The Big Sleep

The aged and ailing General Sternwood made a fortune in oil and became a father relatively late in life. He muses that “a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets” (9); his two daughters are, indeed, a handful. Sternwood wants to protect Carmen from trouble (some of which seems to be caused by her neurological condition); he hires Marlowe to squelch a blackmail attempt involving her recent misdeeds.

Marlowe respects Sternwood for his honesty and perceptive wisdom; he and Vivian protect the old general from the knowledge that his younger daughter killed his best friend, Vivian’s husband, Rusty Regan, in cold blood. Sternwood’s situation symbolizes the tragedy of limitless wealth and how it can permit people to indulge their darker urges, sometimes with terrible consequences.

Vivian Sternwood Regan is the most complex character in the novel. Neither protagonist nor antagonist, she’s caught in the middle, trying to protect her family from scandal while searching for someone, perhaps Marlowe, who can help her to navigate the problems she faces.

General Sternwood describes his sultry and beautiful elder daughter as “spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless” (8). She has black hair and the same black eyes as her father. Marlowe says she’s “tall and rangy and strong-looking” (11), with a more discreet version of the flirty personality of her sister. When Vivian’s younger sister Carmen murders Vivian’s husband, Regan, for refusing a sexual dalliance, Vivian covers up the murder; after doing so, Vivian must pay protection money to Eddie Mars, whom she hired to dispose of Regan’s body and who now can siphon off her wealth through blackmail. She pays Mars by gambling at his casino and purposely losing.

Vivian interviews Marlowe, her queries both flirtatious and testy as she tries to determine whether his work for her father will reveal the truth about her sister, or if perhaps he’s the one man among all those she knows whom she can trust. She thus both pushes him away and pulls him closer. However, although Marlowe seems to be attracted to Vivian, he refuses to become romantically involved with her, citing professional ethics.

Carmen, the younger Sternwood daughter, is pretty, flirty, and flighty. Her father says she’s “a child who likes to pull wings off flies” (8). To Marlowe, “she was always just a dope” (25). In truth, Carmen is the main antagonist: Her behavior threatens to expose the family to public scandal, and her sense of entitlement with men leads her to try to murder those who reject her. Much of the story’s mystery surrounds the disappearance of Rusty Regan, Vivian’s husband, whom Carmen shot in the same way she tries to kill Marlowe.

Carmen experiences periodic epileptic seizures. Her condition is poorly diagnosed and poorly managed—though some of this is due to the novel’s under-researched approach to neurological conditions and mental health in women. Carmen’s symptoms sometimes appear when she’s under great stress, cause her to have short-term memory loss, and make her inappropriately sexually aggressive in ways that defy the gender norms of her time. The novel ends by consigning her to an institution—a typical way to subdue unruly women in the early to mid-20th century within the real world, as mental health institutions disproportionately housed marginalized and oppressed peoples.

Though she is not a classic femme fatale who manipulates men toward a specific goal, her name echoes that of the title character in George Bizet’s famous opera Carmen (1875), who drives men wild with desire that leads to a murder. Carmen’s wild behavior is the source of all the problems that Marlowe must solve; her actions force several characters into morally ambiguous situations.

Arthur Gwynn Geiger owns a store that rents illicit pornographic books. A nearby legitimate bookseller describes him as “[m]edium height, fattish. Would weigh about a hundred and sixty pounds. Fat face, Charlie Chan moustache, thick soft neck. Soft all over” (20). Geiger collects oriental art and lives in a house in Laurel Canyon above Hollywood. At home, Geiger photographs an intoxicated, naked Carmen Sternwood for blackmail material, but he’s shot and killed by Owen Taylor, one of Carmen’s lovers. The photo becomes highly sought after by blackmailers, and its threat to the Sternwoods drives the plot.

Geiger is a gay man; his identity repulses the homophobic Marlowe, who describes everything about Geiger with derisive stereotyping and refers to the dead man with derogatory slurs. Marlowe’s exaggerated hostility toward Geiger occasions much of the novel’s criticism.

The district attorney’s chief investigator, Bernie Ohls, is “a medium-sized blondish man with stiff white eyebrows, calm eyes and well-kept teeth” (31). Tough-minded, practical, and no-nonsense, Ohls once worked alongside Marlowe at the DA’s office, and he gives his friend a lead on a new client, General Sternwood. The two detectives find themselves working the same case, sometimes at cross purposes, but Marlowe helps Ohls and the police find a way to avoid revealing their corrupt connections to Geiger’s illegal activities. Ohls is a good man in a compromised professional situation and a good contact for Marlowe at City Hall.

