February 6, 1939: Raymond Chandler Publishes "The Big Sleep"

February 6, 1939: Raymond Chandler publishes The Big Sleep, introducing his character, Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe.

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born on July 23, 1888 in Chicago, his father's hometown, and grew up in Plattsmouth, Nebraska. After his father left the family, his mother, from Waterford, Ireland, took him to Waterford, London, Paris and Munich, where his language skills grew. By 1907, he had passed the British civil service exam, taken a job at the Admiralty, and published his 1st poem. He later served in the British Army in World War I, and caught the Spanish Flu, surviving it.

He went back to America, and began both a writing career and an affair with a much older married woman, Pearl "Cissy" Pascal. It was only after her divorce and his disapproving mother's death that he was able to marry Cissy. In 1931, he lost his job as an oil company executive, due to his drinking and fooling around with his female employees.

He began writing, in particular copying the pulp-style writing of Erle Stanley Gardner, who was about to move on, and create the character of lawyer Perry Mason. Chandler worked on short stories, selling them to detective magazines, before creating Marlowe, clearly a copy of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, a private eye further north in San Francisco.

In The Big Sleep, Marlowe is hired by an elderly General, to stop a man from blackmailing his free-spirited daughter. He finds out that the General's other daughter is also in trouble. The story comes to involve murder, gambling, a pornography ring, and a secret homosexual affair. Good luck turning that into a movie, with the Hays Code at the peak of its power.

Marlowe proved so popular that there would eventually be 7 novels. The Big Sleep was followed by Farwell, My Lovely in 1940, The High Window in 1942, The Lady in the Lake in 1943, The Little Sister in 1949, The Long Goodbye in 1953, and Playback in 1958. And with Hammett not writing another book after The Thin Man in 1934, Chandler surpassed him as the premier author of what became known as "hard-boiled detective novels."

In 1944, Chandler and film director Billy Wilder co-wrote the screenplay for Wilder's film Double Indemnity. In 1951, he worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the script for Strangers On a Train. But after Cissy's death in 1954, following a long illness, he fell into a deep depression, and drank himself to death in 1959. He had no children. After his death, the Chandler estate authorized later writers to write Marlowe novels.

In 1944, the 1st film featuring Marlowe was released: Farewell, My Lovely was adapted as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell. In 1946, The Big Sleep was filmed, with Humphrey Bogart, and his wife, Lauren Bacall, as the blackmailed Vivian Rutledge. The porn angle was played down, as the photos of older daughter Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) were used only for blackmail; and the gay angle was dropped entirely.

By playing Marlowe, and before that Hammett's Sam Spade in the 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon, Bogart became the stereotype of the hard-boiled private detective, spreading the fame of Spade and Marlowe -- and, by extension, that of Hammett and Chandler.

Bogart as Marlowe

In 1947, Robert Montgomery starred in Lady in the Lake, and George Montgomery starred in The Brasher Doubloon, an adaptation of The High Window. The Montgomerys were not related, but Robert was the father of actress Elizabeth Montgomery, and George married singer-actress Dinah Shore.

Eventually, Marlowe was brought up to the present day. In 1969, The Little Sister was adapted as Marlowe, starring James Garner, and this became the basis for Garner's later L.A.-based private eye TV series The Rockford Files. In 1973, Elliott Gould starred in The Long Goodbye, with baseball pitcher turned writer Jim Bouton playing a "playboy killer."

Film noir veteran Robert Mitchum, who, in spite of his age, seemed born to play Marlowe, went back to the source era to play him in Farewell, My Lovely in 1975, set in 1941. He starred in a present-day version of The Big Sleep in 1978. In 2022, Liam Neeson starred in the period piece Marlowe, an adaptation of The Black-Eyed Blonde, an authorized sequel to The Big Sleep, which John Banville wrote under the name Benjamin Black.

In 1988, Star Trek: The Next Generation showed Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, being a fan of hard-boiled detective novels of the mid-20th Century, in particular stories about a character created for the show, San Francisco private eye Dixon Hill. A Holodeck simulation goes wrong, and he and 3 other crewmembers are stuck with 1941 technology and no safety protocols, a problem which comes into play when one of them gets shot. Laurence Tierney, who had appeared in some film noirs as a young man, played Cyrus Redblock, a tribute to Sydney Greenstreet and his Maltese Falcon character Kasper Gutman. The title of the episode was a combination of 2 Marlowe novels: "The Big Goodbye."

*

February 6, 1939 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL had no games scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.