'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

Discover the newest addition to the inimitable Philip Marlowe series - Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne - out 6 September 2018 in hardback and ebook from Hogarth.

The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler's most famous and popular novel of all.

About the Author
Best-known as the creator of the original private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, and he is widely regarded as one of the very greatest writers of detective fiction.

Reviews
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 *
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 * New York Review of Books *
Raymond Chandler is a master * New York Times *

Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye

* Los Angeles Times *
Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . A great artist * The Boston Book Review *
Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence * Daily Telegraph *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241956281
Author Raymond Chandler
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 181g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 16mm