, the captive "maiden" who cut off all of her once-long hair to prove she didn't mind being confined (“Silver-Wig” Marlowe calls her), who rescued him from killers by cutting his ropes with a knife, but who is still so in love with her corrupt gambler husband that Marlowe cannot begin to save her." - Bill Kerwin


"Since I've been reading a lot of detective-type urban fantasy lately, I decided to pick up one of the original texts of the genre, just to see what it was like.

Chandler wrote this back in 1939, and the book itself holds up remarkably well even though it's been 70 years.

It's very readable. Some of the slang is a little opaque, sure, but not nearly as much as you'd think.

And some of the intuitive leaps Philip Marlow takes are a little difficult to grasp. But I'm not sure if that's because:

1) The cultural gap between now and the time the novels were written.

2) The fact that it was assumed that a reader then should be willing to work a little harder back then.

3) The fact that this was Chandler's first novel.

Most interesting to me were the parts of the novel that didn't have anything to do with the story itself. Marlowe constantly laments how corrupt society and the government are, and I'd always thought of that as a relatively modern sensibility.

The biggest and most pervasive stumbling block to enjoying the book is the fact that racism and sexism are moderately rampant. It's not a piece of malicious propaganda like Birth of a Nation, but the fact remains that Marlow slaps a dame a couple times to bring her to her senses. And there's talk openly demonizing "queers" and "fags."

It's similar to Gone with the Wind in a lot of ways. There's racism and sexism and casual violence against women. And given the time period, it's hard to imagine how you could tell a story set in then and there without those things. It all seems very much a natural part of the story, and so matter-of-fact that it's almost inoffensive.

That said, I don't know if that makes it better or worse than something malicious and blatantly attempting to promote these poisonous views. We tend to be aware of propaganda and therefore it's easier to think about and possibly resist. Propiganda is like someone too close to you, talking too loud, poking you in the chest with a finger. It's pushy, and for the most part, humans resent and resist being pushed.

Stories like this though, where these toxic element seem like natural parts of the genre, world, culture, or story... they're persuasive in a way that outright persuasion can never be. They're like visiting a cool loft apartment in a repurposed warehouse. It's quirky and interesting and cool people live there, and also all the old industrial solvents have soaked into the brick, and so every time you go there, without even noticing, you breathe in a bunch of benzine. And when you touch the banisters or walk around barefoot, you absorb just a *little* lead from the old paint. And so every time you visit, just by passing through, you become ever so slightly poisoned without even realizing it....

That said, this was a book that was instrumental in founding a genre. And reading this now, I see how so many people have been following in Chandler's footsteps. Many of the tropes were obviously set down by him, and they carry forward to this day.

All it all, a complicated but worthwhile read depending how much you're interested in the history of a type of story. But probably more informative than straight-up enjoyable.

(Note: I originally wrote this review back in 2013, and today (in March of 2021, 8 years later) someone brought to my attention that some of what I originally wrote about the problematic elements of this book were themselves problematic. Re-reading it, I realized I hadn't done a good job communicating what I really *meant* to say. So I've revised this to make my thoughts more clear.)" - Patrick
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Like new. Pages slightly darkened due to age.

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