The Big Sleep

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Summary: good an interior plot
Review: chandlers ideas of the way peoples minds work onlong with the inocence of the 50's make a good book. the description to the thoughts in which people think . the character of the young daughter will hypnotise you with her lying and cheating to hurt her fathe

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Summary: If you didn't know, now you do!
Review: This book starts with a bang and ends with boom, and the middle is full of explosions as well. Marlowe is a detective like no other. His selflessness makes one wonder what in his past made him so, especially when every one else in Chandler's LA is rich, crooked, on the take, or just plain immoral.

This is a finely tuned intricate plot and Chandler's characters drop classic lines like apples from a tree; often, without warning and with a shocking thud. You've got to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: This book kept me on the edge of my seat
Review: I never wanted to put it down. It had everything, love, hate, murder, and blackmail. The plot may have been a little hard to follow at times because there were a lot of characters, but all in all this was a wonderful book.

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Summary: Raymond Chandler's Marlowe
Review: Chandler, as a writer, wrote the best novels about L.A. There have been a few, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Day of the Locust. But his four books written between 1939 to 1943 are the best. What makes his books so good? The answer is contain in a single word: style. Chandler's prose has what he said Dashiel Hammett's lacks---overtones, echoes, images. It is also a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control of a great pitcher has over the ball. Chandler wrote with classical dispassion of a romantic and violent society. He had the gift of tongue; he was a poet. Metaphors flowered from him in language utterly suited to the exotic people and places. The inhabitants are all there to life---garage men, room clerks, carhops, grifters, grafters, and house dicks. Marlowe's world cannot be touch by time.

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Summary: Very special book.
Review: Chandler clearly loved words, metaphors, and brilliant descriptions. It's as if he just needed a vessel for his immense talent for turning a phrase that would sell and make money. Hey! Detective novels. That's it! If you want something to obscess about for a few weeks, if you like to say "Wow, look at that sentence", get into Raymond Chandler novels. He only wrote seven. And save your Blockbuster money, no movie could ever do this stuff justice.

Rating:
Summary: What a great way to use the English language!
Review: I read this book while working the night shift at a psychiatric hospital in New Orleans (all of which you really don't need to know) and I found myself laughing out loud I enjoyed reading it so much. Like finding a friend whose humor you recognize as something special -- that's the appeal of Chandler's writing to me. As a mystery novel, it keeps you guessing, too (it helps that there's not really a solution). A lot of fun to read

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Summary: This book defines an era of tough guy detective novels
Review: For best of breed, Raymond Chandler's novels top the list. His character, Marlowe, seems to stumble and crash his way through the plot. By the end of the story, however, Marlowe's fantastic, witty one-liners and his ability to actually solve his cases despite irritating everyone he meets leads the reader to think he may be smarter than he looks. Women falling hard for him left and right complete the male criteria for excellence. I had to buy all of Chandler's books and papers after this one.

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Summary: Chandler has blessed us with this classic detective mystery.
Review: If you're still looking for the butler in the library with the candlestick, you better wisen up and get this book. Chandler has filled his work with intrigue, scandal, and a wise-ass detective who won't take nothing from nobody. From a decaying general, to his rowdy youngest daughter in her "terrible twenties", in this book a menagerie of the craziest characters the page has ever seen sit. All that can be added to the superbly twisting plot. So, you better make sure that your next move is Phillip Marlowe in the bedroom in The Big Sleep(maybe you should get a gun too in case some underworld criminal pops out of the page while you hit your big sleep)

Rating:
Summary: perfect writing, massive wit, and philosophical, too!
Review: Chandler is, bar none, the best writer of the so-called "hard boiled detective" genre, and this is his greatest work.

In a labyrinthine plot featuring corrupt, orchid-growing millionaires, beautiful blondes, gray men with guns and the cynical, deeply romantic narrator-protagonsit Marlowe, we see Los Angeles of the 1940s as Marlowe looks for the truth about murder, pornography and, ultimately, loss.

The sheer genius of Chandler's writing-- aside from the accompished plot twists-- is his deceptively simple language, which sparkles, and his narrator's deadpan wit. From the descriptions of women ("Inside was a blonde. A blonde! A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.") to the caustic remarks in the face of death ("She would either shoot me, or she wouldn't.") to his existential comments ("I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun"), Marlowe is as entertainign to lsiten to as he is to watch.

Chandler's achievement here goes beyond the action sequences, or the wit of his narrator, or the complexity of his plots. His narrator, the tough-as-nails Marlowe, appeals because he is profoundly romantic at heart, but doomed, like Hamlet, to be disappointed. Like Hamlet-- who writes a play to discover the origins of his misery-- Marlowe too is a storyteller, whose stories lead to one kind of understanding, where actions and sequences finally cohere. But Marlowe's dilemmas are Hamlet's, in that although he can tell the story, his sense of what it all means at the end is far from complete.

Chandler's stories are really about people who are lost. Marlowe's quest to find the body and re-tell the story-- although always successful-- is always undermined by his elliptical and understated awareness that, for all our ingenuity and striving, it all ultimately comes down, as it does for Hamlet and for all of us, to the big sleep.

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Summary: Just as incomparable as the movie
Review: If you enjoyed the indispensable Bogey & Bacall classic movie by the same name, you will undoubtedly enjoy this masterfully pinned classic novel. What makes this novel worth reading even after having seen the flick are the both subtle and striking divergences amongst the two art forms.

For starters, the book is infinitely more juicier than the movie in terms of sheer debauchery and scathing wisecracks. Secondly, Carmen is much more central in the book than in the movie -- not to mention the conspicuous absence of Eddie Mars' wife in the movie. As a bonus, you get to hear "You're cute" uttered by the temptress many more times in the book. Moreover, a pivotal scene at the end is omitted at the end of the movie that will irretrievably change your outlook on the movie's conclusion.

Vivian: Why did you have to go on?

Marlowe: Too many people told me to stop.