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The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler author Ian Rankin editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:14th Aug '14

Should be back in stock very soon

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The Big Sleep cover

Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best: Raymond Chandler's best loved novel, The Big Sleep, 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 problem to go away. But Marlowe finds he has his work cut out just keeping Sternwood's wild, devil-may-care daughters out of trouble as they prowl LA's dirtiest and darkest streets. And pretty soon, he's up to his neck in hoodlums and corpses . . .

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 *

ISBN: 9780241970775

Dimensions: 181mm x 111mm x 16mm

Weight: 142g

256 pages