The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler - ISBN: 9780241970775
Paperback
LA’s darkest streets hide blackmail, wild daughters, and deadly secrets.

$23.64

  • Paperback

    256 pages

  • Release Date

    24 September 2014

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Summary

Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best - Raymond Chandler’s best-loved novel published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

‘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 PI Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is indulging in some petty blackmail. A weary, old man, Sternwood just wants the …

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780241970775
ISBN-10:0241970776
Author:Raymond Chandler, Ian Rankin
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:Penguin Books Ltd
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:256
Release Date:24 September 2014
Weight:146g
Dimensions:180mm x 111mm x 19mm
Series:Penguin Essentials
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious

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 *

About The Author

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve, where he attended Dulwich College, alma mater to some of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959, having established himself as the finest crime writer in America.

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