I'm a big fan of film noir, and one of my favorites is The Big Sleep. The Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film has everything you would want from a 1940-50s detective movie. When I saw that the library got in a new copy of the original book, I had to dive in and read the origins of the movie. Some of the differences were a bit eye-opening, proving that many times the book and the movie tend to tell two different stories.
Raymond Chandler published The Big Sleep in 1939, introducing the world to the reoccurring character of private detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe wisecracks his way through the book with all of the slang of 1939, some of which is not as smooth in today's PC world as it was in the pre-war days. There are some harsh attitudes toward women and homosexuals voiced through the comments of Marlowe. In addition, the book also works its way through the dark alleys of pornography production and distribution.
If you are looking for the smoldering love story that Bogart and Bacall brought to their movie portrayals, you are not going to find that in Chandler's original The Big Sleep. Instead of one problem rich sister as seen in the movie, both sisters are on the rotten side in the book, and Marlowe falls for neither one of them. With love being out of the picture in the book, the plot varies several time as you read through the written work when comparing it to the movie. The book is far more dark and cynical.
Chandler is a master of description, giving detailed information on both the characters and story locations. In that sense The Big Sleep is a very entertaining read. It is also fun to compare the book to the movie. The work is dated at bit, but if you can put yourself into a 1939 state of mind, the pages fly by.
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