“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler

This is the first novel about Philip Marlowe – a young and hard-boiled Californian private investigator. As always, he won’t bend to either the police, the client or the most sinister criminals – so at one moment he finds himself in a very awkward situation – but escapes miraculously. And he never compromises his values.

The story starts when Marlowe is invited to the house of the rich and old General Sternwood. The General can no longer use his legs, and everyone knows his days are almost numbered, but his mind is clear. His two daughters – way too young for such an old father (the eldest one was born when her father was fifty-four) give him a lot of worries. His son-in-law has disappeared all of sudden without a word to anyone, but it’s not about his disappearance that the General wants to consult Marlowe. It’s about blackmail.

As Marlowe starts investigating the case, he discovers a lot of unpleasant facts about the General’s daughters – and when they both in turn try to seduce him, that’s the least of their sins. Dead bodies surrounding the case multiply with a terrifying speed, and, as I said above, Marlowe once gets very close to becoming the next one. But he survives – and though nobody asks him to, solves the mystery of the disappearance of Rusty Regan, the General’s son-in-law, the husband of his older daughter. Of course, this disappearance turns out to be the key to everything else.

This book is less depressing than “The Little Sister” written ten years later. Marlowe is younger and less gloomy, though his manners already leave something to be desired. The world we all live in doesn’t look as much like a sewer, but the tendency is already here; we can see that the author doesn’t think much of the mankind.

There are a couple of characters from the whole cast who – apart from Marlowe himself – deserve some respect. First, it’s the General, of course. Alas, he thinks he knows his daughters. In fact, he knows little about them. While he believes them to be merely naughty, they are complete monsters, especially the younger one. The other person who deserves at least some respect is Mona Mars, the wife of the local Mafia boss Eddie Mars. Apart from them, everyone is rotten, corrupted, disgusting or, in the best case, just indifferent to good and evil. So Marlowe deals with them as his conscience tells him.

What’s at the end? Nothing – just more emptiness and disappointment. Marlowe has solved the case, but the solution is not happy at all. The dead won’t come back to life; the rotten and perverted won’t reform or improve. The world just keeps going round with Marlowe in it. It does give some hope – there are people like Marlowe: rude, smoking, drinking heavily, exceedingly insubordinate and, according to himself, painfully honest. They keep it going round.