The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler with Anthony Rizzuto, part 1

THE BIG SLEEP (1939) is a seminal work in the hardboiled detective genre, and it’s among the best of the Raymond Chandler books. It showcases Chandler’s masterful use of sharp dialogue, complex characters and his gritty depiction of 1930s Los Angeles.

This classic hardboiled detective novel introduces private eye Philip Marlowe. Hired to resolve a blackmail scheme, Marlowe uncovers a web of corruption and murder. It revolutionized crime fiction, establishing a template for noir storytelling that continues to influence literature and film.

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Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler Books)

Marlowe is 33 and went to college once. He’s a bit of a cynic, and his manners are bad. He was fired for insubordination. “I test very high on insubordination.”

American hero: “Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious” (NYT Book Review).

Prometheus: “Marlowe is Prometheus [of American myth]: the noble outsider, sacrificing and enduring for a code he alone upholds.” [The Annotated Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (eds. Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Rizzuto)]

Honest: Vivian asks if Marlowe is honest. “Painfully,” he says. He tells Carmen he has “professional pride.” Her father trusts him not to “pull any stunts.”

Tough Guy: He’s tough, clever, and a good judge of character. His speech is brash and witty.

Self-Destructive streak? “I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar check coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming … That was how smart I was” (ch. 21).

Catalyst: There are the aficionados of deduction and the aficionados of sex who can’t get it into their hot little heads that the fictional detective is a catalyst, not a Casanova. (Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler)

Dashiell Hammett’s Influence on the Raymond Chandler Books

The famous Detection Club: “Its roster includes practically every important writer of detective fiction since Conan Doyle. But Graves and Hodge decided that only one first-class writer had written detective stories at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. … Graves and Hodge were not fuddy-duddy connoisseurs of the second-rate; they … were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.” (The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler)

Transcript

Sarah Harrison: 0:24

Welcome to Tea, Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I'm your host Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: 0:35

And I'm your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic, but not a toxin, and join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

Sarah Harrison: 0:55

Before we jump in to our exciting episode on The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and detective Philip Marlowe, we have an even more exciting sponsor. It's Carolyn Daughters. Carolyn runs game changing corporate brand therapy workshops, teaches Online Marketing Boot Camp courses, and leads persuasive writing workshops. Carolyn empowers startups, small businesses, enterprise organizations and government agencies to win hearts, minds, deals and dollars. You can learn more at carolyndaughters.com. Carolyn, The Big Sleep is our first book of 2025.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:41

I'm so excited. I can't believe we're starting a fourth year.

Sarah Harrison: 1:44

That's amazing. Is it the fourth? It is the fourth.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:48

I know it feels like yesterday we started.

Sarah Harrison: 1:50

This is our second third year.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:54

Oh, is that how you do birthdays also?

Sarah Harrison: 1:57

I that's how I build it. I like it well. I am also really excited to talk about our listener of the episode today. This is Dorothy Young. Her name may sound familiar. She's from Newberry, South Carolina, and she is not a first time winner. This is her second win. But Dorothy recently joined our new Patreon page. She was an early supporter of Buzzsprout and our platform there, and then she recently switched over. I don't know it might have something to do with we just put out our first exclusive content on our Patreon page. So that's exciting.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:38

So Sarah, I didn't know anything about what a Patreon was until you told this is. This is the case with Patreon, and, like 100 other things, I had no idea what it was, until Sarah told me and then talk. Can you explain what a Patreon page is, and then how we have some exclusive content on it?

Sarah Harrison: 2:59

It's really wild, and I can't say that I exactly know what I'm doing yet, but I just jumped in there. It's a page. I like it for a couple of reasons. First of all, it can hold all of all of this stuff, right? So we have a certain amount of bad bandwidth on our official Buzzsprout platform, which feeds and everything. But I could just keep uploading episodes, so I can always put them up earlier, faster than I can on our official platforms, and I can hold extra content. We're even experimenting with selling selling stuff on Patreon this year. So it's just a small subscriber service. We have two levels of subscription. Dorothy joined as a raven and ravens get a packet of flat swag, as well as access to any of our exclusive content on the Patreon. You can also join as a Sherlock, and those are for our book minded folks who actually want to receive the curated book list in the mail.

Carolyn Daughters: 4:01

Just to check-- if you're a Hercule Poirot, does that mean that you and I quit our day jobs and we just do this?

