Reviews for The big sleep

The average rating for The big sleep based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-10-05 00:00:00 Nicolas Vincent Chandler's descriptions are so compelling that you not only see the characters clearly but also have a fairly complete feel for their personalities (who they are). I felt like I was experiencing everything: walking across the stones in the grass, sizing up the cool brick house etc. And some of the desriptives are hilarious: "she had a lot of face and chin. she had pewter colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones" Wet stones! Ruthless permanent! Who thinks like that. It was refreshing and wonderful. The quality of the prose is consistent. I was completely engaged. His writing is brilliant. He is funny. The books evoke the era of film noir and hard boiled Hollywood detectives. Where Dashiel Hammet was telegraphic, Raymond Chandler dwells more, using words to their best advantage. He uses words more freely but not wastefully.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-28 00:00:00 Mildred Adkins The original Guy Noir. There isn't much to say about Raymond Chandler's most famous hero that hasn't already been said more than once. I was interested to learn that, though born in Chicago, Chandler was raised in England and went to a British public school where the word "dame" has a different meaning than it does on the streets of Bay City (poor old Santa Monica which doesn't come off very well in Marlow's telling). Made me imagine a Pythonesque ending to the scene in which the thug surprises Marlow by sneaking into his apt while he's asleep, asks him why he left the door off the latch, and Marlow says, "Waiting for a dame." "What dame?" "Just a dame." Finally comes the knock on the door, and in walks Maggie Smith dressed for Downton Abbey. The author of the intro suggests that "Farewell, My Lovely" beats even "The Big Sleep," and I agree. As the intro notes, Marlow's descriptions of California's sights, sounds, and smells, now getting on for a century ago, are vivid, exact, and beautiful, what you'd expect from a private seamus who knows his Shakespeare. His eye for the telling details of every character, no matter how minor, is striking. But it's his similes that make you remember the books--when I got to "A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse-box in a screen porch," I started writing them down. And top this for a worth-a-thousand-words way to put you inside the underfunded, run-down, neglected Santa Monica City Hall: "Inside was a long, dark hallway that had been mopped the day McKinley was inaugurated." That was a long time ago even then. And one of the best things is that way back in the early 40's the hero introduced himself at least once as "Marlow. Philip Marlow." So Ian Fleming must have liked him too.