Raymond Chandler
THE BIG SLEEP
by
Peter Cash
English Association Bookmarks
No. 79
English Association Bookmarks Number 79
For Dr Matthew Edwards, later of Dulwich College,
who introduced me to Mr Marlowe in 1994
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
THE BIG SLEEP (1939)
by
Peter Cash
BOOKS by RAYMOND CHANDLER (Penguin)
The Big Sleep (1939)
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
The High Window (1942)
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
The Little Sister (1949)
The Long Goodbye (1953)
Playback (1958)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)
In his penultimate paragraph, Chandler essays a definitive profile of the fictional private
detective. The date is instructive: his essay is not a prescription for a character which he is
about to develop, but a description of Philip Marlowe as he has appeared in the seven novels
– ‘a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it and certainly without
saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world’.
Without compunction, Chandler admits that the detective story is not ‘a vital and significant
form of art’.
OTHER BOOKS TO READ
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 1929
James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, 1934
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934
Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury, 1947
FILMS TO WATCH
John Huston, The Maltese Falcon, Warner Bros 1941
Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity, Paramount 1944 (Chandler co-wrote the screenplay)
Tay Garnett, The Postman Always Rings Twice, MGM 1946
Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep, Warner Bros 1946
Don Siegel, Dirty Harry, Warner Bros 1971
Roman Polanski, Chinatown, Paramount 1974
Curtis Hanson, L. A. Confidential, Warner Bros 1997
© English Association and Peter Cash 2016
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INTRODUCTION
In Chapter XXX, Raymond Chandler’s first person narrator, the private detective Philip Marlowe,
explains something about himself:
I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don’t expect to go over ground
the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case
from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a
living doing that sort of thing, you don’t know much about cops. 1
No Inspector Lestrade, then ... So far as the crime genre is concerned, Philip Marlowe is an antidetective, an anti-hero. He is not a conventional sleuth engaged in a forensic examination of the
scene of the crime, but a moral crusader, a rider to the rescue. The purpose of this Bookmark is
to illustrate how Marlowe relies for his identity not upon the expertise with which he solves crimes
and catches criminals, but upon the style in which he describes the criminal underworld of Los
Angeles, itself a metaphor for urban America in the 1930s.
Readers of crime fiction should be warned: in coming to the first novel of Raymond Chandler, they
should not expect to find a conventional whodunnit. Detective fiction, compendious genre though
it is, can tend to rely for its popular appeal upon one old-fashioned literary virtue: narrative
technique. Normally, a crime writer takes care to escort his readers through his plot so that they
keep track of its logic and become intrigued by its twists and turns. Not Chandler: he is so
unbothered by plot that his readers, perhaps primed by the expert story-telling of Arthur Conan
Doyle and Agatha Christie, can soon start struggling to follow him ... 2 As a result, his narrative
technique can put us in mind of that question which Harley Granville Barker asked of a Restoration
comedy: “How could an audience be both clever enough to understand the story and stupid enough
to be interested by it when they did?” The answer: Do not try to follow Chandler’s narrative. Listen
instead to the voice of his narrator ...
Raymond Chandler began his career as a writer of pulp fiction, contributing short stories to trashy
magazines such as Black Mask. It is therefore tempting to conclude that the narrative of The Big
Sleep is challenging because he has cannibalised and conflated three short stories which he wrote
earlier – Killer in the Rain, The Curtain and Finger Man – in order to construct it. Here,
however, is Robert F. Moss (2003) with an altogether different and more subtle explanation:
Despite the complicated and sometimes confusing plot, the heart of The Big
Sleep is not the solution of the murders – the ‘whodunnit’ – but rather the
world that the story depicts and the movement of Marlowe within that world.
Whereabouts are we? Why am I reading this ..? It is Moss’s argument that Chandler does not
care about narrative smoothness – he does not care ‘who did it’ – because he nurses an ulterior
and superior preoccupation. According to Moss, Chandler’s primary aim in The Big Sleep is to take
us into the world of Los Angeles in the 1930s and interest us in its ambience, its material glamour
and its moral decadence, its flashiness and its seediness: as depicted, ‘that world’ is not so much
West Hollywood as Wild West Hollywood – a big and lawless country, as it were.3 In this context,
Chandler’s private eye is an urban cowboy, a lone ranger; he is an outsider, a man set apart by
virtue of his ethical superiority to his fellow Californians of this era, a pale rider appalled even by
1
Philo Vance is a fictional detective who features in twelve crime novels written by S. S. Van Dine in the
1920s and 1930s. Not unlike Holmes, but even more like D. L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Vance is an
aloof intellectual who brings an academic discipline to the solution of murder mysteries. Despite Sherlock
Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple, the real-life home of the private eye is the United States of
America (Chicago) where Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded in 1850.
2 Chandler: “Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue”.
3
Chandler: “In reading The Maltese Falcon, no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner
Archer (which is the only formal problem of the story) because the reader is kept thinking about something
else.”
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his own clientele. What then becomes fundamental to Chandler’s fiction is that the voice in which
this narrator tells his story should correspond to the unflinching, upright image that he projects.
Chandler’s first person narrator is Philip Marlowe, an unmarried thirty-three-year-old private
investigator: by his own descriptions, he is ‘a private detective’, ‘a sleuth’, ‘a private dick on a case’,
charging twenty-five dollars per day ‘and expenses’. Here he is at the start of Chapter I, describing
himself in the unapologetic terms which set the tone for every encounter in which he is involved:
I 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.
