The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler

Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by the ailing General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer threatening his wild younger daughter, Carmen. What begins as a contained case of extortion quickly spirals into a labyrinth of pornography, gambling, murder, and missing persons — all set against the sleazy glamour of 1930s Los Angeles. Chandler’s prose is electric, each sentence a perfectly weighted piece of cynicism and poetry. Marlowe himself — morally incorruptible amid a city of rot — became the template for virtually every hardboiled detective that followed. The plot is notoriously tangled (Chandler himself admitted he didn’t know who committed one of the murders), but the novel’s atmosphere, voice, and wit make it arguably the finest piece of noir fiction ever written.