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The Big Sleep

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The Big Sleep

By: Raymond Chandler, Ian Rankin - introduction
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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'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.'

Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is blackmailing him. A broken, weary old man, Sternwood just wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. However, with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out. And that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler's first novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe.

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess

© Raymond Chandler 1988 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Classics Cosy Modern Detectives Mystery Private Investigators Suspense Thriller & Suspense Detective Fiction
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Critic reviews

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious (Robert B. Parker)
Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since (Paul Auster)
Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude (Erle Stanley Gardner)

[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)
Raymond Chandler is a master

Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye
Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist
Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence
All stars
Most relevant
the ultimate. The narration really does add value and bring the story into being. Could not recommend more 👍

Excellent detective noire story. Quite possibly

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See above, I don’t like to waste words. Blubber, pants, prosthetic, harmonica, haemolytic. I needed 15 words.

The turn of phrase, such great lines. Ridiculous plot, really, but still great.

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A good story that still holds up today. The narrator isn’t the best at distinguishing character voices, so it can be a bit confusing when there are more than two people in a scene.

Pretty damn good

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Given the intricate plot and host of characters, this is a tad difficult to follow in audio format and I look forward to giving the print version and film adaptation a whirl. I still enjoyed it overall though and will look to see how Marlowe gets on in his following capers.

Hard boiled as it gets

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Loved the prose, plot, and characters. Truly enjoyable book, that moves along at a pace. The narration was excellent too, exactly the voice that you'd want for this genre.

My introduction to Raymond Chandler

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