Dapper in his powder-blue suit and black brogues, Marlowe has dressed up in order to impress
General Guy Sternwood who lives in a mansion on Alta Brea Crescent in West Hollywood and is
worth ‘four million dollars’. Gumshoes are not known for their sartorial elegance, are they? Private
detectives ‘ought’ not to be ‘well-dressed’ ...4 Marlowe, then, has cast himself against this type; in
conforming to a dress code, in making an effort in order to ingratiate himself with a potential
employer, he is signalling his virtue and doesn’t care who knows it. He has his own standards to
uphold ... Readers need to get used to this bold and combative approach, for it will characterise
Marlowe’s constant attitude to the sleazy world in which he moves and works. If one definition of
a cynic is a man who dislikes his society, including himself for being part of it, then Marlowe, in
rejecting low expectations and resolving to assert his own integrity in face of them, fits that
definition well. Discerning and observant, General Sternwood eyes him up and explicitly confirms
that he is ‘a little bit of a cynic’.
In this context, it would be unwise to read too swiftly past the second paragraph of the novel. For
its sustained importance, this description of a stained-glass panel – not as incidental as it might at
first appear – is worth quoting in full:
Over the entrance doors ... was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight
in dark armour 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.
At one level, this is a comical response to an over-elaborate feature of an entrance hall; on another
level, it is a serious clue to Marlowe’s character, a proleptic encoding of the moral forces which will
motivate him. If ‘a knight in dark armour’, charged with rescuing a naked lady, is not doing a good
enough job, then it becomes incumbent upon a knight in shining armour to offer assistance. Duty
calls: that is, this knight will obey Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and ‘climb up there’ for no
other reason than that it is the right thing to do.
Skilfully though this imagery prepares us for Chapter XXIV of The Big Sleep, it is not until Chapter
28 of The High Window (1942) that Dr Carl Moss, attending to Merle Davis, the naked female
whom Marlowe is helping, refers to him by the oxymoronic epithet which famously defines him: ‘The
shop-soiled Galahad’. All that Chandler’s readers need to know is that Sir Galahad is the knight of
King Arthur’s Round Table who was renowned for his nobility and his purity; as such a figure, he is
seen as morally fit to redeem the failures of his predecessor-knights and finally succeed in the Quest
for the Holy Grail. Get the picture? Where the cops fall short, Marlowe (over six feet in height)
stands tall ... Detective work is a ‘slimy kind of business’ (Chapter XI) and it is therefore ironic that
a champion of such principle and scruple should be devoting himself to it. By his very involvement
In Chapter III, Vivian Regan is required to revise her presumption that private detectives are ‘greasy
little men snooping around hotels’.
4
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in Californian society of this time, his integrity is compromised and ‘shop-soiled’; at the same time,
he will employ nefarious means only if they are the means to a nobler end (of which a Galahad might
approve). Robert F. Moss explains that, “in the 1930s, something had gone awry, and the times
called for a combination Zorro-Lochinvar-Shadow to cauterize public evil.” In short, Philip Marlowe,
as a private investigator of public evil, is licensed – if it becomes necessary – to adapt his Arthurian
principles to his Californian circumstances: not least among the virtues of a ‘shop-soiled Galahad’ will
be the virtue of moral expediency ...
The critical consensus is that Marlowe, an ancient knight in modern times, is remarkable for his
chivalry. For Robert F. Moss, this adherence to ‘an older, chivalric code’ is a flaw in Marlowe’s
character, a shortcoming that accounts for his lack of professional success: “in a corrupt, fallen world,
old standards of honour and loyalty no longer function.” Alternatively, it can be argued that Marlowe’s
success in solving a case is incidental and supplementary to the manner in which he carries out his
investigation of it. How does he conduct himself? How does his old-fashioned sense of values fare?
To find out, we keep on listening to his voice. Why, when I lost the plot long ago, am I still reading
this ..? The answer is that we want to hear how this gallant individual gets on. We like listening to
the way in which he expresses his unimpressed attitude to the country in which he lives: ‘this rotten
crime-ridden country’. In all probability, we have been pre-possessed by his brusque, colloquial tone
of voice and got into our own conversation with it. Gallantry, we hope, will get him somewhere ...
To understand exactly why we cherish this hope, a reader still puzzled should refer to the historical and
social background to The Big Sleep ... It was in 1931 that the social historian John Truslow Adams
(in The Epic of America) put in italics the concept of ‘the American dream’: “that dream of a land in
which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to
his ability or achievement … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a
social order …” What colours Marlowe’s tone of voice is his refusal to be impressed by this vision of a
dreamland. What unimpresses him most of all is the ‘social order’ which has evolved. In Chapter XXX,
Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau essays a modest self-assessment:
“I’m a copper ... Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest
as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style.”
He could, of course, be describing Marlowe too. Both are lawmen of the Wild West Coast who
want to see all criminals brought to justice and sent to Folsom Prison, small-time crooks and bigtime gangsters alike. Captain Gregory goes on:
“That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see
it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this
wide, green and beautiful USA. We just don’t run our country that way.”
This, of course, is an indictment of a ‘green and beautiful’ land for corruption on a nation-wide scale;
he is describing not only a fallen world, but a world beyond salvation. Trawl the internet and you will
discover site after site on which Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, set in this corrupt context, is
perceived not so much as a modern gumshoe as an anachronistic knight in shining armour, ready to
slay dragons and rescue damsels.5 Arthurian or not, Marlowe is a hero purely and simply because in
‘this rotten little town’ (Chapter XXIII) he battles against all odds.
Trawl the internet and you will discover any number of sites on which the plot of The Big Sleep is
summarised. Good luck with that ..! For the purposes of this Bookmark, there will be references to
the plot only where such references are necessary to cue in the commentaries on those chapters in
which Philip Marlowe’s narrative voice is at its most characteristic and distinctive: namely, those
chapters in which in which he implies his sharpest criticism of Californian life in the 1930s.
5
It is no accident that Chandler proposed originally to name his detective Mallory – after Sir Thomas Malory,
author of Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). In the event, he is said to have taken the name from Marlowe House to
which he belonged during his time at Dulwich College in South London. Fittingly, Marlowe House was named
after Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright (1564-1593) who spied for the government.
