Deepest of Dreams

"Failure is never a reason not to try again."
- Martha Albrand 


I was just like how a well-dressed private detective should be. I was on my way to meet up with four million dollars.

Philip Marlowe, a tough-guy private eye from Los Angeles goes to meet up with Guy Sternwood, a man who could as well be a mummy or a vampire without blood, to talk business. Guy Sternwood is being blackmailed by a person named A.G. Geiger whom he has not heard of before. It's not a big sum of money for a rich man, 1000 dollars, but it's a matter of pride for mr. Sternwood, to hire a guy for 25 dollars a day + expenses, to solve the case. And so Marlowe does.

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (a hardboiled crime novel, 1939), his first book to introduce detective Marlowe, while not something that I can call exciting, is one of the more consistent stories that I've read in a while. There are some small mysteries that our detective Philip Marlowe comes across, and it all comes a full circle back to the family of Sternwoods, Arthur Gwynn Geiger and the big bad of the series who is not part of the case but is connected to the investigation of Marlowe. I won't spoil that person but it's not hard to guess early on who he is - the law is not one that can reach that kind of person.
The Big Sleep contains two parts, while they are not named, they are visible to the reader. The first part of the story reads akin to a generic mystery story while the second part expands on the story while the pacing slows down, but it's still its own thing, not enough was set up at the beginning for it and it should have been more overarching throughout the first part I feel.

A list of mysteries: 

 Everyone's interest in wanting Marlowe to find Rusty Regan, a person known to have sold alcohol under the table, whom had disappeared without a word. Throughout the story everyone wants Philip to find Rusty. The man is assumed to have ran away with another woman. Regan is the (ex-)husband of Vivian Regan/Sternwood, one of the two daughters of Philip Marlowe's client. What's the fate of Rusty Regan?

 A few threatening letters to the old general Guy Sternwood about a year ago, general is Marlowe's client. Pay $5000 to a man named Joe Brody.

 A. G. Geiger, a bookstore owner, sending a letter to general Sternwood about Carmen Sternwood where he tries to get money from mr. Sternwood.

 A murder case with a disappearing corpse and letters with secret coding in them. Carmen Sternwood, a frankly stupid girl, gets stuck to it.

 A potential suicide of Owen Taylor, the driver of the Sternwood household, that neatly ties into the case which takes up the first half of the book. Owen had done known criminal acts but was still kept working in the Sternwood's as they claim he's a good man just like Rusty Regan. 
About a year ago Owen had driven the younger sister, Carmen, to a place called Yuna and the older sister Vivian went to get them both back, very child-like acting from both of them - that being a very important clue despite not seeming so at first.

There are some weird almost negative parts in the book as well as; it's kind of annoying how everyone, for no apparent reason, acts aggressive towards almost everything that our protagonist detective Marlowe has to say. 
And the Sternwoods are weird to disappointing levels - the biggest twist at the end of the book and some of the mysteries are not explained well enough as they just are how they are because the family is weird - effectively giving disappointing answers to the reader's question. It's also kind of annoying to read about the two girls be purposefully annoying towards Marlowe. 
 Just a note but the name of the book only has to do with the last line of the book. The name of the book is being used as one of its selling points. At the back of the book this final line, how the story ends completely, is repeated for people to read before they even open the book up, yet the Big Sleep is only about that line which has very little to do with either parts of the story. It has only to do with the second one and you can I guess try to link it to the part in the book with a boy who loved A.G.G. I'm talking about the bed part. 
People care how the bodies are handled after death; Philip thinks it mostly doesn't matter.

Now I was very fascinated by the name of one of the policemen that mr. Chandler had come up with; Cronjager. Cronjager. "Cronjager." I don't know why but that's such a powerful name, worthy enough to be in a list of names that stay in the reader's mind to make a story more memorable, and worthy enough to have a part on this blog - Cronjager, a simple, powerful name representative of the personality of the guy himself. As a character, however, he was disappointing. He was supposed to be this effective detective but mr. Marlowe solved his cases for him. Well, that's ofcourse only natural as he was the person who got stuck to the cases on-scene. Anyway, I hope our Cronjager is an overarching character in the series with more scenes to him in other books from Chandler.

