II.

Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939)

and the Hard-Boiled Detective Story
 1. Context: Pulp Magazines
 Popular magazines printed on cheap paper
 A democratic form
 Readership: cf. the dime novels of the 1860S
 Authors from all walks of life
 Sensationalist crime stories
 Dark view of American society (crime and
corruption)
 Ex: Black Mask (1920-1951)
 Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929)
 The Maltese Falcon
 Detective Sam Spade
 “Hard-boiled” (= dur-à-cuire): war veteran
 Cynical, seductive, (almost) as corrupt as the
society around him
 Yet deontology of the private detective
 Deep-set honesty
 Chivalric elements (parody?)
 The Maltese Falcon a gold statue = focus of men’s
greed and reminiscence of the Holy Grail
Historical context
 Prohibition (Volstead Act, 1920-1934)
 Gangsterism and political corruption
 Great Depression (Wall Street crash, 1929)

 Mind games of “whodunnit” not enough

 In The Big Sleep, presence of shady characters, a
gang boss (Eddie Mars) and human corruption, but
more moral and “metaphysical” than social (even
if criticism of the police)
 1941 adaptation by John Huston
 Mythical
 first “film noir”
 Beginning of a long-
running genre

(with Orson Welles’s

Citizen Kane)
The Big Sleep
1946 adaptation by Howard Hawks
 Mythical
 Also Humphrey Bogart
 Lauren Bacall

 Not fully faithful to the plot

and tone of the novel
 Chandler’s innovations and
ambiguities within the
genre
2. Chandler: A Short Biography
 Born 1888 in Chicago, of Anglo-Irish parents
 1896: parents divorce; leave for Britain with his
mother
 Attends Dulwich Public School (elite institution)
 Works in British administration, then as reporter
 1913: back to the US
 1917: fights with the Canadian Army during WWI
A Short Biography 2
 Works in oil industry
 Marries Cissy Pascal, a much older woman
 Literary ambitions, but lack of inspiration
 Crime stories originally as pot-boilers (Black Mask
magazine)
 Success with first novel, The Big Sleep (1939)
 Works as a scriptwriter for Hollywood (unhappy)
 Dies 1959
 A Short Biography 3
 Personal problems: wife’s ill heath,
womanizing, alcoholism, depression
 Writing difficulties
 His most famous Novels:
 The Big Sleep (1939)
 Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
 The High Window (1942)
 The Lady in the Lake (1943)
 The Long Goodbye (1953)
A Complex Writer
 Tension between literary ambitions and genre
literature
 Suffered from lack of recognition as a writer in the
US (vs. the UK)
 British education: had to learn American slang as a
foreign language
 This tension is visible in the aesthetic dimension of
the works, beyond mere mystery and suspense
A Complex Writing Style
 Classical references:
 Philip Marlowe:
 reference to Elizabethan playwright Christopher
Marlowe
 And character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness (1899): pessimism, urban jungle
 Nostalgic tone
 Parodic dimension of appropriation of the
detective genre
3. The Big Sleep: A Complex Plot
Illustrated with stills from the 1946 film
Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe
Lauren Bacall as Vivian Sternwood
Marlowe called at the luxurious mansion of General
Sternwood
 A dying old man in a greenhouse
 The General had two “wild” daughters, each one
giving rise to a subplot
Carmen, who tries to seduce Marlowe
Blackmail about “gambling debts,” by a rare books
seller
Vivian, who wants to know if Marlowe’s mission is
to find her missing husband, Rusty Regan
Marlowe discovers that the blackmailer, Geiger,
rents pornographic books
 Follows Geiger home,
Carmen arrives,
hears shots

Crime scene:
Carmen naked on a throne,
drugged, in front of
Geiger’s dead body

He takes her home

When he comes back,
Geiger’s body has gone
 A contact in law enforcement, Bernie Ohls, D. A.
chief investigator, informs him that Gal Sternwood’s
car has been found in the sea, with the chauffeur,
Owen Taylor, inside
Back at Geiger’s place, meets Carmen (looking for
her pictures) and Eddie Mars, a crime boss, who
comes to check on Geiger’s business
 A little tragicomedy:
 Marlowe goes to Joe Brody’s, who is taking over Geiger’s racket
and blackmailing Carmen for her nude pictures
 Threatened with a gun
 Agnes, the salesgirl at Geiger’s is here too
 Carmen comes in, with a gun
 Marlowe disarms everyone and gets the pictures, when someone
else knocks, and kills Brody
 He is Carol Lundgren, Geiger’s lover, who mistakenly thought
Brody had killed Geiger
 (Owen Taylor, the chauffeur, did, because he was in love with
Carmen)
“Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains”
 Mission accomplished
 The Geiger blackmail is solved
 Geiger’s murder is solved
 His body is found again: it was hidden by
Lundgren, and brought back to lie in state in his
room
 Owen Taylor’s death remains a little murky, but he
was followed and hit by Brody, to get the pictures
 Marlowe is paid
 The second case kicks in:
 Everyone inquires about Rusty Regan’s
disappearance
 Supposed to have run off with Eddie Mars’s wife
 The general, his friend, has no news, and finally asks
Marlowe to find him
 Strange Happenings
 Called at Eddie Mars’s casino, he sees Vivian
winning big
 Then he witnesses an attempt to steal her money
back, which he prevents
 Strange Happenings