Sarah Harrison: 4:08

Theoretically, yes. If you're interested in support, shoot us an email and we'll make that happen. Okay, I like it. So thank you, Dorothy, and I'm really excited as well to introduce the big sleep. This is Raymond Chandler, published in 1939 when a dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the black mailer of one of his two troublesome daughters. Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion, kidnapping, pornography, seduction and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in. The New Yorker says Chandler wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered. Library Journal says Chandler is not only the best writer of Hard Boiled private investigation. Stories. He's one of the 20th century's top scribes period. Raymond Chandler was a British-American novelist and screenwriter in 1932. At age 44 he decided to write detective fiction after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, black mailers don't shoot, was published in 1933 in black mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, which is our selection this month, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939 in addition to his short stories, he published seven novels during his lifetime. The year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. Raymond Chandler died on March 26 1959 in La Jolla, California. I knew how to say it, Carolyn.

Carolyn Daughters: 5:55

You looked at me. I saw that look.

Sarah Harrison: 6:00

Just a visual check here. La Jolla, California.

Carolyn Daughters: 6:05

To talk about The Big Sleep and Raymond Chandler and our detective hero Philip Marlowe, we're really excited to have Anthony Dean Rizzuto as our guest today. Anthony teaches English and heads the writing program at Sonoma State University in California. He co edited the annotated Big Sleep published in 2018 by vintage. We're going to post a link to this in our notes and on our website. Anthony wrote, also wrote a critical history of Chandler's romanticism entitled Raymond Chandler romantic ideology and the cultural politics of chivalry, that was published in 2021 by Paul Graham Macmillan. Welcome Anthony.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 6:44

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

Carolyn Daughters: 6:47

We're so excited.

Sarah Harrison: 6:49

I think his book is already on our Amazon storefront. I'm a big fan of annotated versions of books, so before I even realized Anthony was guesting, I had put it in our storefront.

Carolyn Daughters: 7:00

I love annotated books.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 7:04

Thank you. Nice reading for us. I'll get us started, if you don't mind, by just reading the very famous opening to the book. I will qualify it by saying I've tried to read all the Marlowe novels out loud to myself, and I can never be Philip Marlowe in my own voice. So this is Anthony Rizzuto reading Raymond Chandler, but not being Philip Marlowe. I can't wait. It was about 11 o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard, wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I [Philip Marlowe] was wearing my powder blue suit with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything The Well Dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on $4 million dollars. The main hallway of the sternwood place was two stories high over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants. There was a broad stained glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on, but some very long and convenient hair. The Knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying. There were French doors at the back of the hall beyond them, a sweep of emerald grass to a white garage in front of which a slim, dark, young chauffeur and shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees, trimmed as if trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs beyond them, a large greenhouse with a domed roof, then more trees. And beyond everything, the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills on the east side of the hall, a free staircase, a. Tile paved, rose to rose to a gallery with a wrought iron railing and another piece of stained glass romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall. Round about. They didn't look as if anyone, anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the west wall, there was a big, empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantle with Cupids at the corners. Above the mantle, there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait, two bullet torn or moth eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican War. The officer had a neat black, Imperial black mustachios, hot, hard, cold, black eyes and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with. I thought this might be the general. I thought this might be general sternwood's Grandfather. It could hardly be the general himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous 20s. I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It wasn't the butler coming back, it was a girl.

Carolyn Daughters: 11:45

I love that. At any point in time, if I read that, I would keep reading. I mean, we are always gauging whether we want to read a book or not, or whether we're going to continue on with the book from how good the opening is. And I feel like this is so strong and compelling for the protagonist, Philip Marlowe, the setting and the house and the place, and what we learn about the general and his daughters just in these few words, that no matter what I would keep reading,

Sarah Harrison: 12:24

I'm a chronic book finisher. I'll just say so I don't necessarily make a decision based on the opening, although I really like, now that I've read the book, going back and rereading the opening, I'm like, Oh, this is really encapsulating a lot, like that piece of stained glass, I feel like, but it certainly is a page turner.

Carolyn Daughters: 12:43

So here's just a quick question then. So Sarah, if you were reading a book, you just pick up a book and start reading it. Are you committed to finishing that book, no matter what, even if you're like, "This is not a great book."

Sarah Harrison: 12:57

I have put down one book in my life.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 13:01

Wow.

