"The Big Sleep" is about the detective Philip Marlowe who, in the first chapter, calls on General Sternwood — who is this almost dead character, under a blanket in this glass greenhouse, because the life is just ebbing out of him. He has two daughters. Both of them a little bit debauched, one of them much more than the other. The more debauched one is being blackmailed and [General Sternwood] wants Marlowe, the private eye, to get to the bottom of this. 

Marlowe is the prototypical L.A. private eye. There had been private eyes before, but Chandler gave it a distinctively Southern California twist. There are all these wonderful moments when you're with him, alone. He's kind of shabby and yet romantic. Underneath all the hard-boiled exterior, he can be hurt. He wants to help, and it doesn't always work out that way.

L.A. in 1939 was at this kind of turning point. And you can see that in the character of General Sternwood in "The Big Sleep." He is presumably a Civil War general. We don't know if General Sternwood was anywhere near the front lines, but he was a pioneer. He was one of the buccaneers of California — and with oil, made a mint. His daughters represent the thinning of the bloodlines. They were born rich, as opposed to making or stealing it.



One of them who Marlowe becomes a little sweet on — although not as sweet on her as Bogart got on Lauren Bacall in the movie — even so, you get a sense of the second generation. The second generation which is building up Los Angeles, but at the same time, not really keeping faith with the first generation with, in some cases, perfectly reprehensible founders who built this place with their bare hands. 

Chandler was not a native Angeleno. Chandler was born in, of all places, Chicago. In later years, he professed to be disillusioned with Los Angeles, which completely obscures the point that he never loved the place. I think as a writer, he knew he had great material on his hands. And he was like Columbus — he thought he had among the first opportunities to plant his flag on it. And he did so beautifully, but never adoringly or blindly. He saw the place's flaws. He exaggerated the place's flaws. 

Chandler uses classic L.A. locations which we would recognize. Whether in their former form or completely obliterated but in the back of your mind, you can still remember what's going on. For example, General Sternwood's mansion is pretty much the Greystone Mansion of Doheny in Beverly Hills.



But in the climactic scene, there's this wonderful moment where his oil fields, the disgusting, smelly, revolting fields on which his great wealth is based, still visible from his beautiful mansion that he's built in the intervening decades — those are the oil fields around La Cienega, just north of the airport. And Marlowe spends so much time driving around that it could be like a kind of checklist. And that's one of the most delightful things that an Angeleno can bring to the reading of Chandler, even though people have been reading from him and stealing from him around the world for decades.