 She tries to seduce him in the

car
 The theft a ploy to make him
think that Mars and Vivian
were not allies,
 Seduce him into dropping
the Regan case
 Back home, Carmen is in his
bed and he has to kick her
out
 The Little Guy
 In comes Harry Jones
 Had been tailing him for several days
 Proposes a deal: to tell him where Rusty Regan is
 Agnes and Brody had seen Mars’s wife driving to a
small farm off Realito, near a garage, with one of
Mars’s henchmen, Canino
 Before he can intervene, Marlowe witnesses Jones’s
death, poisoned by Canino
 Did not betray Agnes under duress
Canino and Jones
 Finds Mars’s wife Captured

(“Silver Wig”)
 Captured by Canino
 Convinces her he will be
killed
 She unties him
 He hides behind the car
and there is a shoot-out
 Canino is killed
 (not the right woman)
 Regan’s Fate

 Marlowe gives Carmen back

her gun
 She takes him to an old oil
well on the property to be
taught to shoot
 She wants to kill him (he
loaded the gun with blanks)
 She has done the same with
Regan
 The Final Recap
 The two cases are connected
 Eddie Mars had helped hide Regan’s body and floated
the rumor about his wife’s elopement to prevent
inquiries into his disappearance
 He sent Geiger on the blackmail trail to test whether the
General was aware of the truth, or if he would have to
wait until his death to collect his dues
 Marlowe refuses hush money, and orders Vivian to send
Carmen to an institution
 P.I. ethics and compassion for the old man
 A bitter-sweet ending
 The mystery is solved BUT:
 A waste of lives
 Generalized disgust at corruption, which doesn’t
spare the detective
“Me, I was part of the nastiness now”
 Sense of vanity: explains the title
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? … You just
slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or
where you fell… [The old man’s] heart was a brief, uncertain murmur.
His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like
Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.
4. Analysis: Mystery
 Double plot and deduction of the “whodunnit”
 Elucidation of two cases
 Regan’s death as background for the Geiger mystery
 But very complex, confused plot
 Everyone lies / deceptive appearances
 Fragmentary knowledge
 The city as labyrinth
 Chain reaction of deaths (domino effect)
 Doubt about possibility to know reality in full
Characterization: the “hard-boiled” detective
 Contrary to the purely cerebral detective of the Whodunnit,
Philip Marlowe is an embodied character
 1st description:
I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display
handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on
them. 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. (1)
"Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
 Unlike H. Bogart
 Cynical, sarcastic, insolent, witty
Appears as part of a corrupt society:

“Me, I was part of the nastiness now” (250)

 Defies the police, in the interest of his clients (and his own)
 Brody might not have died if he had not withheld information
about Geiger’s murder
 Police also bends the rules
As for the cover-up, I've been in police business myself, as you know. They
come a dime a dozen in any big city. Cops get very large and emphatic
when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same things
themselves every other day, to oblige their friends or anybody with a little
pull. (123)
 Does not denounce Carmen to the police
Yet, less than Hammett’s Sam Spade
 Greed: Spade always asking for money (sometimes as a
ploy)
 Sexual desire: Spade sleeps with his partner’s wife, and
later with his client
 Cynicism: “If they hang you, I’ll always remember you”
(211)
 Vs. disinterestedness of the whodunnit detective

