Raymond Chandler, “The Big Sleep”

Four million dollars, two reckless daughters, and a detective who can’t be bought.

It is raining in Los Angeles, and Philip Marlowe has been summoned to the Sternwood mansion. The old General receives him in a hothouse thick with orchids and steam. He is dying slowly, he is rich beyond counting, and someone is blackmailing him over his younger daughter’s gambling debts.

It should be a quiet job, the kind a discreet private eye settles in an afternoon. But the General has two daughters, both beautiful and both trouble, and a son-in-law who walked out one day and never came back. Nobody has asked Marlowe to look for him. Everybody seems to expect that he will.

What follows is a night city of rented houses in the hills, gambling clubs on the edge of the Pacific and bookshops that sell something other than books. Clues turn into traps and favours into bribes, and the people paying Marlowe are rarely the ones telling him the truth.

Published in 1939, The Big Sleep was Raymond Chandler’s first novel, and it changed crime fiction for good. Its lean, wisecracking, unforgettable voice created the modern private eye. Chandler gave the hardboiled novel its poetry and gave Los Angeles its darkest, most seductive portrait. The book became a celebrated film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but nothing on screen matches the sentences on the page.

Read it for the plot that coils back on itself. Read it for the similes you will quote for years. Above all, read it for Marlowe: a tired, stubborn, lonely knight in a world that has no use for knights.

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) was the master of the hardboiled novel and the creator of Philip Marlowe.

Crimina Series

A paperback and e-book series published by Intra.

Global readability, Italian charm.

• Date of publication: October. 18 2026
• Language: English
• Paperback: 211 pages
• ISBN-13: 979-1259919595
• Weight: 299 g
• Dimensions: 12.7 x 1.3 x 20.32 cm
• Price: $ 16.99 (paperback)

AVAILABLE ONLY ON AMAZON.CA (paperback)