THE BIG SLEEP  

BY RAYMOND CHANDLER

"To Chandler, the mean streets extend into the posh apartments and mansions of Hollywood and suburban Los Angeles, and he is more interested in exploring cruelty and viciousness among the very rich than among the people of the streets" (Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 226:  American Hard-Boiled Writers).

Biography of Raymond Chandler 
 

    Raymond Chandler, the author of  the The Big Sleep was born in Chicago, Illinois in July 23, 1888 and was given the name Raymond Thornton Chandler. He was born an American but he naturalized himself a British subject in 1907, then he became once again an American citizen in 1956. Chandler went to a local School in Upper Norwood, London and to Dulwich College in  London in 1900-05. He studied in France and Germany in 1905-07. He served in the Gordon Highlanders,  in the Canadian Army in 1917-18, and in the Royal Air Force in 1918-19. In 1924 he married Pearl Cecily Hurlburt. Raymond Chandler became a member of the Mystery Writers of America and became president in 1959.

  He worked in a supply and accounting department of the admiralty in 1907. He was a reporter in the London Daily Express and Bristol Western Gazette in 1908-12. Then in 1912, he came back to America and worked in St. Louis. Raymond worked on a ranch and in a sporting goods firm in California. He was an accountant and bookkeeper in the Los Angeles Creamery in 1912-17. He worked in a Bank in San Francisco in 1919 and he was a staff member in the Los Angeles Daily Express in that same year. He then became a full-time writer in 1933.

Chandler began working on The Big Sleep in the spring of 1938. The writing progressed quickly, taking only three months--a pace he would never again be able to match. The plot is drawn from two of his short stories, Killer in the Rain and The Curtain and incorporates small pieces of  Finger Man. Of Raymond Chandler's seven detective novels, his first, The Big Sleep  (1939), is arguably his best. When the novel was published, Chandler was fifty years old. He had already spent five years as a full-time writer of short stories and novellas for the pulp fiction magazine market, and during this apprenticeship had mastered his technique. Although it would be years before the novel received the critical recognition it deserved, the publication of The Big Sleep was a landmark in the history of the American hard-boiled detective novel.

In 1946 and 1954 he received the Mystery Writers of America, Edgar Allan Poe Award. This wonderful writer of The Big Sleep died in May 26, 1959.

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