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Book Summary and Reviews of Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

  • Published:
  • Aug 2014, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best: Raymond Chandler''s best loved novel, The Big Sleep, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

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

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is indulging in some petty blackmail. A weary, old man, Sternwood just wants the problem to go away. But Marlowe finds he has his work cut out just keeping Sternwood''s wild, devil-may-care daughters out of trouble as they prowl LA''s dirtiest and darkest streets. And pretty soon, he''s up to his neck in hoodlums and corpses ...

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This information about Big Sleep was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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More Information

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great 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 seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made 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.

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Read-Alikes

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If you liked Big Sleep, try these:

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    For fans of Paul Auster, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene comes this bold, prize-winning literary thriller.

  • Huge jacket

    Huge

    by James Fuerst

    Published 2009

    About this book

    Life hasn’t been easy for Eugene “Huge” Smalls. But it’s not all bad. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett have taught Huge everything he needs to know about being a hard-boiled detective, and he’s just been hired to solve his first case. What he doesn’t realize is that his search for the truth will change everything...

  • By the Time You Read This jacket

    By the Time You Read This

    by Giles Blunt

    Published 2008

    About this book

    Detective John Cardinal is on the hunt for an ingenious killer even as he mourns his own wife’s tragic death in this thriller of heart-stopping suspense. Published in the UK as The Fields of Grief.

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