The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s First Novel

The rolling hills and untouched prairies of the Old West were, by and large, replaced with modern infrastructures and communities by the time Raymond Chandler and Thomas Pynchon got around to writing The Big Sleep and Crying of Lot 49. As the “New West” became the “Noir West” liberality transformed into something more along the lines of uniformity. The now more urban landscapes of the Noir West began to call for a different kind of toughness, one based on mental rather than physical strength. It wasn’t enough to be strong and free spirited anymore; being a “Cowboy of Noir” required more mental acuteness than anything else, as both authors (Chandler and Pynchon) demonstrate with Philip Marlowe and Oedipa Maas.

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s first novel, served as the kickstarter to the hard-boiled detective fiction genre that his work would eventually come to represent. Philip Marlowe, a private eye on the sketchy side of Los Angeles, dons the archetypal role of a hard-boiled, fast talking hero on the edge of legal and illegal. Marlowe represents a character capable of communication with everyone; from a seedy criminal to a district attorney. The detective is able to converse with even the shadiest of characters as an equal due to his lack of fear, overabundance of confidence, and overall mental toughness. “ Tsk. Tsk.” I said, not moving at all. “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail. Put it down and don’t be silly, Joe” (Chandler 79). This kind of calm, collected nature under intense situations is the mental cowboy equivalent to a victory in a shootout in the Old West. Marlowe’s collected presence under high...

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...lackmail case, as well as what enabled Oedipa to discover and make sense of the posthorn, the W.A.S.T.E. system, and the Trystero. If Oedipa had never wrote down the posthorn and the acronym W.A.S.T.E while at The Scope or had never attended The Courier’s Tragedy with Metzger, she would have never noticed Koteks and probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the word Trystero. If Detective Marlowe had never camped outside of Geiger’s house that fateful, rainy night, he would have never of heard the flash, scream, or gunshots that led him to Carmen Sternwood and Geiger’s body. Unlike the cowboys of the New West where instant gratification was usually attainable through a physical means, Noir cowboys usually undergo an “investigation” of some sorts, unable to achieve gratification until days, months, or even years after the initial introduction of the conflict.