Where to Start with Raymond Chandler: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Raymond Chandler — how to approach The Big Sleep, his essential hardboiled crime novel and Philip Marlowe's debut. A complete reading guide.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) was an American crime writer who published his first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939 at the age of fifty-one, having spent his earlier career in the oil industry and his middle years writing for pulp magazines. He wrote seven Marlowe novels, a volume of short stories, and several influential essays on the detective genre — including “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), which is among the most important documents in genre criticism. His prose style transformed crime fiction and influenced American writing broadly, from the hard-boiled tradition to literary fiction of the late twentieth century.
Where to Start: The Big Sleep (1939)
The essential Chandler — and the novel that gave American crime fiction its voice, its city, and its moral seriousness. The Big Sleep opens with one of the most effective scene-establishments in the genre: Philip Marlowe arriving at the Sternwood mansion, observing the neo-Gothic architecture, the stained-glass panel over the front door with its knight in armour, and the dying General Sternwood in his orchid greenhouse — too old and sick to feel warmth, surrounded by plants that sweat and smell and overproduce heat on his behalf. In a single opening scene, Chandler has set the novel’s moral universe: age, dignity, and failing control at the centre; corruption that the old man can smell but cannot quite see gathering at the edges.
The plot of The Big Sleep is notoriously impossible to follow in complete detail. When Howard Hawks was making the 1946 film adaptation with Humphrey Bogart, his screenwriters sent Chandler a telegram asking who killed the Sternwoods’ chauffeur, Owen Taylor. Chandler could not answer. He had forgotten, or possibly never established, the fact. This has become the most famous piece of literary trivia about any crime novel, and it points to something true: Chandler was not primarily interested in the mechanics of the puzzle. He was interested in what happened on each individual page.
What happens on each page is Marlowe’s narration — and Marlowe’s narration is the primary pleasure of every Chandler novel. His voice is wry, moral, poetic, and incorruptible: he notices everything and describes it with similes that are never decorative, always diagnostic. When Marlowe observes a woman’s shoes, a gardener’s expression, or the way a man holds a gun, the observation arrives as a metaphor that tells you not just what Marlowe sees but what he thinks it means. Chandler’s style functions as epistemology: the way Marlowe describes things is the way he understands things, and his understanding is both more accurate and more honest than the world he’s moving through.
Los Angeles is Chandler’s other great subject. Before Chandler, the city barely existed in serious American fiction; he gave it a specific geography and social texture — the canyon estates of old oil money, the Bay City gambling boats moored offshore, the cheap rentals of the flatlands, the canyon roads that close in heavy rain. More importantly, he gave it a specific corruption: not melodramatic villainy but systemic compromise, the kind where everyone understands how things actually work and no one fully admits it. Marlowe moves through this city as an outsider who belongs to none of its layers and is therefore the only person who can see all of them.
Reading Raymond Chandler
Begin with The Big Sleep — it is his essential debut and the purest expression of his style. The Long Goodbye (1953) is his most ambitious and emotionally complex novel; many critics consider it his masterpiece. Both standalone.
For the full Raymond Chandler bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Raymond Chandler author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Raymond Chandler?
The Big Sleep (1939) is Chandler's essential debut and the foundational text of hardboiled detective fiction — the novel that introduced Philip Marlowe and the Los Angeles he inhabits. Its plot famously defied even Chandler's ability to fully explain, but its prose and atmosphere make the mystery almost irrelevant. The purest expression of what crime fiction can do when the writing is genuinely literary.
What is The Big Sleep about?
Philip Marlowe, private detective, is hired by the aging General Sternwood to handle a blackmailer — and finds himself drawn into a Los Angeles underworld of pornography, gambling, and murder involving the General's two dangerous daughters, Vivian and Carmen. The plot is notoriously convoluted; Chandler himself could not explain who killed one of the characters when asked by Howard Hawks's screenwriters. The book is not primarily a puzzle but an atmosphere — a portrait of a corrupt city filtered through one man's wry, moral, inescapable voice.
Why is Chandler's writing considered literary?
Chandler's prose style — particularly Marlowe's first-person narration and its distinctive similes — is one of the great voices in American fiction. The similes are never decorative; they are diagnostic, revealing what Marlowe actually thinks is happening beneath the surface of what he observes. Chandler also took Los Angeles as a serious literary subject at a time when the city barely existed in fiction, and his rendering of its geography, social texture, and corruption has influenced American writing from Raymond Carver to James Ellroy.
What should I read after The Big Sleep?
After The Big Sleep, Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953) is his most ambitious novel — longer, more melancholy, more explicitly concerned with Marlowe's code and its costs. Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is the other foundational hardboiled text, with Sam Spade as counterpoint to Marlowe. James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential extends the Chandler tradition into the 1950s with greater violence and moral complexity.
