The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

“Philip Marlowe here. This book was my first appearance in print. Of course, I’d been solving crimes in L.A. for years when this Raymond Chandler fellow thought me worthy of my own novel. Seems like wherever I go, trouble follows. People lie. Double-cross each other. Just an occupational hazard, I suppose.

“The caper Chandler called ‘The Big Sleep’ was about blackmail, see. There are murders and stakeouts, and a guy drives a car off a pier. Not that unusual in my world. Nothing I couldn’t handle. But Hollywood liked it enough to get Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to make a picture about the case. Bogart played me, of course. Did a pretty fair job, you want my opinion.

“That Chandler fellow knows his way around a Smith Corona, too. He wrote lines like, “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.” Pretty good, huh? Guess that’s how come The Big Sleep made Time’s 2005 list of the 100 Best Novels, and was on Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century.”