"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.”
So opens The Big Sleep, a book which was made even more famous by the Humphrey Bogart starring film. It is one of the Chandler must-reads that made his name and helped established Philip Marlowe as a literary character.
Because of work commitments it has not been possible to make anything more than a very brief start to the book.
Highlights from the first couple of chapters
Marlowe goes to call on a rich and elderly general who is being blackmailed by someone looking to settle his daughter’s gambling debts but this is not the first case of blackmail and he seems to have a problem with his two daughters being irresponsible with money and men
One of his daughters was married to an Irish bootlegger who upped and vanished a couple of weeks before Marlowe’s visit and there perhaps could be a connection with him and the trouble
More, hopefully much more, tomorrow…