Sternwood’s butler “was a tall, thin, silver man, sixty or close to it or a little past it. He had blue eyes as remote as eyes could be. His skin was smooth and bright and he moved like a man with very sound muscles” (3). Every inch a proper butler, Norris is unfailingly polite; he must balance his sometimes conflicting loyalties to General Sternwood, Vivian, and Carmen. Marlowe initially makes fun of Norris but learns to admire him because both men are ultimately servants of the rich.

Norris symbolizes a competence and professionalism that Marlowe respects: Even when serving the duplicitous ends of his employers, Norris’s even-keeled behavior retains a gloss of righteousness. Norris calls this trait “the soldier’s eye” (160), a trait he perceives in Marlowe as well.

Proprietor of the Cypress Club casino, Eddie Mars has his fingers in various criminal pies: Mars oversaw Geiger’s blackmail operation, knows about Carmen’s murder of Regan, and blackmails Vivian into regularly losing at Mars’s roulette tables as a means of siphoning off her money. When Mars encounters Marlowe, he tries to treat the detective like an underling, assuming that the detective is as much for hire as the many goons Mars employs.

Eddie Mars represents the sophisticated, smart, and ruthless leaders of local crime whom Marlowe must face during his investigations—he is one of the novel’s embodiments of The Dark Underbelly of Glamour. While his casino has surface-level class, Mars is deeply enmeshed in the seamy side of LA.

Mars’s surname is that of the ancient Roman god of war and violence; its similarity to Marlowe’s name suggests that the two men are evenly matched in cunning. In the story, they’re frenemies who must maneuver carefully around one another.

A tall, tanned man, Joe Brody is an ex-lover of Carmen Sternwood who runs into financial problems and seeks a way out by blackmailing her father about Carmen’s behavior. He later steals a naked picture of Carmen and blackmails her directly. Brody is not involved in Geiger’s murder, but his proximity to the events surrounding it make Geiger’s partner, Carol Lundgren, assume that he is Geiger’s murderer; Lundgren shoots Brody dead in mistaken revenge.

Brody represents the flip side of Marlowe: Brody is a criminal with more looks than brains whose greed and disregard for others lead him into lethal trouble, showing what might befall Marlowe if he were to give in to his impulses and desires.

Geiger’s partner, Carol Lundgren lives with Geiger and works at Geiger’s store. Anguished by Geiger’s murder, Carol believes incorrectly that Joe Brody is the killer, and he shoots him dead. Apprehended by Marlowe, Carol fights vigorously, cursing the detective, until he’s brought under control. His violence is a sign both of his criminal nature and his great love for Geiger.

Marlowe describes Carol: “Moist dark eyes shaped like almonds, and a pallid handsome face with wavy black hair growing low on the forehead in two points. A very handsome boy indeed” (71-72). Carol’s gender-neutral name and beautiful face are oblique ways for the novel to signal that he is gay during a time when this sexual orientation was unlawful and generally condemned. Chandler’s depiction of Lundgren is meant to characterize him—and, by implication, other gay men—as deviant miscreants. This homophobic stance is somewhat par for the course for Chandler’s time, although contemporaries pointed out that Chandler was much more rabidly prejudiced against gay people than his peers. To modern readers, Carol’s understandable rage and his devotion to Geiger—as evidenced by his worshipful improvised funeral rites—mark him as a heroically tragic figure.

A paid assassin often in the employ of Eddie Mars, Lash Canino is described thus: “Short, heavy set, brown hair, brown eyes, and always wears brown clothes and a brown hat” (124). Canino is ruthless: He murders Harry Jones after trying to get information on the whereabouts of Agnes, a witness to Mars’s misdeeds (though Jones, loyal to a fault, manages to give Canino a fake address). Later, Mars hires Canino to hide Mona Mars at a safe house east of town; there, Marlowe gets into a lethal shootout with Canino. Canino represents the deadly power available to crime bosses, a disposable human weapon they can keep at arm’s length.

Mona Mars, née Grant, is a cabaret singer who attracts the attention of Rusty Regan and Eddie Mars, though Mars ends up marrying Mona. When Regan disappears a month into his marriage to Vivian, it appears he and Mona have run off together. In fact, Mona is forced to prove her loyalty to Mars by hiding out for a few weeks outside LA—a ruse to make the police think she and Regan are together, so that Mars doesn’t become a suspect in Regan’s murder.

Mona has a sexual allure that few men, including Marlowe, can resist. This allows her to side with whichever powerful man is closest. Mona swears love for Mars, but then helps Marlowe escape from Canino and kisses him after Marlowe explains the risk Mars puts her in by entrusting her to the brutal Canino. Mona’s doubts about whether to escape with Marlowe inspire him to rescue her; when he kills Canino, Mona reproaches Marlowe but also seems approving. This callousness is indicative of the moral universe of the novel’s world, whose survivors know to navigate the slippery edges between The Good, the Bad, and the Ambiguous.