 Marlowe looks, kisses, but doesn’t sleep

“Kissing is nice, but your father didn't hire me to sleep with you.“ (164)
 Refuses money from Eddie Mars, and from Vivian
A dangerous life
 Whodunnit often in a closed place, rather static
action (focus on “little grey cells”)
 “seeing” vs. “saying” (hiding truth)
 “hard-boiled” crime fiction: “doing”; active pursuit
of the truth (labyrinth)
 an active character: uses violence and is a victim
of violence: lack of control over the action
 Ex: knocked out by Canino and Western-like
shootout
 Ultimately, like Spade, a sense of justice
 self-interest (sell the falcon, get the girl)
 Spade ultimately denounces the killers to the police, even
Brigid, whom he might be in love with.
 Marlowe refuses bribes but does not tell on Carmen out of
compassion (for the General, maybe her too)
 Justice vs. the law?
"Uh-huh. I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world.
All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five
bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking
myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and
of Eddie Mars and his pals, I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you
very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just
leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.” (247-48)
Narrative Technique
 Problem of detective novel: distribution of
information
 Hammett:
 3rd-person narration
 External focalization
 Precise descriptions, without revealing character’s
inner thoughts
 Indirect characterization (showing>telling)
 Every word is a clue
 Cf. cinematographic style
 Chandler’s Narrative Technique
 3rd-person narration and external focalization was
becoming cliché
 Need to renew the formula
 Chandler’s 1st-person, homodiegetic narrator
 Not a sidekick, but the detective himself
 Invention of a voice
 Need to withhold some information
 Mixture of “objective,” cinematographic style and
“subjective” 1st-person narration.
 Detached, ironic tone
A cinematic mise-en-scène
 All characters lying and playing a part
 Limited empathy
 Elaborate fictions:
 Chap. 4: Marlowe pretends to be a bibliophile to check
on Geiger’s store (+ disguise)
 Geiger’s store as false front
 Chap. 21-23: Rigmarole at Eddie Mars’s casino to get
Marlowe off the track + Vivian’s attempt to seduce him
 Fiction that Regan had run off with Mars’s wife
A cinematic mise-en-scène 2
 Importance of dialogue:
 Indirect characterization
 Dialogue is action: Marlowe pretends to know more
than he does, to get information; threatens Brody to
“frame” him (accuse him of the murders – chap14);
veiled threats (Eddie Mars); seduction and double-
entendre
She took the photo out and stood looking at it, just inside the door. "She has
a beautiful little body, hasn't she?”
"Uh-huh."
She leaned a little towards me. "You ought to see mine," she said gravely.
"Can it be arranged?“ (65-66)
 A cinematic mise-en-scène 3
 Self-reflexive references to film (gangster movies)
 Story takes place in Hollywood
 Gangsters’ attitudes imitated from movie gangsters (ex: Canino)
He moved his dark eyes up and down slowly and then glanced at his fingernails
one by one, holding them up against the light and studying them with care, as
Hollywood has taught it should be done. He spoke around a cigarette. (202)
 Vivian and Carmen’s seductive ploys may also be borrowed from
film “vamps,” before serving as Noir films icons
 Life imitates art: theme of deceptive appearances reinforced by self-
reflexive references to genre in literature and film
 Marlowe’s subjectivity
 1st-person narration: judgements and emotions
 Characterization of the narrator
 Cynical, ironic, humorous, but also honest and compassionate
 Same game with the reader as with other characters (posturing,
playacting and dissimulation)
I didn't go near the Sternwood family. I went back to the office and sat in my swivel
chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. (138)
 But possible counterpoint between “inner” and “public” voice
 Retrospective narration: total control?
 A Voice-Over
 Comment on the action
 Complementary to visual precision
 Similar to filmic voice-over
 Became a staple of hard-boiled detective stories and Noir films
(not in the 1946 adaptation, but in the 1978 one)
The Big Sleep (1978) Location - 15 Victoria Grove, London (youtube.com)
 Mutual influence of cinema and literature
 A metaphorical style
 Characteristic of Marlowe’s voice: metaphors and similes
 Both literary techniques and hard-boiled tone
 Ex: chap 2, interview with the General in the greenhouse
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like
the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling
alcohol under a blanket. (6)
 “Poetic” style (alliterations), subjective feeling of disgust, announces
the theme of death (the general’s, the other victims)
 Orchids: "They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men.
And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.« (8)
 Announces the theme of corruption and dangerous women
 A symbolic scene