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COMMENTARY
It is in Philip Marlowe’s encounters with General Sternwood’s two daughters – Carmen and Vivian –
that his narrative voice can be most distinctively heard. No sooner has Marlowe set foot in the
Sternwood residence than he is accosted by General Sternwood’s younger daughter. Carmen
Sternwood, aged ‘twenty or so’, bursts into the hallway, conspicuously unsteady on her feet; her
expressionless eyes, her colourless face, her involuntary giggle and her sexual forwardness also imply
a drug-habit. Carmen it is who initiates the first-ever dialogue to which Philip Marlowe contributes:
“Tall, aren’t you?” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”
“... Handsome too,” she said. “And I bet you know it.”
I grunted.
During the first paragraph of the narrative, the narrator addresses the reader in a ‘hard-boiled’ style
...6 For Chandler’s purposes, it is essential that he should then speak to the characters whom he
encounters in the same smart and invulnerable way; in his spoken utterances, we should be able to
recognise the idiom in which he narrates, here resisting Carmen’s irresistible charms in no uncertain
terms ... Readers who want to hear that same uncompromising voice will not be disappointed, for
Marlowe, when he talks, talks tough and retorts to her trickery with a cold disdain. Instantly audible
is the same tone – both critical and self-critical – which he adopted in that first paragraph: as he repels
Carmen’s unsolicited advances with an icy wit, so he expresses his regret for possessing attributes
(‘tall’, ‘handsome’) which an amoral woman has found attractive. He succeeds in sounding unimpressed
by both Carmen and himself. Flummoxed, Carmen flashes her eye-lashes at him, but to no avail ...
Flattery gets her nowhere: when he refuses to roll over ‘with all four paws in the air’, she flops into his
arms, melodramatic and stupefied. “You ought wean her,” he says to the butler, inviting him to extend
the metaphor and conclude that General Sternwood’s little girl ought to grow up.
In Chapter II, General Sternwood (‘an old and obviously dying man’) receives Mr Marlowe in his
sweltering conservatory and explains that he is being black-mailed by Mr Arthur Gwynn Geiger, a
bookseller. It transpires that Carmen has run up ‘gambling debts’ of $3,000 for which Geiger has three
‘promisory notes’. Rather than pay up, General Sternwood engages Marlowe to ‘take him out’.
Before Marlowe leaves the Sternwood mansion, Vincent Norris, the butler, informs him that General
Sternwood’s elder daughter Vivian – Mrs Vivian Regan – would like to see him. According to General
Sternwood, both of his daughters are dissolute creatures, appetitive and libidinous; according to their
father, Vivian and Carmen ‘go their separate and slightly divergent roads to perdition’ and do not
possess ‘any more moral sense than a cat’. Like Carmen, Vivian is a femme fatale. On the one hand,
this is an ancient stereotype whose Biblical ancestors are Delilah (Book of Judges 13-16) and Salome
(Mark 6 and Matthew 14): specifically, she is a voluptuous woman who uses her sexual charms to
seduce a man and lead him into a situation where he finds that his life is endangered. In this American
context, the type dates back to two silent films: The Vampire of 1913 and A Fool There Was of
1915 from which Theda Bara (1885-1955) acquired the sobriquet of ‘the vamp’. 7 The idea at work is
that such a woman is a vampire in that she can enchant and manipulate a man to the point where he
loses his manhood: metaphorically, she sucks the life-blood out of him. Narratively, this process of
sexual enchantment is a prequel to the moment where his life-blood literally seeps out of him: in
Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, it is Brigid O’Shaughnessy who murders Miles Archer; in Cain’s
6
In itself, ‘hard-boiled’ is no more than a metaphorical adjective for ‘tough’: to be exact, it refers to an
acquired toughness in that eggs are originally fragile and soft. Here, the term ‘hard-boiled’ is in inverted
commas because it refers to a specific genre of crime writing, emanating from the short stories The False
Burton Combs and Three Gun Terry which Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) contributed to Black Mask
in 1922 and 1923. The term came of age when it was used to advertise Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red
Harvest in 1929; in this story, the detective was said to be ‘as hard-boiled as the criminals he pursues’.
By 1996, the critic George Pelecanos can confidently go further and compare Marlowe’s ‘hard-boiled’ way
of talking to ‘a kind of tough, dialectical shorthand’.
7
For the genesis of this type, we must return to Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire written in 1897.
In American film, modern examples include Matty Walker played by Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981)
and Catherine Tramell played Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992).
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Double Indemnity, Phyllis Nirdlinger conspires to murder her husband; in Cain’s The Postman
Always Rings Twice, Cora Smith takes part in the murder of her husband. In American cinema of
the 1940s, the character (played by Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Lauren Bacall)
becomes a staple of film noir, nowhere more vividly than in the films of these novels.
Chandler chooses to define Vivian’s fatal femininity by means of Marlowe’s references to her legs. He
attributes her feminine allure exclusively to her exhibited legs – which, even by Marlowe’s grudging
criteria, are ‘worth a stare’. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,
but that was then: in the 1930s, with Vivian Regan, anything goes ... 8 When he enters her boudoir,
Marlowe encounters her in a decadent pose, ‘stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her
slippers off’ so that he can stare at her legs ‘in the sheerest silk stockings’:
They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and
one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The
calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line
for a tone poem.
It is all that even the self-contained Marlowe can do to anatomise her without drooling: ‘arranged to
stare at’, her shapely legs get the viewing that they invite. His is a connoisseur’s appreciation of her
physique, expressed with a heterosexual candour; indeed, it is a frank admission for which –
characteristically – he makes no apology ... At the same time, he is still not impressed, for Vivian,
physically attractive though she may be, is morally repugnant to him, much as her little sister was. Her
designs upon him are arch and unsubtle: ‘beautiful’ though her legs are, worthy of his rhapsody though
they appear, their sheer elegance (‘with enough melodic line for a tone poem’) is not the point.
Unknown to Vivian, the point is that he has a code of ethics to honour ...
