The Big Sleep was published by Alfred A. Knopf on February 6, 1939. It introduced Philip Marlowe to the world and, in doing so, established the template for the American private eye novel that would dominate crime fiction for the next half century. Chandler was fifty years old at publication — a former oil executive who had been fired for alcoholism and had spent the previous five years writing pulp stories for Black Mask magazine. The novel he produced from that apprenticeship was immediately recognized as something more than genre fiction: it was literature.
The Novel
General Guy Sternwood, wheelchair-bound and dying in his hothouse of orchids, hires Marlowe to deal with a blackmailer who has compromising photographs of his younger daughter Carmen. The job should be simple. Nothing in Chandler is simple.
Marlowe’s investigation leads him through the strata of 1930s Los Angeles: from Sternwood’s Italianate mansion to the pornographic bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, from Geiger’s elaborate death scene to Eddie Mars’s gambling house in Las Olindas, from the Sternwood oil wells (pumping money from the earth “as if it were an obscenity”) to the rain-soaked canyon where bodies accumulate.
The plot is famously convoluted — Chandler himself reportedly couldn’t explain who killed the chauffeur Owen Taylor. But the plot is not the point. The novel’s real subject is the moral geography of Los Angeles — a city where money corrupts everything it touches, where beauty conceals depravity, and where Marlowe’s stubborn, incorruptible decency is not a strength but a form of self-punishment.
Marlowe
Philip Marlowe is Chandler’s great creation — the knight errant in a world without honor. He is educated (he quotes Flaubert, owns chess sets, appreciates good architecture), physically tough but not invulnerable, morally serious in a way that makes him a perpetual outsider in a city defined by compromise. His code — help the helpless, keep your word, don’t steal — is simple. Living by it costs him everything: money, love, comfort, happiness.
Chandler described Marlowe as “a man fit for adventure” who “would not spoil a virgin” — a formula that sounds archaic but describes something real: a character whose integrity is absolute and whose loneliness is the price of that integrity.
The Prose
Chandler’s prose is what elevates The Big Sleep from genre fiction to literature. His similes are justly famous: “She had a face like a collapsed lung.” “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” But the similes are symptoms of a larger achievement — a prose style that combines American vernacular toughness with an underlying lyricism, creating a voice that is simultaneously hard-boiled and poetic.
The prose also encodes Chandler’s moral vision. Los Angeles is rendered in language that makes its beauty inseparable from its corruption: the oil derricks and orchid hothouses and Spanish colonial mansions are all described with the same acute, slightly nauseated precision.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, on February 6, 1939. First printings are identified by:
- Knopf imprint and Borzoi colophon
- “First edition” stated on copyright page
- Orange cloth binding with black stamping
- Dust jacket with distinctive typography
The first printing was approximately 5,000 copies. The novel was well reviewed and sold modestly — enough to encourage Knopf to publish Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and subsequent Marlowe novels.
Collecting The Big Sleep
First edition (Knopf, 1939): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $15,000–$40,000. This is one of the great twentieth-century mystery collectibles — Chandler’s debut, in the distinctive orange Knopf binding.
Signed copies are extremely rare. Chandler was not famous in 1939 and did not sign extensively. Authenticated signed firsts bring $50,000–$100,000+.
Dust jacket condition is critical — the jacket’s design is iconic and most surviving copies show wear, fading, or chipping.
The UK edition (Hamish Hamilton, 1939) is also scarce and collected, at $3,000–$8,000.
The Big Sleep is one of the blue-chip titles in mystery/crime collecting — comparable in value and desirability to The Maltese Falcon and first editions of Christie or Fleming.