By Raymond Chandler. Copyright 1988 (reprint), Vintage Publishing.

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The past few years, I've been working adamantly to address certain gaping holes in both my cinematic and literary education. For some people this translates into things like, "Must finish Finnegan's Wake and watch more Truffaut films." For me, it means watching more Spanish horror films from the 1970s and reading more Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler. In the case of both of the mentioned authors, I decided to begin at the logical place: the first book for each of their most famous characters. For Fleming, obviously, this means James Bond and Casino Royale. For hardboiled fiction maestro Chandler, this means Phillip Marlowe and The Big Sleep.

It's pretty shameful, at least to me, to have such a gaping hole in my education. Chandler is one of the seminal writers of hardboiled crime fiction, and were it not for the pulp roots of hi chosen genre, he'd be more highly regarded as one of the great American writers of all time. The Big Sleep showcases his proficiency at creating poetic, highly descriptive passages without resorting to overly flowery or ornate prose. It's the literary equivalent of ashcan painting -- detailed, beautiful, but hard-edged and realistic. "A dead man is heavier than a broken heart," has to be one of the great sentences of all time. Hammett was perhaps more grim, and Spillaine was more over-the-top, but Chandler was an absolute artist with words.

The Big Sleep introduces us to Los Angeles private detective Phillip Marlowe (although New York is generally -- and erroneously -- considered the hardest city in the world, much noir cinema and literature is centered around Los Angeles, primarily because LA had, even in the 1920s and 1930s, still maintained to some degree the sense of lawlessness that defined it when it was just a dirty frontier outpost). Marlowe is the prototypical world-weary private eye -- somewhat morose and grim, but of course possessed of a certain streak of hope that he can't help but pander to from time to time -- the quintessential warrior with a broken heart, who fights to protect what's left of good in the world even though the world has broken his heart. He's hired in this story to investigate a blackmail attempt on a rich old man and ascertain whether there is anything behind the attempt, and if so whether it would be better to pay off and be done with things or bust some heads and teach the blackmailer a lesson. The investigation leads him into the middle of an underground pornography ring and manages to get him tangled up with the old man's two daughters -- one of whom is fairly insane. Although the blackmail case ends up being fairly easy for Marlowe to crack, the doorway it opens up into the investigation of a missing man and a couple murders draws Marlowe deeper into the intrigue surrounding the old man's family.

The plot is complex and expertly woven, full of vibrant and believable underworld characters who complicate Marlowe's investigation. Marlowe himself is a gruff but likeable character, not nearly so mean-spirited as Dashiell Hammett's equally famous private eye, Sam Spade (both characters have been played by Humphrey Bogart in the movies -- Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Marlowe in the film adaptation of The Big Sleep). Chandler creates a world in which we know Marlowe isn't going to die, but he's probably not going to be any better off by the end of the book. He gains very little, monetarily or otherwise, from his struggle, but still he struggles on, a man who has learned to exploit the rampant corruption around him in order to combat that same corruption. Chandler's description of Marlowe and the seedy world he inhabits is crisp and expert, and The Big Sleep is without a doubt one of the best reads I've had in a long time.

Labels: Espionage