Penguin Modern Classics: The Big Sleep & Other Novels

Raymond Chandler created the fast-talking, trouble-seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe’s entanglement with the Sternwood family and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective’s iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell, My Lovely , on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Chandler’s brilliant epitaph, The Long Good-Bye . ‘One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards that others still try to attain.’ Sunday Times