Calling on Money
“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. 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. I was calling on four million dollars.”
Almost a hundred years ago, author Raymond Chandler wrote those words to kick off his best-selling novel and series. I thought about what he must have been doing. Probably smoking a cigarette and drinking scotch, like his famous detective, Phillip Marlowe. Smoking was not en vogue anymore, but I sipped my wine and had an Oreo instead, and tried to brood a little, to get myself in the atmosphere. After all, Chandler famously prioritized atmosphere and character over plot. There are many questions left unanswered in his mystery stories.
I scrolled through from the end of the book back to the beginning, on my e-reader. It was about nine o’clock at night, early June, with the palm trees swaying just outside the backyard and dry desert coolness in the air. I was wearing pajama pants, the way I had been for weeks now most days, since mid-March, when the nation went into lockdown for about eight weeks. By early June, all fifty states had begun to re-open, much to my chagrin. I was far away from my regular apartment in downtown Los Angeles near the university campus. I was in Loma Linda, about an hour out from San Bernardino. My friend and his grandmother were kind enough to let me stay, and break bread with them. Still, I felt an eerie connectedness to the dark and claggy Los Angeles Chandler portrayed in his pages.
While still young, the year 2020 has already drawn popular comparisons with the early twentieth century. The current unemployment rate rose catastrophically high in its first months, rivaling The Great Depression, a monumental event that shaped the hard-boiled crime genre that Raymond Chandler perfected. Even after an unexpected small recovery in May with the loosening of government suppressions, severe recession persists and the economy seems unpredictable. The much-discussed COVID-19 pandemic often recalled the 1918–1919 Spanish flu epidemic, the last memorable time the Western world had to learn difficult lessons about widespread airborne diseases. And of course, the culture now and in the 1930s reflects a shared perception, of varying levels of truth, of sharp socioeconomic inequality, rampant law enforcement violence, corruption, and a seedy criminal underworld rife with drugs and sex.
She’s a grifter, shamus. I’m a grifter. We’re all grifters. So we sell each other out for a nickel. Okey.” — Joe Brody
These shared social environments gave birth to the hard-boiled literary genre, which often featured a private detective who is pitted against the violence of organized crime and equally corrupt law enforcement during and after Prohibition (1920–1933). Rather than the interior psychological focus of noir fiction, hard-boiled crime fiction paints a setting of institutionalized social corruption.
It is difficult not to ponder the international protests which have swept the world in the past couple of weeks. This year, anti-racist, anti-police protests have erupted across the nation after a string of police murders: the Memorial Day murder of George Floyd, a 43-year-old man killed by Minneapolis police officer while three others did nothing, the Louisville murder of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor during a botched no-knock raid, and the murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick by two self-proclaimed white vigilantes. The parallels are not perfect, as The Big Sleep is a decidedly white novel, with almost no mention of characters of color, but it still mirrors the widespread disillusion and decades-long perception of police inefficacy and the privilege of the rich to exclude themselves from the rule of law.
“[Carmen Sternwood.] A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick.” — Phillip Marlowe
Looking out the window into the quiet suburbs, I remembered that the LAPD was a constant presence in my L.A. neighborhood, with helicopters flying over and sirens sounding nearly every night. The University of Southern California, founded in 1880, established a partnership between its Department of Public Safety and the LAPD, and they patrol the supposedly crime-ridden neighborhoods surrounding the historic campus, as white flight and urban poverty overtook the oldest parts of Los Angeles in the 20th century. Indeed, by 1939, detective Phillip Marlowe’s white-collar blackmail and racketeering, wealthy clients, and white criminals engaged in their activities mainly in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, still bastions of wealth today. When crime happened there, the “practical coppers” wanted it to exist out in the open.
[Speaking about a pornography lending library.] “Everybody knows the racket exists. Hollywood’s made to order for it. If a thing like that has to exist, then right out on the street is where all practical coppers want it to exist. For the same reason they favor red light districts. They know where to flush the game when they want to.” — Phillip Marlowe
So what’s to be made of it? Here, as I re-read the first pages, Phillip Marlowe doesn’t know what awaits him at this four-million-dollar mansion yet, the layers of crime, sex, drugs, and the selective arm of the law that awaits. So let’s join him.