Sarah Harrison: 13:02

You know what? No.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:06

What was it?

Sarah Harrison: 13:08

It was Babbitt.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:10

Oh, Sinclair Lewis.

Sarah Harrison: 13:12

I worked on it, and I worked on, you know what? Not worth it.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:16

That's, that's a tough book.

Sarah Harrison: 13:18

It's not that it was tough.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:19

No, no, not, not difficult to read, tough to get into.

Sarah Harrison: 13:23

Didn't like it. I mean, War and Peace was tough to get into.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:28

I used to teach Babbitt, and that was a hard sell to students in my class. I'm just going to be honest with you,

Sarah Harrison: 13:38

I was too much. This is really off topic of our book, but I don't like to feel like I'm so getting splashed in the face with the author's opinion about stuff. You know? I want to read the characters. I want to form my own opinions.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:53

Or think you're forming your own opinion.

Sarah Harrison: 13:54

I ever think I am, I want to be manipulated subtly. And it was just too heavy handed.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:59

I will put a book down if I feel like this is not going to be worth my time. My time is limited for how much time I have for reading, and I want to read stuff that moves me, makes me think, takes me places I didn't even know a book could take me. And so if a book isn't doing that, it doesn't have to be in the first few pages. But I'm always putting the book on trial for its life. I'm like, am I going to put 4, 6, 8, 12 hours, or whatever, into this book. And this is one where I would say, okay, yes. I want to ask you, Anthony, what's your philosophy here? And then also, because The Big Sleep and Philip Marlowe are so formative to noir fiction and to hard boiled fiction, do some readers come to this book after having read contemporary hardboiled fiction and say, Oh, this feels dated. Or are they going to come to this book, do you think, and say, "Wow, not only does this feel fresh and new, but I can see how this hardboiled fiction form started or emerged."

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 15:21

A great question. I love that we're beginning by talking about reading, because reading is just such a wonderful activity. It's underrated as a thing in itself, and we all bring so many ideas to books, like, if you did pick up The Big Sleep, you probably have heard of it, right? You have, you have an encyclopedia in your head. You two in particular, do have encyclopedias of the mystery genre, but everyone has heard something, maybe of the novel or the author and so. When I do teach, well, I haven't taught it for a while, but when I do teach it, people can find it dated. It usually takes a younger audience to not be familiar with it, but they get into it. I don't know if just what I read would have been enough, and then, funnily enough, so my reading experience was very different. I spent so much time on the novel, and then I annotated the bejesus out of the opening paragraph that that was just so for most in my head, I probably spent months thinking about how those annotations were going to work and so when you asked me to read into paragraphs further on, but still towards the beginning, where the action hadn't begun yet, really, it was refreshing. I hadn't remembered those last few paragraphs, and it was neat to read them again. And I actually was struck by how much description there is right there after the very opening antechamber part, right where Philip Marlowe walks in, and there's the stained glass, and he's dressed this way, and he's calling on $4 million and hears his voice. And I forgot about what Philip Marlowe sees out the window and the hills, and the trees and the manicured lawn. And I remembered that the chauffeur was there, but I didn't remember that he was there that early. That's another great thing about reading. Once we take the words off the page and put them in our heads. We are now in charge of them. We rewrite them and order them and direct the movie that they describe. It's such an empowering activity. So so I don't know if this directly answers your question, but I feel like it was very exciting for me to re encounter the second half of what I read, and there's a lot of, there's a lot that people will bring to the first half. It's been heavily written on. And then students will latch, as critics have latched on the stained glass. Symbolism, symbolism. It's like symbolism alert the bells and the neon go off. And in my opinion, what symbolism is there has been, has been flattened and misread in a very obvious way that it isn't borne out by the book, it's not saying, very straightforwardly, that Raymond Chandler is writing a novel about Philip Marlowe, who is a knight. And here's the symbolism that shows it. That's actually not what I think is happening. And that's the big misrepresentation for that you got to read my book.

Carolyn Daughters: 18:59

We highly recommend your book.

Sarah Harrison: 19:01

I want to ask you about your books. When I saw, Oh, this is the guy that wrote the annotated version. So I said I loved the annotated version, but I actually own one only, and that is the annotated Alice in Wonderland.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 19:14

Yes, that was one of my first favorite books as a kid, and it was always in my head, when I was annotating this, I thought, I have to make this book, as lovable as it already is, but not ruin it.