In Chapter III, Marlowe lets Vivian labour under the misapprehension that her father has engaged him
to find her missing husband, Rusty; as a consequence, they talk at cross-purposes. When she tries to
pump him for information, he remains hard-boiled and gives nothing away. This she cannot
understand: by showing a leg, brazenly offering herself to him, she has been presuming that Marlowe,
a ‘big dark handsome brute’, will readily put his lust for her before his loyalty to her father. Marlowe,
of course, has more self-respect and is not so easily biddable. He remains impassive and
uncommunicative, thereby angering her:
“I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,” she snapped. “And I don’t like your
manners.”
“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I
don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t
mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to
make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re
pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste
your time trying to cross-examine me.”
Here is Marlowe opening up and speaking in the judgemental voice which elsewhere and otherwise
conditions and informs his interior monologue. Deprecating and self-deprecating, critical and selfcritical, these – to be precise – are Marlowe’s two ‘manners’; no virtue-signaller, he is ironic both at
Vivian’s expense and at his own. “People,” retorts Vivian indignantly, “don’t talk like that to me ...”
Well, they do now. To her intense frustration, Marlowe makes himself clear: he is by no means unaware
of her sex appeal and not ill disposed to looking at her ‘very swell legs’, but he prides himself on being
impervious to feminine wiles and will not therefore be answering her questions. After he has left the
Sternwood premises, Marlowe reflects as follows:
She had lovely legs. I would say that for her.
8
Cole Porter wrote Anything Goes in 1934.
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Casual though the juxtaposition of these sentences seems, it expresses the relative merits of physical
beauty and moral worth. Even though there is not much to be said for such a promiscuous and
troublesome woman as Vivian Regan, Marlowe finds something: it can be said that she has ‘lovely legs’.
Such a reflection is not entirely idle, for it is a measure of Marlowe’s chivalry. Deeply though he
disapproves of her, he gives her credit where it is due: he is both gallant enough to recognise Vivian’s
finer points and fair-minded enough to concede that good looks, whilst they may not give dignity to a
woman, can – albeit ironically – create an impression of it. If he is allowed to take a pride in his probity,
then she can be allowed at least to take a pride in her appearance. Charitably, generously, he’ll ‘say
that for her’ ...
In Chapter VI, Philip Marlowe tracks Carmen Sternwood to Arthur Gwynn Geiger’s house at 7244
Laverne Terrace, off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Nowhere in the canon is there a more sublime example
of Chandler’s ‘hard-boiled’ style than in the description which Marlowe gives of the scene which
confronts him when he breaks the French window and enters the place:
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in,
although only one of them was dead.
How difficult it is to impress Marlowe can be gauged by how little he is impressed or perturbed by turns
of events which would shake or rock an average man. For the purpose of conveying Marlowe’s
sangfroid, Chandler’s style is consistently fit, frequently toughened – as it is here – by a talent for
understatement. At first, Marlowe neglects to mention that he has come across a corpse, postponing
this detail to the very end of the sentence where it is finally divulged in a subordinate clause, belatedly
added as if in an after-thought. Given the undramatic structure of this sentence, a reader will be
waiting for some such adjective as ‘asleep’ or ‘blindfolded’ or ‘drunk’ to complete it; what brings the
chapter to a dramatic conclusion is the placing of ‘dead’ in a context which is just not expecting it.
Reverse the order of the clauses (so that its grammar might please a purist) and at once the double
drama – of the sensational revelation and Marlowe’s indifferent reaction to it – is lost. Such indifference
is incongruous and thereby creates a kind of dark, deadpan humour ... Because of the grammatical
and rhythmical organisation of this one sentence, Chapter IV ends with a noirish flourish: it leaves us
both shocked by a grim discovery and then amused by Marlowe’s nonchalant reaction to it.
The ‘dead’ person is Arthur Gwynn Geiger, pornographic bookseller and blackmailer: he is ‘on his back
on the floor’ and has been shot three times. The living person is Carmen Sternwood: she is sitting on
‘a high-backed teakwood chair’, but is in a catatonic state: ‘They were mad eyes’. Marlowe devotes
no fewer than sixteen lines to the description of the pose in which Carmen is sitting, once more
postponing to the very end of a paragraph the detail upon which the eye of a more easily startled, less
chivalrous dick would instantly alight:
She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had
probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.
The meditation on the earrings, coming as it does before the disclosure that Carmen is naked, is
characteristic of the aplomb with which Chandler’s Marlowe always reacts. If he remains unmoved by
a dead body, then he isn’t very likely to be fazed by a naked one.
Only after this disclosure does Marlowe permit himself to compose a rhapsody on Carmen’s physical
allure. His six adjectives – ‘She had a beautiful body, small, lithe, compact, firm, rounded’ – fully
explain why Geiger was eager to take flash-photographs of her in the nude. Marlowe, however, has
no intention of taking advantage of the situation, for here, in literal form, he is seeing only that naked
damsel in distress. Although he is ‘a leg man’, he looks at her legs ‘without ruttishness’ and remarks:
As a naked girl she was not there in that room at all. She was just a dope.
To me she was always just a dope.
Carmen is there not ‘as a naked girl’, but as a vulnerable female in need of male assistance.
Furthermore, the repetition of ‘dope’ is designed to indicate that, where Carmen is concerned, the
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epithet has both of its meanings. ‘She was just a dope’: first, she is dopey, stupid in the common and
metaphorical sense of the word. ‘To me she was always just a dope’: second, she is a drug-user, full
of ‘dope’ and therefore ‘stupid’ in the literal sense of the word in that she is ‘always’ in a narcotic stupor.
Because she is under the influence of ‘ether’, Carmen dribbles and chuckles and giggles ... The precise
measure of Marlowe’s chivalry can seen in the care that he then takes to convey her discreetly and
modestly to her car. He does not bother to fiddle pruriently with her underwear, but picks up her
jersey dress (‘a pale green rough wool dress of the pull-on type’) and manages to fit it over her head.
When she is still unable to walk unaided, he ‘swathes her in her coat’, sweeps her up ‘and carries her
out to the car’, finally driving her home and delivering her safely to her front door on Alta Brea Crescent.