Another thing to point out is that the book at times does an excellent job at telling the readers the inner thoughts of Philip Marlowe - page 67 of my own translation from Finnish:
Again that expressionlessless face. My pace was too quick for her. Any pace would have been.
"Are you willing to tell the police that it was Joe Brody?" I asked while feeling the ground.
A sudden sense of fright flashed on her face. 
"So that I can get those nude photos out of the game," I added calmingly.
She giggled. That felt awful to me. If she had screamed or started to cry or even fallen face flat on the ground while unconscious, that would have fit the picture. She just giggled. All of a sudden everything was so very funny. She had gotten a photo taken of herself naked and someone had stolen it and someone had popped the life out of Geiger in front of her eyes and she's drunk worse than a company of gunmen, and all of a sudden it was very funny and nice. And then so she giggled. How sweet. Her giggles got stronger in noise and traveled across the corners of the room like rats behind the walls...

After Marlowe figures out the intricacies of the past mysteries; the case of the first part of the book, he gets once again stuck with his thoughts of Regan. Everyone wanted him to find Rusty, but it was not his job- however in the second part of the story, without askin, he tries to find the man himself. Although finding Rusty was not what he was supposed to be doing, it does connect back to, maybe not everything but many plotlines in the story. The mystery of the Sternwood family. A woman who had gone missing at the same time as Regan with his $15 000, which is a sum Regan for some reason always had with him. The woman which Philip comes to call the Silver Wig, is part of a plan to lure police away from the truth. The police during the second part of the story assume that Regan and the Silver Wig are hiding somewhere with new identities but will be found in due time. Marlowe assumes that they are sleeping in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Halfway through the book you, the reader, are basically left with an aftertaste of reading an O.K. mystery story with an acceptable murder case as Philip is one of those characters who has nice wits for a more realistic approach to the cases than what you'd be normally used to. The story halfway through gave couple of chuckles here and there as well. Afterwards it takes its time slowly getting to the end of the story, dropping the aspect of dealing with many characters and plots and becoming more focused on just one thing, and becoming more emotional, not in the sad sense, but in the sense that you can feel something while reading, especially tension, but it does drop off things that make the story better as well that were in the first part, such as Philip's quick wits being shown off as there's less planning involed in the plotting of the chapters.

Philip is taking a walk outside of a rich man's, Eddie Mars's, building which contains a casino in it where Vivian regan just won a pot against Eddie himself for her last game of the day. A masked man with no visible facial expressions to be seen is seen to be walking behind Marlowe as the sense of suspense and tension finally builds up for the first time during this story.
The second part of the story is spent dealing with a man named Harry Jones, Rusty Regan's mystery and Eddie Mars but it may not end up like one would have liked it to from many aspects. (hint: Eddie, truth behind Rusty.)

Raymond Chandler seemed to be trying to do an overarching story and a case story in this novel but it didn't come out as well as it should have in my opinion. It's still a fine story for what it is.



This book seems to flow better on a re-read when you know the style of dialogue Chandler uses for these characters, it somehow felt kind of off-putting to read how they were talking about things at the beginning, I don't even know why, but parts such as talking about A.G. Geiger's threatening letter never stuck in my head until I reread it; because I had gotten used to Chandler's expository writing style, after about 2/3rd to the story I had become used to it I guess, never really bothered to think about that there even was something to get used to in the first place but looking back, somehow there was. Maybe it's not something most people get stuck on - as for me, I think that multiple times I had thought that the pacing is too slow - that nothing's going to be going on and all that text about how things look, how things almost look like and how things could be like, just felt like filler to stretch out the pages. However I don't think that ever actually happened. The pacing was actually fine considering the amounts of mysteries and how quickly they were dealt with. It felt like more of a traditional golden age detective story in the first half, and the second half felt more broad - more free, so it was both slower but felt more fresh to read in comparison, I guess. Certainly some tension at one point that there was not earlier though Marlowe didn't manage to show off his ability to read ahead many things at once in the second half all too much.