Sarah Harrison: 19:35

It's gorgeous. It's so helpful. I feel like, as I'm raining Alice in Wonderland to my son, or if my husband reading I'm over there, like going back through the annotations to be like, what on earth? Because it's like something mathematical, or some like Poem of the day, or piece of context that I've completely missed. Can you give us, like, in a nutshell, some of the. Insight that you included in your annotated version of this book,

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 20:05

That's great. So I'm put in mind in the annotated Alice of all those poems that are in Alice Wonderland are parodies of things that readers probably would have known at the time, but we sure as shooting don't now and haven't for a long time. And I think Raymond Chandler, when he's playing with the chivalric symbolism, which he does throughout it's not like people who, in my opinion, misinterpret the symbolism as Philip Marlowe being represented as a knight. It's not like they're foolish or unintelligent or anything like that. There's tons of symbolism around the knight in there, but I think Chandler was deeply immersed in the actual traditions of romance, the original stuff, probably Mallory version, Sir Thomas Mallory's version. More Dart there, where there's a specific code, yes, and Philip Marlowe has a code. There's all kinds of things you can't do as a knight, like you can't you can't assault women. You can't touch women, especially high born women. I mean, there's a lot of class prejudice, right? So it's all classed in the traditional romances, but you the idea of a knight assaulting a woman is completely forbidden. And Philip Marlowe slaps Carmen around. Is a phrase. It's terrible, but he does right? He cracks Agnes on the head. He slaps Carmen again later. These are not nightly activities. He threatens to throw her out in the hall naked. So Chandler is seeding the symbolism with both nightly stuff and very anti nightly stuff. And I think people aren't as familiar with the original romance tradition to recognize the anti nightliness, the non nightliness.

Carolyn Daughters: 22:17

In his defense, in almost throwing her out naked. She is naked throughout most of the book. I mean, how else would you throw her out? Like, you would have to dress her and put a bunch of clothese on her and be, like, now I'm throwing you out and then fling her out.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 22:37

Good point. Good thing I didn't talk to you before I wrote the stained glass piece.

Sarah Harrison: 22:46

The stain glass piece, though, even the night. So you've got this naked woman here and you've got this, but it struck me that he's not trying very hard. I was like, that's, that's, that's where it is. Philip Marlowe is not trying very hard.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 23:03

And it's a joke, obviously, about the fact that it's a it's a fixed, not moving piece of art. So he's making a joke for the reader. The knight isn't getting anywhere. But there's also a very surface level bit of raciness there. She's naked the night's not getting any closer to her. Maybe I ought to get there right? Like everyone is about to describe Carmen's about to talk about how virile and handsome he is. The general is about to talk about Vera he is. Vivian's gonna throw herself at him like he's a big, strong, red blooded American man, and there's a naked woman. It's not that sophisticated, really, but people miss it, I think, because of the beauty of the language, right? Like, how could someone who writes in such a lovely way be making such a crass and obvious statement?

Carolyn Daughters: 24:00

And Philip Marlowe says, at one point, he's in his apartment and he's playing chess against himself. And he says, Knights have no place in this game. It's not a game for knights, yep, and, or it wasn't a game for knights. And so I think he's also just telling us point blank there that I'm not. I think it would be maybe a superficial read to just simply say Philip Marlowe is this courtly gentleman this night. He's more he's definitely more complicated than that.

Sarah Harrison: 24:35

So much nobody's trying very hard. You've got a whole book full of women that are entangled in situations, and anybody like really wanting to get them out of it, if anything, like, wow, you're my girl now, so we'll just switch things over.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 24:54

A little bit entangled is a great word. The book is all about entanglements.

Carolyn Daughters: 25:00

Can you talk about Raymond Chandler? You say in your introduction to the annotated version that he grew up in Edwardian England. He grew up in where this courtly theme, this courtly literature had had a place, and he may have been influenced by it.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 25:25

He was influenced, he had a whole writing career in the nineteen teens that is seldom reprinted. The poems and essays there's a there they're reprinted in something called a literary reference to Raymond Chandler. But they don't get reprint, reprinted on their own. I find the essays very interesting. The poems are not great. They're early poems, he gave up writing. He knew he didn't quite have it at that time, but he also thought that he was waiting to come back to it. His the output of the 19 teens is straight romantic. Paul Fussell was a literary critic who wrote about World War One, talked about the poetry of that period as being dreamy Keats-ian and Tennyson-ian verse. And that's what he was writing. And Raymond Chandler himself gave that up when he 15 years later, takes up writing, Hard Boiled as a as a job. Really, he's out of a job, and he always wanted to write. So he gives himself a year to learn how to write, to make money writing this money-making form. And so he brings some of his original, what's in his imagination, right? What like I brought The Annotated Big Sleep, or the annotated Alice into the annotated big sleep, he brought what he had encountered as an adolescent young man.