 Exposition scene: proleptic

 Themes of death and corruption
 Artifice: fake jungle (studio)
 Enjoying drink by proxy
Cf. actions by henchmen
Cf. reader’s experience
 Urban jungle in a novel
 Self-reflexivity
5. Mythic” pattern
 “Whodunnit” often closed, secluded environment
 Concentrated time
 Both victim and criminal belong to middle or
upper-middle class
 Everyone has something to hide, could be the
culprit
 Resolution of the mystery points to a “scapegoat”,
restores order
“hardboiled” more open structure
 more social mix, predominantly urban
 Emphasis on losers
 Everyone can be guilty, but also become a victim
 corruption is generalized (more social criticism)
 Similitudes with picaresque novel, but also
chivalric romance
 Chandler: “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944 / 1950)
 Criticizes deduction novel as an artificial formula
Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.
 Defends the “realism” of the hardboiled genre, including its description of a corrupt
society
The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule
cities.
 Advocates its vernacular American language, but lifted to the level of literary language
 Defines the proper hero, imbued with the “redemptive power” of art:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the
hero, he is everything. … He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a
lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is
his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen
to a man fit for adventure.
 Detective story as “modern epic”
 No pure heroes
 Darker vision of life
 But pattern of a quest (cf. chivalric romance)
 Truth and justice as the Holy Grail?
 In stained glass window at Sternwood residence, a knight frees a
damsel, but makes a bad job of it
 Neogothic building (fake)
 Novel parodies the structure and ethos of chivalric romance
 No romance, no innocent damsels, hardly a chivalrous knight
 Detective story as “modern epic”
The main hallway of the Sternwood place
was two stories high. Over the entrance
doors, which would have let in a troop of
Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-
glass panel showing a knight in dark armor
rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and
didn't have any clothes on but some very
long and convenient hair. The knight had
pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be
sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots
on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and
not getting anywhere. I stood there and
thought that if I lived in the house, I would
sooner or later have to climb up there and
help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.
(1)
6. Ideological interpretations
 The other meaning of “myth,” or “mythologies”
(Barthes)
 Crime fiction seems the perfect way to convey
ideology
 The “bad guy” as the adversary, or representing the
wrong lifestyle
 A major field of criticism has addressed the
question of gender in Noir novel and film
 The detective
and the question of gender
 Gender theory: gender
roles are not natural but
social constructs
 Novels and film provide
identification patterns
 Usually heteronormative
masculinity
 Whodunnit detective often sexless
 “couples”: buddies or covert homosexuality?
(“queer-coded”?)
 The hard-boiled detective: a model of masculinity
 Tough guy (cynical, sexual, greedy, violent, almost
as corrupt as the world around him)
 But self-possessed and independent
Philip Marlowe in R. Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939)
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
The 1946 film is different from the novel
 The film creates a romance between Marlowe and
Vivian
 Whereas the novel inverts gender categories:
 Women are assertive and men are weak, often
victims (Christophe Gelly)
 A “gender war” without resolution
 Marlowe an imperfect model of masculinity
 A scale of masculinity
 The chivalric code no longer holds, yet it is one
measure of a man’s worth
 Harry Jones does not betray Agnes
 Owen Taylor kills out of love for Carmen
 Carol Lundgren kills to avenge Geiger
 Fools, but some sympathy for them
 Contrary to Eddie Mars, a tough guy who uses
henchmen to do his dirty business
 Canino a violent brute (= dog): masculinity does not
equate blind violence
Even the “good guys” are not perfect: grey areas
 The General:
 Confesses to a “gaudy life” and neglecting his
daughters, yet courage in front of death and genuine
friendship for Rusty
 Rusty Regan
 Former bootlegger, former Irish Republican veteran:
courage, honesty and friendship
 Marlowe:
 Ditto, and “respects” women
 Masculine ideal, if there is one, is a form of stoicism
and independence(cf. Hemingway)
 Representation of homosexuality
 Geiger and Lundgren a homosexual couple
 Geiger a pornographer and a blackmailer
 Many disparaging mentions of homosexuality, both among
policemen (ch. 18) and by himself (ch. 17)
I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no
iron in his bones, whatever he looks like. (109)
 Echoes the masculinist stereotypes of the time
 Lack of virility
 Yet real love of Lundgren for Geiger (very rare in the novel)
 Marlowe: live and let live, even if homosexuality was
punishable by law in the 30s.
 Fatal Women
 The Male Gaze
 Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative cinema” (1975)
 Two forms of visual positions in film: a character’s and the
camera’s
Visual focalization = ocularization
 In classic Hollywood cinema, women are often the objects of
the gaze, men the bearers of the gaze (identify with them)
 Visual pleasure in film: voyeurism (seeing what one is not
supposed to see) / fetishism (physical beauty, reification)
 First Crime Scene
 Discovery of Carmen naked next to Geiger’s body
She had a beautiful body, small, lithe, compact, firm, rounded. Her skin in
the lamplight had the shimmering luster of a pearl. Her legs didn't quite have
the raffish grace of Mrs. Regan's legs, but they were very nice. I looked her
over without either embarrassment or ruttishness. As a naked girl she was
not there in that room at all. She was just a dope. To me she was always just
a dope. (38)
 Visual description of a drugged naked woman
 Objectification / voyeurism / fetishism
 Comparison between the sisters
 Male gaze and implied male reader
 Denial, “respect” and possible disgust
 Highly ambivalent
In classic Hollywood cinema, the main
gaze is a male gaze (evaluates women)
 Same in popular detective novels
 Mother, victim, or dangerous manipulator
The femme fatale
 Duplicitous, dangerous woman
 Acting a part, comedy of innocence
 Uses her sexuality as a weapon against men

