The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Los Angeles, CA

Chandler's "The Big Sleep" crystallized the hard-boiled mystery genre, especially in melding a detached comic tone to a tragic vision. The 1946 Howard Hawks-directed film version with Bogart & Bacall defined the film noir romance, grafting a darkly absurdist and violent non-linear plot to a linear and romantic narrative form. Novelist Jonathan Lethem recently joined a long line of writers for whom Chandler still defines Southern California: "I breathed in the atmosphere of those books before I even understood Chandler was writing about real places" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/jonathan-lethem-by-the-book.html). The legacy of the filmed "Sleep" can be seen from the French New Wave ("Breathless," "Shoot the Piano Player"), to "Chinatown," "Blade Runner," "Pulp Fiction," "The Big Lebowski," etc. (Indeed, the Coen brothers entire film oeuvre is infused with Chandlerian wit and dark irony.)

Roger