THE BIG SLEEP Detective Stories

Raymond Chandler's novel is told by its main character, Philip Marlowe, a private detective in Los Angeles. In this story he is hired by a rich man to find his missing and wayward daughter. When he does, he discovers that she is mixed up with a pornographer who runs a rare book store while also selling photographs and blackmailing rich girls like the one Marlowe seeks to protect. The blackmailer is murdered and the girl suspected, but Marlowe proves who actually did it with the help of the girl's older sister.

This novel is from the hard-boiled school, a style of mystery novel which takes a dark view of human nature, which expresses themes in terms of violence, and with what is generally a cynical point of view. The narrator is often the detective himself, as is the case in this novel, and the consciousness of marlowe is the filter through which every scene is depicted. The style was pioneered in Dashiell hammett's The Maltese Falcon, but that novel is told in the third person. The two most interesting things about the novel are the consciousness of Marlowe, a cynical man who tries to have ideals in a world where ideals are not favored, and the setting, for Chandler makes Los Angeles in the late 1940s a major character in the novel. Because the story is in the first person, we see everything from marlowe's point of view and with his running commentary on what it means to him, so the book remains interesting because Marlowe himself is interesting.

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ing girl, a university student, and stumbles into the other plot in the course of that investigation. As she does, she delves into the background of a Chicago union considered especially dangerous and corrupt. Warshawski is an interesting character and has a number of interesting friends who help her in her work, and Paretsky makes the sex-role switch believable. DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS Walter Mosley's novel is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep in that this is a hard-boiled detective novels et in Los Angeles and told through the central consciousness of the main character, Easy Rawlins. Rawlins, however, is a black man in the Los Angeles of the late 1940s, a period not only of more overt racism than exists today but of police corruption, making the role of a black private detective especially difficult. In this story, Rawlins becomes a detective out of necessity after he loses his job and has to find something else to do, and he feels his way in this new role, learning as he goes. Through an intermediary, he is hired to find a missing woman--the hard-boiled private detective is often hired to find a missing person--and encounters a sordid story of political corruption involving this woman, at one time the

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