Equally instructive is Marlowe’s re-encounter with Vivian Regan. In Chapter XXII, Vivian reappears at
The Cypress Club in Las Olindas, a casino run by Eddie Mars, a notorious and versatile racketeer. In
Chapter XXIII, she emerges from this casino with her winnings: when she does so, Marlowe, her knight
errant, her ‘bodyguard’, foils an attempt to mug her. Repartee between them re-commences in ‘hardboiled’ style:
“... What are you doing here?”
“Eddie Mars wanted to see me.”
“I didn’t know you knew him. Why?”
“I don’t mind telling you. He thought I was looking for somebody he thought
had run away with his wife.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“Then what did you come for?”
“To find out why he thought I was looking for somebody he thought had run
away with his wife.”
From this smart dialogue, it sounds as if Marlowe is suddenly happy to strike up a rapport with her ...
He is, for he has an ulterior motive. He takes her to a drugstore where they drink black coffee laced
with rye whisky. So atmospheric are Chandler’s nocturnes that urban America of the 1940s – from Los
Angeles to New York – has been defined by them: in this description, it is very difficult not to perceive
an exact inspiration for Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks (1942) in which an identical
‘clerk’ serves a man and a woman from a nickel urn. Then, Marlowe drives Vivian to Del Rey where he
parks the car ‘a few hundred yards’ from the sea: here, ‘the surf curled and creamed, almost without
sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness’. 9 It is in this heady atmosphere
that Vivian, talking in the lingo of a comic strip character, makes another attempt to seduce him: “Hold
me close, you beast.” This time, she succeeds ... At first, Marlowe kisses her ‘tightly and quickly’, both
adverbs suggesting a certain degree of reluctance, a lack of commitment; it is as if he is consenting to
a screen kiss, allowing himself to lower his lips to this task only because the script requires it. Only
gradually and guiltily does he begin to enjoy the sensation of a woman willingly giving herself to him:
I kept kissing her. After a long time she pulled her head away enough to say:
“Where do you live?”
As soon as he is certain that she wants to go back to his place, Marlowe (“What has Eddie Mars got on
you?”) seeks to exploit the situation, but speaks too abruptly, too clumsily and too soon ...
“So that’s the way it is,” she said in a soft dull voice.
“That’s the way it is. Kissing is nice, but your father didn’t hire me to sleep
with you.”
Gallantly, he confesses that he likes kissing her, but concedes that, yes, he does have a professional
reason for doing so. He is ‘not blind or without senses’ and can see that she is a physically attractive
9
Chandler’s prose is remarkable for its metaphysical similes: comparisons which, whilst they may
sometimes strive too hard for effect, usually succeed in fusing an abstract reflection with a concrete
observation. On Raymond Chandler’s flair for simile, there is an entire thesis waiting to be written.
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woman. He has ‘warm blood like the next guy’ and fancies women, but finds that some of them show
an alarming lack of discernment and put up a startling lack of resistance: “You’re easy to take – too
damned easy.” As a consequence, he has been kissing her not because he has fallen for her undoubted
charms, but mainly because – for a white knight in a shady world – it was the morally expedient way
to proceed. Originally tasked by General Sternwood to keep tabs on his wilder child, Carmen, Marlowe
has now taken it upon himself to find out what malign hold Eddie Mars has on the dying man’s other
daughter:
“... What has Eddie Mars got on you?”
“If you say that again, I’ll scream.”
“Go ahead and scream.”
She jerked away and pulled herself upright, far back in the corner of the car.
“Men have been shot for little things like that, Marlowe.”
With an ironic perspicacity, Vivian warns him that it is dangerous to trifle with the affections of a
Sternwood girl. Typically unmoved, Marlowe (“I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it”) retorts that he
doesn’t mix business with pleasure/‘work’ with ‘play’. To Marlowe’s honourable way of thinking, he
would have betrayed the old man’s trust if he had turned a semi-professional duty to look after
Vivian into a personal opportunity to sleep with her. Such opportunism would not have been right
– and, in any case, he still does not think that much of Mrs Vivian Regan, for, ‘lovely’ though she
looks, ‘softly’ though she kisses, she is no prize. As he told her to her face, she would have been
‘too easy’ a lay.
Vivian, needless to say, does not see things in this scrupulous and high-minded way and resents
him for having been able to kiss her at length, but without any loss of composure or self-control:
“You kept your head beautifully.” Gallantly and repeatedly though he protests that he ‘liked kissing’
her, she cannot help but feel patronised and in addition be sensitive to a harsh truth: that, in his
eyes, her physical glamour cannot compensate for her lack of moral worth, her sexual easiness. “I
like kissing you ...” and “I liked kissing you ...” She is likeable to kiss. Kindly, magnanimously, he’ll
say that for her, but it is not enough ... After she asks him to drive her home, she does not say
another word.
It is in Chapter XXIV that Philip Marlowe re-encounters Carmen Sternwood. From Chapter I,
Chandler has characterised Carmen by her feline predatoriness (‘little sharp predatory teeth’) and
her acute awareness of her own animal attractiveness to men – an attribute about which she
giggles uncontrollably and for which she uses the euphemistic adjective ‘cute’ (“I’m cute too”). As
soon as he re-enters his apartment at the Hobart Arms, Marlowe is aware that ‘something’ is wrong;
instantly, he detects ‘something on the air, a scent’; subsequently, he sees that there is ‘something
across the floor in front of [him] that shouldn’t have been there’. By this third usage, ‘something’
has become a metonym for the alien presence in his room. When he flicks on the light, he sees
that the retractable bed is ‘down’ and discovers what it is: ‘Something in it giggled’. In his bed is
‘something’ not altogether human, a creature that he then proceeds to reveal by means of
synecdoche:
A blonde head was pressed into my pillow. Two bare arms curved up and the
hands belonging to them were clasped on top of the blonde head. Carmen
Sternwood lay on her back, in my bed, giggling at me ... She smiled. Her small,
sharp teeth glinted.
