Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is the definitive hardboiled detective story and Philip Marlowe the perfect expression of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe. Hired by the crippled General Sternwood to shake off a blackmailer, Marlowe also has to deal with the general's two rebellious daughters, the gamblers and pornographers they run with and, soon enough, some inconvenient murders. Chandler's LA and the gutter-life that populate it made crime fiction what it is today and remain unmatched.

Praise for Raymond Chandler

"Raymond Chandler is a master." --"The New York Times"
"[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered." --"The New Yorker
""Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious." --Robert B. Parker, "The New York Times Book Review
""Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye." --"Los Angeles Times
"Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist." --"The Boston Book Review
"Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler's prose. . . . He wrote like an angel." --"Literary Review
"[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision." --Joyce Carol Oates, "The New York Review of Books
""Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." --Ross Macdonald
""Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude." --Erle Stanley Gardner