The Investigation
We find Marlowe at the ominous, rainy Hollywood estate to which he will return again and again: a wealthy General Sternwood’s home, where he lives with his two “wild” daughters. Based on its descriptions, the location is widely believed to be based on Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, a 55-room, 46,000 square-foot Tudor Revival mansion built in 1928 by oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny. It is now owned by the city of Beverly Hills, became a city park and National Historic Place in 1970s, and remains a popular film shooting destination. Indeed, Chandler’s descriptions were spot-on.
“The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high…A free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery…There were French doors at the back of the hall…Beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage…Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.”
In the greenhouse, the ailing and elderly General assigns him to investigate an attempt by bookseller Arthur Geiger to blackmail his promiscuous daughter, Carmen. They were blackmailed successfully because of her deeds before, by another man named Joe Brody. The General mentions that he holds a dear affection for Irish bootlegger Rusty Regan, who married his eldest daughter Vivian and disappeared a short time ago. On Marlowe’s way out, Vivian calls him to see her and presses him on whether her father hired him to find Regan, but he will not say. The Sternwoods’ display of opulent California wealth has an ugly, tainted air to it, foreshadowing the layers of secrets Marlowe would yet uncover.
“[Vivian’s] room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared “towards the darkening foothills.”
The setting reminds me of a surreal summer when I spent a month with my much-wealthier roommate in her family home in La Cañada Flintridge, a notoriously affluent and isolated neighborhood in L.A. County. After a late-night party, a guy swept us along to his very similar mansion in Pasadena, built in 1928 as well. It alsohad a threatening air of secrets untold, as we snuck through the back ways, eventually coming to the opulent basement with wall-to-wall murals of medieval knights, and was just as alien an environment to me as any could be.
Marlowe tracks Geiger down to a shop on a busy street: “A.G. Geiger’s place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevard near Las Palmas.” Scouting LA traces the real-world location to the north side of Hollywood Boulevard, at the corner of Las Palmas. Here’s what it looked like in 1935:
He tails Geiger home to a fictional street called Laverne Terrace, stakes the house, and sees Carmen enter. Later, he hears a maniacal scream, a flash of light, three gunshots and two cars speeding away. He breaks into the home to find Geiger’s dead body and a drugged and naked Carmen, in front of an empty camera.
He takes her home, but upon returning to the home, finds Geiger’s body gone. The next day, old friend and police detective Ohls calls him to inform him of the discovery of the Sternwoods’ chauffeur, Owen Taylor. His body was found in a car driven off the “Lido” pier (probably Malibu in our world). The police tell him that he planned to run away with Carmen once upon a time, and marry her. He had a police record, which Marlowe mentions to Vivian upon meeting her in his office:
[Vivian] said negligently: “He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.”
Marlowe returns to the Geiger home without much luck. He merely encounters a gangster named Eddie Mars, who claims to own the house and have rented it to Geiger. Carmen keeps appearing, purportedly in search of her nude photos.
When he stakes out the Geiger bookstore, he sees that the suspicious book clerk Agnes and two men are bringing it to a “white apartment building.” It turns out to be Joe Brody’s home, the same petty criminal who once blackmailed Carmen. Marlowe retreats to his office, where Vivian awaits him.
“The cab took me downtown…to my office building. I had a room and a half on the seventh floor at the back.”
Marlowe famously worked on the seventh floor of the “Cahuenga Building” — actually the former Security Bank Building at the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga. It was a branch for the bank as well as a rented office space. In 1994, this intersection was renamed Raymond Chandler Square.
At the office, Vivian offers evidence that Carmen is being blackmailed with the nude photos from the previous night, and mentions that she gambles at Eddie Mars’s casino. When the bitter subject of Regan comes up, she volunteers the theory that he had run off with Eddie Mars’s common-law wife, Mona Grant.
Marlowe decides to return to Brody’s home. When making my way toward the La Brea Tar Pits last year, I remember riding a bus to a similar neighborhood, where beautiful houses sat in neat rows. If it was anything similar back then, it must have been difficult indeed to imagine such seedy events happening in that place. Indeed, the apartment itself seemed to be upper-middle-class:
“It was a cheerful room with good furniture and not too much of it. French windows in the end wall opened on a stone porch and looked across the dusk at the foothills.”