“Cute, aren’t I?” she said.
Chandler’s characterisation of Carmen is consistent and systematic: indeed, her giggles bring to
Marlowe’s mind the sound of ‘rats behind a wainscoting in an old house’ and her head rolls
‘kittenishly’. At this juncture, Chandler organises his narrative in order to make an explicit and
symbolic point: in response to Carmen’s stealthy materialisation in his room, Marlowe goes to his
chessboard (conveniently situated on a card table under a desk lamp) and – both literally and
metaphorically – considers his next move. Visually prompted, he recalls that Carmen hasn’t ‘any
more moral sense than a cat’ (Chapter I) and enters into his dialogue with her accordingly:
© English Association and Peter Cash 2016
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“I’m all undressed,” she said, after I had smoked and stared at her for a
minute.
“By God,” I said, “it was right at the back of my mind. I was groping for it. I
almost had it, when you spoke. In another minute I’d have said ‘I bet you’re
all undressed.’ I always wear my rubbers in bed myself in case I wake up
with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it.”
“You’re cute.” She rolled her head a little, kittenishly. Then she took her left
hand from under her head, and took hold of the covers, paused dramatically,
and swept them aside. She was undressed all right. She lay there on the bed
in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl. 10
Here, at his most imperturbable, his most unemotional, is Marlowe explaining to Carmen just how
unimpressed he is by her nudity – not least because he has quite literally seen it ‘all’ before. Not for
the first time, he is not led into temptation, but retains his equanimity, even stealing an expression
from Carmen’s idiolect (‘all undressed’) in order to play comically with it in his description of her
‘naked’ offer: ‘She was undressed all right’. Drier wit hath no man: he emphasises how obviously
‘undressed’ she is and thereby implies the height of the ‘glistening’ temptation that he must resist.
Not only to cinema-goers of the 1970s, but also to cinema historians, movie buffs of both that century
and this, Marlowe’s way of talking here – with its heavy accents of self-parody – may sound extremely
familiar. It is a measure of Chandler’s cultural reach, his legacy to us, that one of the most famous
film-speeches of all time should echo Marlowe’s verbalised dramatisation of his own thought-process.
Here in 1971 is Clint Eastwood as Inspector Harry Callahan, speaking to that armed robber over
whom he is standing on a San Franciscan street:
“I know what you’re thinking: ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you
the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a
.44 Magnum, the most powerful hand-gun in the world, and would blow your
head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well,
do you, punk?”
Like Marlowe, Dirty Harry Callahan is remarkable for keeping his composure under extreme
provocation – be it sexual or violent. Callahan is made in Marlowe’s image in that he too is prepared
to sacrifice himself in the service of a moral cause superior to the law.
To Carmen’s consternation, Marlowe retains his self-possession. Ignoring her coquettish poses, he
proceeds to hold with her the same conversation as he held with her sister. Courteously, patiently,
he explains himself: it isn’t that he doesn’t ‘appreciate’ her offer of sex, but that he has a higher
priority. To this end, he makes a pledge: “I’m your friend. I won’t let you down – in spite of yourself.”
Given his straight approach to his line of work, Marlowe’s ambition is to befriend her, not to sleep
with her, for that [= a sexual involvement] would only be a bar to saving her and isn’t therefore ‘the
way to do it ...’
“... Now will you dress like a nice little girl?”
She shook her head from side to side.
“Listen,” I ploughed on ... “It’s a question of professional pride. You know –
professional pride. I’m working for your father. He’s a sick man, very frail, very
helpless. He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts. Won’t you please get
dressed, Carmen?”
10 One detail remains indicative of the delicate sensibilities of the 1930s. Considering that The Big Sleep is a
novel in which Carmen (aged 20) twice appears in the nude, first because she is being photographed for a dirty
magazine, it is somewhat quaint that Marlowe, elsewhere lavish and even salacious in his descriptions of the
female form, makes not one mention of her breasts. This, after all, is the immodest era of Jean Harlow, Tallulah
Bankhead and Mae West – all of whom Carmen, with her platinum blondeness and her sultry poses, is meant to
resemble.
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Sadly, his fine talk of ‘professional pride’ cuts no more ice with Carmen than it did with Vivian. This
is where he says to her what he said to her sister: that her ‘frail’ father has employed him to rescue
her from the ‘road to perdition’, not to help her make further progress along it. In gentlemanly
manner, Marlowe continues to reason with her: he has been hired to pull her out of the slime, not to
drag her more deeply into it. He has accepted this commission in good faith and been trusted ‘not
to pull any stunts ...’ Won’t she ‘please’ stop flirting with him and put her clothes on?
Chivalry gets him nowhere ... Even at the second time of asking, Carmen refuses to co-operate,
staying right where she is, still hoping that he will give up and get into the bed with her: as Robert
F. Moss observed, “old standards of honour and loyalty no longer function.” There is no point in
appealing to Carmen’s better nature because she doesn’t have one: at the end of the game, she
knows only that her advances have been spurned and that she hasn’t got her own way ... To signify
Marlowe’s recognition of this new order, Chandler’s direction of this scene takes a theatrical turn:
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I
put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game.
It wasn’t a game for knights.
Reluctantly, Marlowe recognises that, in Carmen’s world, his chivalrous approach means nothing;
hers is not a world in which he can play ‘the knight’ with any great hope of success. It is therefore
time for him to stop jousting with her: not to play the ‘game’ by a different code of rules, but to quit
this particular battlefield altogether. While he is in the kitchen, Carmen continues to wonder why he
has not succumbed to her naked charms:
It’s so hard for women – even nice women – to realize that their bodies are not
irresistible.
When he returns from the kitchen, she has still not figured out what keeps him off her and, in a final
throw of the covers, bares her ‘beautiful’ body again. Only slowly does she figure him out: he does
not want to share his bed with her, not because he doesn’t find her attractive, but because he doesn’t
like her. On Galahad’s scale of values, her physical beauty can in no way compensate for her lack of
moral worth.
