So, okay, I admit that was more than I ever wanted to know about Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep. It took me ten months to get all the way through it, partly because I’m not a huge fan of noir. The men are always so Alpha male and the women are always such one-dimensional characters, madonna or whore and no coloring outside the lines of those roles, please.

But if you are a writer there is a lot to learn here. For example, it turns out that much of this book already existed in bits and pieces of Chandler’s short stories. The annotators do a great job of putting each excerpt from the short stories right next to where it was cut and pasted into the novel. You’re basically reading over Chandler’s shoulder as he writes and then rewrites. That’s both interesting and instructive on craft, and Chandler was very conscious of craft, which was on display in continuous and continuing use of motif, symbols, themes, and of course great use of simile and metaphor, especially in dialogue.

The annotators write

An aristocratic family in decline, an ancestral mansion teeming with secrets, an atmosphere of illness and unease, and a creepy butler: Chandler transplants elements of the Gothic novel and the classic English mystery into the Southern California landscape.

Add in

A flippant attitude and a deflating wit were part of the arsenal of the hard-boiled dick; often outnumbered, outmuscled, and outranked, and he could still level the playing field by cracking wise…”I know I talk too smart,” Marlowe himself will say in Farewell, My Lovely. ”It’s in the air nowadays.”

stir, and you get what one critic called “L.A. Gothic.” 

The annotators have included maps, drawing and photographs to show the mean L.A. streets Marlowe drives down (he’s behind the wheel a lot), examples of cover art from many, many editions, photos of various actors who either played the Chandler characters or inspired their appearance. There is also the hilarious (well, I find it so) reveal that Chandler thought Cary Grant should have played Marlowe in film. When you consider that Chandler wrote Marlowe as his alter ego, that’s some seriously wishful thinking going on there.

You do have to remember that this novel was written almost a hundred years ago in what was seen as an all! new! and improved! form at that time. It’s not a textbook but it’s certainly a literary mile marker.

The only time I’ve ever written noir was a chapter in a serial novel.

It was a lot of fun, which I wrote about here.

#thiswritinglife Book Review Monday Chatter Anthony Dean Rizzulo Owen Hill Pamela Jackson Raymong Chandler The Annotated Big Sleep