Of course, as with most beautiful things and people in the novel, these objects are to be the setting for bloodshed and death. Marlowe finds Brody in the apartment with Agnes, the book clerk. He demands the pictures and tells him he knows that he is blackmailing Carmen, even as Brody points a gun at him. Just then, someone knocks and Brody allows them in. It’s Carmen, of course, but unexpectedly, she is demanding her photos with her own gun as well. Right after Marlowe seems to regain control of the situation and Carmen goes home, another knock at the door comes and Brody is shot and killed.
Marlowe follows Brody’s killer to Geiger’s home, who turns out to be Carole Lundgen, Geiger’s gay lover. He shot Brody thinking he was Geiger’s killer. Marlowe subdues Lundgen and calls the police. Case closed. Right?
A Case Closed? A Tale of Knights?
After a discussion with the police, where they agree to change the stories of the murders to spare General Sternwood and his daughters, Marlowe returns to his residence at Hobart Arms on Franklin, near Kenmore. Over his breakfast, he reads a heavily fabricated story explaining the murders in the papers, giving all the credit to an unsavory head detective. The rich get off, of course, and the accounts “come as close to truth as they usually come… as close as Mars is to Saturn.”
Marlowe is still dissatisfied, especially by how Rusty Regan figures into all of this. He runs back around to many of the places he’s been before, seeking answers to a case that he believes may be more than it seems. Much like Marlowe, I’ve found that L.A. is a large and small city at the same time. As much as there are infinite places yet to be seen and that will never be seen, in each chapter of my time in L.A., I find myself returning to the same neighborhoods over and over again, and so many of them seemed like echoes of each other. As Marlowe recalls more of his ramblings about the city in pursuit of the case, Chandler captures this feeling perfectly:
“My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the same people, say the same words to them, over and and over again, and yet each time it seemed real, like something actually happening, and for the first time.”
As I read the book, it surprised me that after only a year in Los Angeles, I recognized the atmosphere of the places that Marlowe traverses. Perhaps the spirit of Los Angeles endures. A new and jaded kind of spirit, not one defined by knights and ladies anymore. The ideas of chivalry and knighthood has close ties with Anglo Europe, a forefather of some strong aspects of American ideals and romance. But in the Los Angeles of the 20th century, in the America of the 20th century, the codes of behavior that typified that medieval society have long-deteriorated even as they are venerated in the veneer of the city.
To much of the world, Los Angeles remains an aspirational city. Even the aesthetics of film noir and pulp fiction have been romanticized, idealized, and sanitized since the 1930s. But Phillip Marlowe tries to convey the sharpness, cynicism, and corruption of Los Angeles partly through the gravestones of knighthood.
At the beginning of the novel, Marlowe looks up to see a stained glass picture above the Sternwood mansion doors, which foreshadows his role in the Los Angeles landscape of men and women.
“Over the entrance doors … there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor 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 vizor 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.”
As indicated by Marlowe’s rather mocking perspective on the knight, he does not see himself as a knight in shining armor, contained by the “sociable” and showy codes that prevented him from really being of any use. Marlowe is an antihero, one that would have “climb[ed] up there” and gotten the job done. It indicates the trite and absurd imagery which this stained glass picture now holds in 1930’s Los Angeles society, but nevertheless the privileged ostensibly uphold.
Moreover, Carmen’s propensity in the novel to keep appearing naked and attempting to seduce Marlowe (with no mention of any “convenient” hair as a modicum of modesty as a lady in distress) points to the more overt and indelicate sex and women of the period. Though far from depicting widespread accepted casual sex, Chandler has a brusque attitude towards the many sexual encounters suggested in the novel which is a wide departure from the romanticized and chaste traditional ideal.
Another significant instance of the idea of knighthood appears when Carmen shamelessly attempts to seduce Marlowe by breaking into his apartment and laying on his bed, naked. It is here that Marlowe looks down at the chessboard in his room and moves the knight piece. But within the same scene, he retracts it:
“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.”
We see that the game of life, and the game of crime, sex, and blackmail in Los Angeles, is not relevant for knights any longer. We’re reminded of the stained-glass knight’s sexual suggestiveness and encouragement of the naked lady, and it serves as a sharp contrast to Marlowe’s refusal of Carmen’s offer of sex. He is no knight indeed, and knights no longer had any meaning in this world. But he forges ahead with a different kind of idea of a principled man. One who doesn’t sleep with his client’s daughter.
