The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler & Owen Hill & Pamela Jackson & Anthony Rizzuto

Author:Raymond Chandler & Owen Hill & Pamela Jackson & Anthony Rizzuto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Director Howard Hawks’s personal version confirms receipt of Chandler’s telegram stating that he didn’t know. So Hawks had his scriptwriters add a piece of dialogue in which a detective says, “So Taylor killed Geiger because he was in love with the Sternwood girl. And Brody followed Taylor, sapped him and took the photograph, and pushed him into the ocean. And the punk killed Brody.” But Hawks never shot this speech, and the crime is left unresolved.

14. blow: Leave town.

15. Nix: No, negative, stop; from the German nichts, nothing.

16. Children’s parlor game in which the players compete for position. Marlowe also doesn’t want to play kids’ games when he sees the General again (see this page).

17. This is another throwback to Chandler’s pulp training. Writing about the demand for action in early crime fiction, Chandler famously said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” But he was never sure what balance to strike. In a 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, he complained, “The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time.”

18. stucco: Thick plaster coating used to cover wall surfaces. An archetypal feature of LA architecture.

19. electroliers: Electric lamps.

20. Marlowe has a way of noticing male beauty (see the “Chandler, Marlowe, and the Boys” text box on this page).

21. queen: Slang term for a gay man, related to the older British English word quean, a prostitute or “low” woman.

22. The New York Times review complained that “the language used in this book is often vile, at times so filthy that the publishers have been compelled to resort to the dash, a device seldom employed in these unsqueamish days” (Isaac Anderson, The New York Times, February 12, 1939). Chandler borrows from The Maltese Falcon, in which the Carol character, Wilmer, repeats “—— off.” Where the pulps generally tended to avoid giving offense, Chandler and Hammett tested the limits in novel form.

As for the squeamish dashes: publishers were put on trial for obscenity in the United States for bringing out such “obscene” works as Ulysses by James Joyce (publishers convicted in 1921) and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (banned in the United States upon its 1934 French publication; it was put on trial extensively in the early 1960s before finally being found innocent by no less a literary authority than the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964). Norman Mailer famously sidestepped the issue by spelling the word “fug” in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead. The landmark trial of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1957 opened the door to slightly more liberality in works of “redeeming social value,” but it was not until 1971 that the U.

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