Thalia Book Club: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

Chandler’s dark first novel is full of endlessly inventive wordplay, with the wry, cynical private detective Philip Marlowe. Join the investigation with two contemporary masters of detective fiction and film when they compare notes on Chandler’s grand style, its place in the mystery canon, and its influence on their work.

“Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.”
-Los Angeles Times


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Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Gun, With Occasional
Music, The Fortress of Solitude, and You Don't Love Me Yet. Motherless Brooklyn, his fifth, won the National Book Critic's Award, and has been translated into twenty languages. Lethem is also the author of two story collections, a novella and a book of essays, The Disappointment Artist. As editor, he created The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2001, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence Magazine. An avid reader of science fiction and noir as a child, Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler are among his early influences. On Chandler, Lethem has said, "His books bear rereading every few years. The novels are a perfect snapshot of an American past, and yet the ruined romanticism of the voice is as fresh as if they were written yesterday."

Judith Freeman has written four novels: The Chinchilla Farm; Set For Life; A Desert of Pure Feeling; and Red Water; a collection of short stories: Family Attractions; and one work of non-fiction: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved. Her essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. In an interview with American Heritage Magazine, Freeman ascribes Raymond Chandler's timelessness to the vitality of his writing, a quality she says "is a hard thing to fake if you don't have it, which is why so many imitators fail." Judith teaches a class on noir at the University of Southern California, focusing on films and mystery novels set in LA.

Raymond Chandler is the author of the crime novels The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye as well as many crime stories published in Black Mask Magazine. His dark and poignant portrait of the criminal world of Los Angeles is brought alight by endlessly inventive wordplay, astute portraits and dialogue, forever capturing the 1930s and revolutionizing the mystery genre. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, redefined the private eye in literature and continues to be a classic today. A celebrated writer in his own time, Chandler's literary acclaim led him to the silver screen, where he collaborated alongside Alfred Hitchcock on the screenplay Strangers on a Train. He is also credited for adapting James M. Cain's Double Indemnity and for penning The Blue Dahlia. A wide range of contemporary writers and filmmakers, including Haruki Murakami and Ethan and Joel Cohen, as well as tonight's guests, continue to cite Chandler's style as a major influence in their work.