Carolyn Daughters: 27:15

Do you think? Okay, so, I think Yeats, another poet that I used to teach and who I love. If Yeats had simply stuck with the poetry he was writing when he first started, he'd be a minor English poet focused on poetry about fairies and Irish folklore. Probably, yay. But he didn't stick with that. He shifted it at one point. Do you think Raymond Chandler found his voice the way Yeats found his voice, for example? Or do you think Raymond Chandler said, I know how I can make some money. I've been reading this, these black mask editions that, I pick up just for something to read and I want to, I want to pay my bills. Essentially, I'm not working. Did he find his voice, or did he figure out a way to pay his bills?

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 28:14

Both? I think it's great question. Great, great parallel to Yeats. I think that in 1932 when he was sacked from the oil company, he had to pay the bills, and his first short story published in 33 black mailers, don't shoot. No one's going to mistake that for high literature or anything. And through the 30s, I think he was practicing, as a craftsman how to make money, but I think he always had the love of artistry in him, and he always was working towards mastering it so that he could allow that to come out. And The Big Sleep is 1939, it's his first novel, right? It's six years after his the publication of the first story, so it's not like he stepped right into the big sleep. In fact, The Big Sleep uses bits of prior published stories, and in the Annotate Big Sleep, we print some of the original versions, and you can just compare the step up in craftsmanship at the level of the line is, is very obvious. He worked very hard to get it to be what he thought of as literary, and it was published by Alfred A Knopf, instead of black mask, right? They were publishing, will it Cather and go, go, and, really, highbrow stuff,

Sarah Harrison: 29:51

It struck me as I was reading it. I was like, this feels, it feels very Dashiell Hammett, because I read it. But there were so many really interesting med. Force. And I just, I love them all. Some of them were just wild. I looked up one. Her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought.

Carolyn Daughters: 30:14

Metaphors and similar like throughout this book.

Sarah Harrison: 30:17

Someone else's eyes were like oysters on the half shell. Someone voices like delicate as a phone's eye. So it's just like they were just so descriptive, so many metaphors. Can you talk about that?

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 30:39

That's the thing, if you, if you Google, or at least this was the case a few years ago when I was doing the annotated big sleep. If you Google Chandler esque, what comes up is his use of similes. It's the thing that stuck. And as similes are great, and I think it filtered out. He didn't invent really, like the cynical PI. That was already a thing. And Hammett, as you said, it's hard to say whether Sam Spade or the Continental Op are cynical or just just hard, just hard men. And so maybe he added that bit of idealism to Philip Marlowe or world weariness, sadness, oh, it's not a game for knights, right? So maybe he added that. But the simile is definitely something that Chandler thought that he had invented that has been imitated throughout since smashing it's been meme-ified. Sometimes, I'll be watching a cartoon or something. If one of my kids is watching a cartoon, and they'll do like a noir, the SpongeBob is wearing a trench coat and a hat or something, and, and there'll be a simile SpongeBob, and that's Chandler. It was Homer originally. I think Raymond Chandler got it from Homer.

Carolyn Daughters: 32:26

One thing I really like is this idea of his taking from some of the writing he had already done and maybe published, and putting together this story that elevates maybe some of the stuff that he had already done. Because the one verb that I see a lot in the reading I've been doing about Chandler is cannibalizing, which is a really rough verb, right? And it might be actually apt. It might be, it's his word. And I'm thinking, he slapdash, pulled together a bunch of stuff and patchwork quilted this thing together. But if that's what he did, boy, he did it pretty, pretty well. I want to hear your thoughts about, like, what the story he put together, and talk about the importance of scene versus plot to Raymond Chandler, because I sometimes get I'm just gonna be that guy, like I get a little lost in his plot at times. But when I'm in a scene, when I'm reading, I'm wholly immersed in the scene, and then there's a break, and we go to another scene and but when it comes to beginning to end, if somebody said, Hey, tell me the plot of this story, I might be hard pressed to do that.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 33:53