Incoherent with rage, Carmen reacts to Marlowe’s five entreaties to ‘get dressed’ with an appropriate
succession of feline hisses, each a literal letting off of steam: for her, his simile – ‘like a cat in long
grass stalking a young blackbird – is completely consistent with the five references to ‘the hissing
sound’ that comes out of her mouth. Carmen, it becomes very plain, is not just any ‘stray broad’, for
there was ‘something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that [Marlowe] had never seen in a
woman’s eyes’. ‘Something’ ... Behind her eyes is a psychotic anger.
Disturbed by her very presence in his apartment, Marlowe no longer wants her there. His room is
‘not much’ of a room, but has the unique virtue of being his room: it is the room he has to live in, all
he has ‘in the way of a home’, containing ‘everything’ that has ‘any association’ for him ... Carmen
Sternwood has invaded this space and, like a cat, marked his territory with her scent; she has
desecrated his inner sanctum. As a result, Marlowe (‘I couldn’t stand her in that room any longer’)
gives her an ungentlemanly ultimatum:
“I’ll give you three minutes to get dressed and out of here. If you’re not out
by then, I’ll throw you out – by force. Just the way you are, naked ...”
It is a measure of the impact that Marlowe’s threat makes on her that Carmen is ‘dressed in a little
over two minutes’. It is both instructive and ominous that, as she dresses, she makes an ‘animal’
noise and seems ‘full of some jungle emotion’. As she dresses, he watches her, not because he
enjoys ogling her, but because he means coldly to carry out his threat if she dallies: ‘I timed it’. After
she has gone, Marlowe (‘I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely’) feels that
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his home has been violated and needs to be fumigated, purified: that is, it needs making fit again for
human habitation. Women, he concludes in his savage temper, make him ‘sick’.
No ‘broad’ in the novel resembles Jean Harlow (1911-1937) more closely than Eddie Mars’ estranged
wife, Mona: to disguise herself, she has had her hair cut short and taken to wearing a platinum wig
in which she looks like Hollywood’s ‘Blonde Bombshell’ herself. “She was so platinumed that her hair
shone like a silver fruit bowl,” wise-cracks Marlowe to himself. It is in Chapter XXVIII that Philip
Marlowe encounters her, but not under propitious circumstances. In his altruistic quest for Rusty
Regan, Marlowe heads out of Los Angeles and finds his way to a garage a mile from the city of Realito
[= Rialto on the outskirts of San Bernardino]: ‘Art Huck – Motor Repairs and Painting’. Here, his
appearance has aroused suspicion with the result that he has been knocked out and tied up. It is
Mona Mars who tends to him when he comes round, courageously setting him free, cutting the ropes
which bind him and searching for the key to the handcuffs. Glamorous though she is in her silver
wig, Mona Mars does not make him sick; on the contrary, she is a compassionate and dignified
woman of whom he approves and with whom he strikes up an immediate rapport. Because he is in
handcuffs, Marlowe cannot take her in his arms, but is determined to seal his approval of her with
a kiss: “Kiss me, Silver-Wig.” Mona he kisses because he likes her. It is not insignificant that, in the
very last sentence of the novel, he should find himself thinking fondly of her ...
Theories about Rusty Regan’s disappearance abound throughout the novel. In Chapter I, General
Sternwood remains confident that he’ll hear from his son-in-law “one of these days”; in Chapter XI,
Vivian Regan is confident that “Eddie’s blonde wife is the lady Rusty ran away with”; in Chapter XXV,
Harry Jones is certain that “Eddie Mars had Regan bumped off” [for eloping with Mona]; and in
Chapter XXVIII, Mona herself is certain that Marlowe will find him “alive and well somewhere, when
he wants to be found.” All of these people believe that Rusty is alive, although only one of them
knows that he is dead ...
Only ‘five days’ after he visited Alta Brea Crescent for his first meeting with General Sternwood,
Marlowe is called to the Sternwood mansion for a second meeting. At the end of Chapter XXX,
Chandler’s planning is impeccable: on entering the main hallway, Marlowe cannot help but notice
that ‘the knight in the stained-glass window still wasn’t getting anywhere untying the naked damsel
from the tree’. In this context, it is highly ironic that General Sternwood should wish to admonish
Marlowe for having initiated his own search for Rusty Regan: by consulting Captain Gregory of the
Missing Persons Bureau without permission, hasn’t he ‘betrayed a trust’? Exceeded his brief? Acted
unethically? By General Sternwood’s strict standards, he has – one possible reason [= that he hasn’t
completed the job to the General’s satisfaction] why it would ‘mean something’ to Marlowe to repay
the fee of five hundred dollars.11 Here, however, is Marlowe spelling out his own code of conduct in
which moral expediency is allowed to play its part. Although he was not specifically enjoined to find
Rusty Regan, find Rusty Regan was the right thing to do ... But he didn’t find Rusty Regan: that,
says Marlowe to the General, is “why I thought I should give you back your money – because it isn’t
a completed job by my standards.” The italics are not in Chandler’s text, but should be in order to
emphasise that Marlowe’s searching for Rusty represents a greater good than confining himself to
his Carmen brief. To his instant credit, General Sternwood can see what Marlowe is saying and
promptly confers approval on his alternative code by offering him ‘another thousand dollars to find
Rusty ...’
When Marlowe steps outside, he re-encounters Carmen: predictably, ‘she jumped up and whirled like
a cat’. In Chapter XV, he had seen fit – for safety’s sake – to confiscate ‘her little pearl-handled gun’;
here, in Chapter XXXI, he returns it to her. Less predictably, she asks him there and then to teach
her how to shoot and suggests that they drive to one of the Sternwoods’ derelict oil-fields on the
edge of the city:
“Stand there, you son of a bitch,” she said.