Indeed, at length, it is revealed that the deceptive lady-in-distress, Carmen Sternwood, is really the murderer of Rusty Regan. And Vivian Sternwood covered up the murder, rather unfeelingly. She never loved Regan, and she wished that her father would continue to believe the best that he could of his daughters while he lived. The key to the case lay at the ominous Sternwood manor all along.
The City of Movies, Lies, and Wall-to-Wall Carpet
I have lived in at least a few different places in my life: Jakarta, Bandung, Austin, and now Los Angeles. But Los Angeles is indeed a distinctly special city. Chandler captures a special part of its evolution and its timeless unique energy, burning with a sinister flame through the parties in the Hills, and the small fires on Skid Row, and the night lights in Malibu.
As Marlowe leaves the manor, he ponders the state of Rusty Regan, shot dead by a disturbed woman in the deserted oil wells and dumped in an oil slump. And General Sternwood, who will die spared of the illicit knowledge of his daughters that would likely break his heart
“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high 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.”
These words points to a salvation that comes only in death, to sweep the tired individuals caught by the backdrop of social corruption out of their stations. The grifters Marlowe encounters are trapped by their need for money and survival, rather than a malicious want to commit these acts. The police run the city on their own terms and don’t seem to be very effective in solving crimes at all. The rich, including the murderers who did it out of spite (Carmen) or their own self-interest (Vivian) get away scot-free. In death, these cares about pride and survival are mercifully taken away.
In death, Regan does not care what kind of “dirt” engulfs him. It is just the same to him as if he were laying in a soft bed in a master bedroom the way the General is. If there is any kind of hope in The Big Sleep, it’s only to be found in that so-called sweet release.
This is America. This is Los Angeles. The LA police union has had the local politicians in their pockets for decades. Politicians across the nation are funded by corporate lobbyists and other profit-motivated actors that fuel the militarization of police, overcriminalization, and the mass-incarceration system. The Senate and House are dysfunctional, strictly partisan entities largely driven by private interests. Perhaps it is a sad truth that the noir fiction of L.A. is not always so fictional.
The social problems depicted in the novel, that we still see the consequences of today, are still our problems. It is a bitter and unmistakably American cruelty that the people who may suffer the most, tend also to be the victims of a social structure that condemns them to a feudal role.
Maps and More
Hobart Arms (Phillip Marlowe’s Residence)
“It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.”
Geiger’s House on Laverne Terrace (aka Gould Avenue)
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
Sternwood Residence -3765 Alta Brea Cresent, West Hollywood (Greystone Manor in Beverly Hills)
“Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn’t look as if anybody ever sat in them.”
Realito (Rialto) and L.A.
“Then faintly out of the dark two yellow vapor lights glowed high up in the air and a neon sign between them said: “Welcome to Realito.”
In the book, it is called Realito, but it is likely referring to Rialto miles out of L.A., “north of orange country.” This is where Marlowe is captured tracking down the supposed hideout of Rusty Regan. Here, he ends up discovering Eddie Mars’s wife and his right-hand gunman, Canino.
“The Big Sleep” in the Movies
Here Lauren Bacall, who plays Vivian Sternwood in the 1946 film adaption of The Big Sleep, sings classic jazz standard “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” The more explicit aspects of sex, violence, and police corruption were cut from the movie due to the Hays Code enforced at the time.
The Warner Bros. film was directed by Howard Hawks and stars Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Famed author William Faulkner co-wrote the script, along with Leigh Brackett.
It is considered the most-beloved adaptation of the novel, despite several changes towards the end of the movie towards a more commercial and censored story. It was adapted in the 1978 again into a film set in London, and in numerous other mediums since.
In 1998, the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski was released to critical acclaim. The film was inspired by the character of Phillip Marlowe (in Lebowski, “The Dude”) and the story structure of Raymond Chandler stories like The Big Sleep.
More Resources
I’m not the first by far, nor will be the last, to conduct a tour of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. He is a celebrated and genre-refining L.A. author who reflects much of the same enduring spirit of L.A…. full of contradictions, disparities, and so on.
Scouting LA’s In-Depth Locations in “The Big Sleep”
LA Magazine’s Tour of Raymond Chandler’s LA (His General Works)
