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Raymond Chandler dominates the crime novel in the way that Anton Chekhov dominates the short story - it's almost impossible to imagine the genre as we know it today without being conscious of the long shadow he has cast over almost all writers that followed him. In the seven novels he wrote - and the twenty or so short stories - he took the trashy pulp-fiction, hardboiled detective story and turned it into something highly sophisticated and nuanced. "Down those mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean," Chandler famously wrote in "The Simple Art of Murder."

"The Big Sleep" (1939) is the first novel to feature the private-eye Philip Marlowe, and is derived from two short stories, "Killer in the Rain" (1935) and "The Curtain" (1936). It is considered one of Chandler's best works.

About an hour before noon on a mid-October day in the 1930s, Philip Marlowe drove through downtown Los Angeles. The sun was not shining, and there was a "look of hard rain in the clearness of the foothills." The shabbiness of Bunker Hill made him think of its days of respectability. Soon he headed west on Wilshire Boulevard, turning to the north at La Cienega, he crossed Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards and found his way into the hills of West Hollywood, to the home of General Guy Sternwood. As Marlowe entered the Sternwood mansion, he looked up to see, on a stained-glass panel, a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree. The lady was without clothes, but she was wearing long and convenient hair.

In this fashion, Chandler introduced his hero who was to become the epitome of them all. The story is infamously complex and sometimes hard to follow, with many characters all double-crossing and triple-crossing each other. In all seven novels, Marlowe was looking for ladies to rescue or the little fellow who needed help. Most of Marlowe's sympathy was spent on General Sternwood, once virile, now sick and helpless. His two problems were his two daughters, neither of whom had "any more moral sense than a cat."

Marlowe can be as brutally tough as Sam Spade or as uncertain and troubled as a Kafka hero. Add this persona to a prose style of limpid assurance and a feel for atmosphere as good as you'll find in any fiction, and one quickly understands why Raymond Chandler bestrides the genre like a giant. One could argue that his plots were not perfectly worked out. The dénouement in The Big Sleep is not entirely successful, because it comes from surprise not development, and because the villainess is ill rather than criminal. Marlowe's major motive is sentimentality allied to loyalty in one part of a double plot structure.

The novel was made into a movie directed by Howard Hawks and scripted by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Futhman and had an excellent cast, most notably Humphrey Bogart (Marlowe) and Lauren Bacall (Vivien Sherwood). Although the film closely follows the novel, it became so inextricably complicated that even Raymond Chandler claimed about one murder he did not know "who done it." (Even in the book it isn't solved, and I would like to leave that to the reader.) Nevertheless, it is vastly enjoyable along the way for its slangy script and star performances.