The big sleep/raymond chandler

Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best: Raymond Chandlers best loved novel, The Big Sleep, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didnt care who knew it.

I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.

I was calling on four million dollars.

(Los Angeles PI).

Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is indulging in some petty blackmail.

A weary, old man, Sternwood just wants the problem to go away.

But Marlowe finds he has his work cut out just keeping Sternwoods wild, devil-may-care daughters out of trouble as they prowl LAs dirtiest and darkest streets.

And pretty soon, hes up to his neck in hoodlums and corpses.