You and everybody else. Absolutely. I had to write a document to myself, the plot of The Big Sleep of one pager, so that I could keep track of it and follow it and he flew that as a flag. He said, I don't care about plot. And he I'm sorry to say to your listeners who love the traditional, who done its and the drawing room, room mysteries. Chandler claimed to despise those and to be writing intentionally against that sort of thing, which I think he overstates too, because he needs to have something that pulls people along towards a mystery at the center, and it's going to be a puzzle that's figured out later. True, he's not giving the readers enough clues to be able to play along like I think is the rule for. Game of the classic mystery, like, if the reader has all the clues, they can figure it out. Fair game, right? Fair game. And Chandler is not playing that game, but there's still a puzzle. There's still clues. I think that was something that he intentionally. He prioritized scenes and characterization and dialog over the overall structure. But he didn't. He didn't throw them together. He did try to weave them together with care. I just think that when he was spending his time really caring, it was more on the level of the line, and not whether the material from one story mixing with the material from another story resulted in a coherent hole that said there are only a couple plot holes. He's got a reputation for it's complex, but there's the famous who killed Owen Taylor plot hole, who killed the chauffeur. But that's it. There's a couple others I came up with, but it's not like, you don't know the rest of them, the murders, like it.

Sarah Harrison: 36:25

I didn't have a problem with that phone that was realistic. We were traveling along with him, that we were feeling the same ambiguity. I had the same experience again, from when we read Red Harvest, or like, a third of the way through the book, and I'm like, Oh, well, we've solved the mystery. Got two thirds. We're halfway through the Big Sleep, we solved it, but we've got half the book. What's gonna happen? I really enjoyed, that unwinding at the end, as he relayed. These were the hunches I was working on and, oh, actually, that doesn't make sense. Those were interesting feelings that I didn't really realize were happening, but they made sense in retrospect. So I really enjoyed. There were several aspects that I just felt were I didn't exactly know what happened, and I'm not sure I was supposed to, and they were ambiguous, but they were really interested.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 37:25

Did you read it for the writing? Well, you read everything anyway, but as you were reading it, were you enjoying the writing of it or the characters? Did you? Was there something about it? You wanted to find out?

Sarah Harrison: 37:44

I enjoyed the writing, for sure. It just It kept moving, and there kept being something to draw me on the characters. And this is what, one great thing about my position in this podcast is I've read almost no mysteries. It's the first time I've read it, and so I'm always getting it new. And I have, like, retrospectively, what we've read building up so, but not the things that will come after. I thought it was beautifully written. I thought it was interesting. I thought the characters were wild, and I like to see how it related to other things that we've read, just like the way women's portrayal changes, or the way the detective changes, or the way like the police change. I liked his character a lot. I kept looking for the part, because he keeps getting described. Maybe you can help me here. He keeps getting described as hopeful. I just wasn't. I wasn't finding the hopeful in the book. So what or naive? Do you consider him hopeful? And if so? Philip Marlowe, what's hopeful about him?

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 39:00

I do not think of him as hopeful.

Sarah Harrison: 39:11

Robert B Parker, The New York Times.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 39:13

Yes. What did he say? Can you read that?

Sarah Harrison: 39:16

"Raymond Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero. Wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious."

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 39:31

I'm not sure how sentimental he is, either.

Carolyn Daughters: 39:33

So for hopeful, I wonder, you know, so I called it self-destructive. Maybe self-destructive and hopeful are two sides of a coin.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 39:39

Interesting.

Carolyn Daughters: 39:39

In chapter 21 okay, that's what I used to call hopeful, well, but I'm saying two sides of a coin, right? So certainly not hopeful with maybe, that chapter 21. Philip Marlowe says, " I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for 24 hours. I was still at large and had a $500 check coming, the smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess that being the obviously smart thing to do. I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming. That's how smart I was." So when I hopeful is maybe not the right word, but like, he's constantly like striving to do this next thing, whatever the fill in the blank is he wants.

Sarah Harrison: 40:27

I would say driven. He's driven in a little self-deprecating.

Carolyn Daughters: 40:33

I don't think so. I would say self-destructive more than ...

Sarah Harrison: 40:36

He's making fun of how smart he is.

