Which author wrote 'The Big Sleep'?

Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep. Published in 1939, it introduced Philip Marlowe, the private detective who became Chandler’s signature character and one of hard-boiled fiction’s defining investigators.

The novel follows Marlowe through a tangled Los Angeles case involving blackmail, family secrets, gambling, and murder. Its deliberately complicated plot is famous for characters who deceive one another and for clues that do not always resolve neatly. Chandler adapted material from several earlier magazine stories, reshaping them into his first Marlowe novel.

The title is a euphemism for death, a phrase that appears in the book’s closing reflections. Readers sometimes confuse Chandler with Dashiell Hammett, another major American hard-boiled writer. Hammett created detectives such as Sam Spade and the Continental Op, while Chandler created Marlowe. The 1946 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall helped make the story even more famous, though the novel remains the original source.