11
As Robert F. Moss points out, this is exactly how a pupil of Dulwich School in 1901 [= Chandler] would
have been expected to behave.
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When Carmen pointed the gun at him, her face ‘became animal ... not a nice animal’: presumably,
her eyes once more wore that look – of psychotic rage – which he had never ‘seen in a woman’s
eyes’ before. When she fired all five chambers of the gun at him, it finally became clear what had
happened to Rusty Regan ... Fortunately, Marlowe had ‘had a hunch’ and had taken the precaution
of loading all five chambers of the little revolver with blanks. ‘Not being bullet-proof is an idea I had
had to get used to’ (Chapter XIII). Having ‘got used’ to that particular ‘idea’, he has lived to tell
Rusty’s tale ...
In Chapter XXXII, he is with Vivian Regan, telling that tale, sharing with her what he knows and
confronting her with what she knows. His summary moves with a convincing fluency towards the
recent night when Carmen sneaked into his bed only to be rejected and thrown out of it ‘on her ear’:
“I guess maybe Regan did the same thing to her some time. But you can’t do that to Carmen.” At
first, Vivian makes a big and false show of not knowing what he is talking about:
“You son of a bitch!” she said.
This is the cue for Marlowe to embark on a 26-line monologue in which he defines for her his idea of
‘a son of a bitch’ in sarcastic, self-deprecating terms. One rant stands out, its spoken rhythms entirely
characteristic of the ‘hard-boiled’ style in which he narrates:
“I do all this for twenty-five bucks a day – and maybe just a little to protect
what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought
that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild,
as many nice girls are these days, they are not perverts and killers. And that
makes me a son of a bitch ...”
Of course, Carmen, the nude model and the murderer of her brother-in-law, is both a pervert and a
killer. At last, Vivian relents and reveals what Eddie Mars has on her. She confesses that Carmen is
‘not normal’, not only because she shot her sister’s husband for refusing to sleep with her, but also
because she ‘came home’ after killing him and told her sister about it – at which point we can hear
at last the proleptic irony of Vivian’s remark to Marlowe in Chapter XXIII: there, upset by his rebuff
of her advances, she informed him – most reliably, as it turns out – that “men have been shot for
little things like that ...” In that crisis, Vivian had turned to Eddie Mars: he it was who arranged for
the disposal of Rusty’s body, consigning it to the sump of an old well where it remains in the throes
of decomposition even as they speak. She thereby placed herself forever in Eddie’s power,
mortgaging to him her entire future in that, upon her father’s death, he – ‘a pornographer, a
blackmailer, a hot car broker, a killer by remote control, and a suborner of crooked cops’ – would
effectively assume control of her inherited wealth.
From the outset, Vivian’s priority has been to protect her family, not only her ‘little sister’, but also
her ‘sick father’, cruelly crippled in a riding accident. In Chapter XXIII, she had admitted to Marlowe
that keeping ‘things’ about Carmen from her father was a constant concern: “I don’t want him to die
despising his own blood. It was always wild blood, but it wasn’t always rotten blood.” In Chapter
XXXII, she explains that, when Carmen went so far as to kill Rusty, his beloved son-in-law, she could
not turn to her father for that same reason: “It’s not his dying – it’s what he would be thinking just
before he died.” Vivian feels obliged to become her sister’s keeper and her father’s saviour. Wild
though her own blood was, it was not ‘rotten blood’ until it became contaminated by her implication
in Carmen’s crime, covering it up and in the process associating herself with criminal types who
proceed to prey on her. From the outset, Philip Marlowe has been a champion of mediaeval values,
foremost among which is gentillesse, a concept of gentlemanliness defined by the gracious exercise
of magnanimity. Accordingly, he has sympathy with Vivian’s priority and insists only and generously
that Carmen be kept where she can no longer pose a threat to reluctant lovers. Familiar only with
an unforgiving world, Vivian (“I don’t know how to begin”) does not ‘know how’ to respond to such
courtly forbearance ...
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The Big Sleep rushes towards a powerful and memorable conclusion, its issues swiftly encapsulated
and resolved in a dynamic prose. In the penultimate paragraph of the novel, Philip Marlowe justifies
his generosity of spirit by some tough talking:
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in
a marble tower on top of a hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big
sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same
as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the
nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
His ready answer to his own question is that it doesn’t matter at all because the dead, lest we forget,
are oblivious, not only to the various circumstances of their burials, but also to their deaths
themselves. They are ‘sleeping the big sleep’, a romantic and euphemistic form of metonymy for a
gruesome and intractable reality;12 he therefore reckons that he can afford a harsh indifference.
Rhetorically, Marlowe shrugs off the grave issue of Rusty’s demise, replacing it with a humane
concern for General Sternwood’s peace of mind: ‘But the old man didn’t have to be.’ After his week
with the Sternwoods, he is anxious to rise above the nasty slime. He decides to see Rusty Regan’s
death in a realistic and utterly unsentimental perspective and reasons expediently that General
Sternwood should be permitted to die in peace: ‘lie quiet on his canopied bed’. This is a move which,
in ‘a game for knights’, represents a gentler and higher good than going ahead and reporting a
damsel-in-distress to the police.
Peter Cash was Head of English Studies at Newcastle-under-Lyme School in Staffordshire
1985-2009. He is an Emeritus Fellow of The English Association.
12
Chandler’s metonym is something of a counter-weight to an earlier form: “To die will be an awfully big adventure”
– J. M. Barrie Peter Pan (1904) Chapter 8.
© English Association and Peter Cash 2016
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English Association Bookmarks Number 79
Raymond Chandlerl: The Big Sleep by Peter Cash is Number 79 in the Bookmark series, published by
The English Association
University of Leicester
Leicester LE1 7RH
UK
Tel: 0116 229 7622
Fax: 0116 229 7623
Email: [email protected]
Potential authors are invited to contact the following at the address above:
Series Editor
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Primary Bookmarks
Children’s Literature Interest Group
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Key Stage 3 Bookmarks
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