Lauren Bacall
The Big Sleep
(1946)
 Early Feminist criticism (1970s)

 Negative image as response to

new assertiveness of women in
society (from the 1920s)
 Redomestication of women
 Final punishment for
transgressive women

Rita Hayworth, Gilda (1946)

But:
 Fascination for transgressive woman
 Questioning of traditional gender roles
 Figure of feminine empowerment
 Symptom of the corruption of the (male) world
 Sometimes a victim as well as a manipulator
 In The Big Sleep: several femmes fatales
 Agnes, Geiger’s employee, then Brody and Harry Jones’s
partner
 Literally fatal to the last two, even if only led them to take
risks; greed, but modest means
 Mona Mars (“Silver-wig”):
 presumably cause of Regan’s flight or downfall, but innocent.
 Helps Marlowe escape
 The only one he wished to see again, but never happens
 Not “fatal”
 Femmes fatales list 2
 Carmen Sternwood: irony of her name
 Carmen: magic charm, a fatal woman in Bizet’s opera
 Immature, drug-addict, nymphomaniac, killer
 Giggling and hissing (cf. biblical snake)
She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like
scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had
nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were,
that I had never seen in a woman's eyes. (171)
 Marlowe between compassion and repulsion
The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the
sheets.
I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely. (173)
 No interrogation on possible trauma that made her so
 Femmes fatales list 3
 Vivian Sternwood:
 Vivian: life, the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian legend (protector of the
kingdom, giver of Excalibur)
 In appearance a femme fatale because tries to trick and seduce
Marlowe
 But to protect her family, especially her father
"We're his blood. That's the hell of it." She stared at me in the mirror with deep,
distant eyes. "I don't want him to die despising his own blood. It was always wild
blood, but it wasn't always rotten blood."
"Is it now?"
"I guess you think so.”
"Not yours. You're just playing the part.” (161)
 A feminine double of Marlowe, even if a dangerous adversary
 7. Conservatism or Progressivism?
 Some critics say the detective story is conservative by nature
(C. Gelly)
 Reestablishes social order by solving the crime
 Formulaic genres encourage conformity
 Sensationalist genre, mentions marginal people and
behaviors, often to stigmatize them
 In The Big Sleep:
 Homosexuality, pornography, assertive women:
 An array of non-traditional behaviors
 Sensationalism
 A hint of corruption ( a world out of joint)
 But also transgressive subjects, questioning moral conformism
 Possibly an ironic take on reader expectations
Ironic “overkill” and exaggeration of topoi of the genre
 In The Big Sleep:
 Chandler criticized cheap sensationalism
 All elements are part of the aesthetic / literary project of his
novels

It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair

writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be
very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind
than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. (Chandler, “Simple art”)
Moral Struggle: the “culture wars” in the 1930s
Ex. Film “censorship” in the USA:
 Gangster film and the Production Code
Administration (PCA)
 “crime does not pay”
 Protect morality and the American Way of Life
 After 1945, context of the Cold War
 Literature protected by 1st Amendment (freedom of
expression)
≠ film industry (commercial venture)
“hard-boiled” detective story and “film noir”
 Pessimism contradicts optimistic view of American
Way of Life
 Vs. Prohibition and Christian morality
 Greed, sex, alcohol, corruption
Corruption double-edged (hypothesis):
 Progressive if corruption is social (unfair system)
 Conservative if human nature is corrupt
 Chandler was not a progressive, but his work bears
witness to social issues and problems
 conclusion
 A new mythology for the modern age
 A belief in rationality (whodunnit)
Questioned in “hard-boiled” crime fiction
 From optimism to pessimism
 A genre focused on crisis:
 Crime as a crisis in the social order
 Corruption and its criticism
 Crisis in gender roles (from non-gendered sleuths to
tough masculinity)
(Marlowe: it is hard to be a man)
Further Reading
 Gelly, Christophe. Raymond Chandler: du roman
noir au film noir. M. Houdiard, 2009.
 Reuter, Yves. Le Roman policier. Armand Colin,
2022.
 Tadié, Benoît. Front criminel: Une histoire du
polar américain de 1919 à nos jours. PUF, 2021.