The Big Sleep (First Edition)

Chandler, Raymond

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1939

About this Item

Very good copy with Lending Library borrowing slip (removable) and number above it. The flaps, clean and flat have been glued to the front and rear paste-downs. The front flap has the correct $2,00 price. No other lending library markings. Name in ink at the top of the front endpaper. The book is clean and attractive With the exception of some modest rodent nibbling to the top center of the fore-edges. The jacket fits fine and has not been trimmed. A pleasant copy of Chandler's first book and basis for the brilliantly confusing movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.[1]Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list.[2] The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field.[3][4] In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honorby instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. (Wikipedia). First Edition with "first Edition" stated on the copyright page. And matching dates of 1939.

Seller Inventory # 2268

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Big Sleep (First Edition)
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 1939
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included