Raymond Chandler, Ian Rankin (Introducer)

The Big Sleep

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Summary

Founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler's most famous and popular novel of all

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 . . .

THE FIRST NOVEL FEATURING LACONIC PI PHILIP MARLOWE, THE STORY CONTINUES IN FAREWELL, MY LOVELY

'Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess

Reviews

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious
Robert B. Parker, The New York Times Book Review

About the author

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve, where he attended Dulwich College, alma mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959, having established himself as the finest crime writer in America.

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