THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler

GRADE: C+

*Book 1 of the Philip Marlowe Series*

Private dick Philip Marlowe takes a blackmail case involving an old rich man and his two crazy-ass daughters and ultimately gets more than he bargained for in the form of racketeering and dirty picture-book smut. I really wanted to like this one more than I did. It's one of the top essential classics of not just the hardboiled noir genre but of the crime genre in general. I read somewhere that Chandler came up with the book by cobbling a few of his old short stories together. Well it shows. The plot is so muddled and the double and triple-crosses so tangled, that I unfortunately just stopped caring after a while. But Chandler really does have a gift with words that's nearly unmatched, and that definitely elevates the material. I will definitely give the other books in the series a try soon.