Description
Book SynopsisHard-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 . . .
Trade ReviewChandler 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 *
Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since -- Paul Auster
Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude -- Erle Stanley Gardner
[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision
-- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books *
Raymond Chandler is a master * New York Times *
Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye
* Los Angeles Times *
Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist * The Boston Book Review *
Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence * Daily Telegraph *