Carolyn Daughters: 40:40

For sure, for sure. I agree with that. I don't know in my mind, Philip Marlowe sees what the next thing could be, and he sees how he can contribute to that thing. He can move. He can move and make progress in this world where you get this sense that very little progress has been made, and it feels corrupt and soiled and just it feels problematic from beginning to end. To me, when I'm reading it, he's like, carrying this, like, weird, very dimly lit candle and saying, like, I can, I can do this one thing, and a lot of the time in this book, and also in Farewell my lovely and maybe in other books of his, we just see him, like, marching somewhere, and you're like, Oh, for God's sake, stop. Don't go there. Don't do that. Don't enter that building, don't talk to that person, but it's like he can't stop himself, because he sees this potential. Maybe, I don't know if that makes sense.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 41:52

He's driven. There's so it does help to have read The Simple Art of Murder, where Raymond Chandler put some of his cards on the table, but then he also adds more and pretends they were always there. It gives a little too much, and has led to some further misinterpretations, I think. He's got the great line in simple art of murder where he says, this is the adventure. It wouldn't be worth reading if it didn't happen to a man who is fit for adventure. He really heroizes in that story, that essay, which actually came out in 48 I think it was the first time it was published. He retroactively heroizes Philip Marlowe even more so the dimly lit candle becomes a torch in the essay. But it's definitely there. The dimly lit candle is there. He has to press on that chapter 21 is a perfect example, because that's where the, as you were saying, Sarah, the with Red Harvest, you find out it's it's done, the it's over. The blackmail he was hired to find out who was blackmailing or deal with the blackmailer of sternwood. That's Geiger. Geiger is dead. He's paid. Why? That's the end of the book, right? Then he presses on, on his own, off, off the clock, as it were.

Carolyn Daughters: 43:40

Yeah, which is very Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.

Sarah Harrison: 43:44

At least he didn't like burn the town down on his way.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 43:52

Raymond Chandler is so influenced by Dashiell Hammett. But Philip Marlowe is also so not the Op or Sam Spade.

Sarah Harrison: 44:03

Really, I want to talk about that more in the next episode.

Carolyn Daughters: 44:05

Yes, we have so much more to talk about.

Sarah Harrison: 44:08

Before you go -- you said something at the very beginning that I wanted to just revisit and understand. When you said you were reading, you're like, I'm reading in my voice. I'm not reading in Philip Marlowe's voice. What did you mean by that?

Carolyn Daughters: 44:22

What is his voice?

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 44:25

What is his voice? That's a great question. So he's been associated with Humphrey Bogart ever since the film Chandler writes into the novel that Philip Marlowe says of Joe Brody, that he speaks like the gangsters in the films, right, which would be something like Bogart, maybe. And so obviously, Marlowe doesn't talk like Bogart. He makes. Fun of people who are trying to talk like those, right? Those kinds of people who are trying to be tough like the movies have made them. Chandler wrote that the person he had in his mind as an actor to play Marlowe would be Cary Grant.

Sarah Harrison: 45:21

Oh, I love and it was Humphrey Bogart.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 45:26

Cary Grant, fascinating. And it opens a certain door to think of all those witticisms. Think of the tone that would be different if Cary Grant was delivering those lines.

Sarah Harrison: 45:45

He is tall and handsome and funny.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 45:49

Totally and gay and urbane, right? Like closeted, secretly gay, but like, there's that whole it's a different it's not the toxic masculine dude who's bringing, dripping masculinity, which spade is and the OP is too, if Marlowe is more debonair, right, and urbane like that. He's a totally different cat. Then, even Humphrey Bogart.

Carolyn Daughters: 46:23

Philip Marlowe, oh, that's fascinating. So Raymond Chandler said, I think about Humphrey Bogart, that he could be tough even without a gun. And there's so much to talk about this film as well. So fortunately, we're doing, I think, is it 47 different episodes with Anthony where we're going to cover.

Sarah Harrison: 46:45

I mean, at least 17.

Carolyn Daughters: 46:47

It's a lot. I just knew it was a lot. But one of them is going to focus, I think, on the film.

Sarah Harrison: 46:53

We're definitely going to do a movie centric episode, but hopefully we can beg Anthony to stay for another second episode of the book discussion. Thank you so much, Anthony. This has been fascinating.

Anthony Dean Rizzuto: 47:05

My pleasure.

Sarah Harrison: 47:06

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Carolyn Daughters: 47:31

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Sarah Harrison: 47:55

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