With The Big Sleep, did Philip Chandler write the most subversive detective novel ever? That is a heavy weight holding a lot of responsibility to hang on one single book so let’s the lighten the load a little and instead merely suggest that it was the most subversive detective novel ever embraced by the public at the time it was published. What makes it such a rebellious work of literature? What makes anything seditious by definition? Breaking rules. The bigger and more important rules the better. In this regard, The Big Sleep is unabashedly an act of insurrection against prevailing powers that be. That it was successful enough to change the rules forever is what truly makes it a revolutionary American novel.
And it is distinctly an American novel because the prevailing powers in charge of maintaining the status quo at the time of its publication belonged to England. The hard-boiled American PI existed, but not to the point that his presence had yet changed the landscape. As a result, the world of the whodunnit was still firmly under the thumb of its British King and Queen: Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
The detective story may have been invented by an American—fella goes by the name of Poe, famous for writing about a black bird…no, not a falcon—but it was quickly taken out of his hands and crafted into a successful genre by the Brits. And with that success came conventions. Not just conventions for the sake of generic sensibility, but conventions that made sense and were followed dutifully with utter logic.
• The detective may investigate multiple murders, but they must all be connected and committed by either one individual or two or more working in tandem as a conspiracy.
• The detective solves the crime.
• The criminals are punished either through the criminal justice system or violent engagement with law enforcement
And that was pretty much it. At least for the big picture. And then came The Big Sleep. Was I the first detective story to violate one of these rules? Absolutely not. Was it the first wildly successful long-form detective novel to flagrantly and without any justification or explanation flout all three rules and thereby set a new standard for all that was to follow?
Yes. Philip Marlowe enters a world distinctly unlike that visited upon by Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot in The Big Sleep. It is a violent place where murders happen among people who know each other, but independently and outside the loop of a conspiracy. Practically every time he turns around he stumbles over another dead body. And it is as if to solve one means solving them all.
In fact, Marlowe doesn’t really solve all the crimes that are independent yet connected. For the record, he does solve the only case he was actually hired to investigate, but that investigation led to multiple other instances of criminal activity which he does solve.
Or, if he does solve it—by which is meant, Marlowe knows whodunnit—there is nothing he can do to make sure justice is solve. This is the point at which The Big Sleep leaps fully into the sphere of the Second American Revolution. Sherlock Holmes on more than one occasion allowed people who knew were guilty to go unpunished. But in those cases, the mitigating circumstances were that punishment would have been a great act of immorality than the crime itself.
No such mitigating factors allow one to close The Big Sleep secure in the knowledge that justice will ultimately be served. Eddie Mars is a bad man and should not be allowed to escape punishment. That he does is the book’s ultimate act of subversion.
