THE BIG SLEEP is to detective noir what THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING is to fantasy, what DUNE is to science fiction--the pinnacle of a genre that flattered its author's genius with imitation, and imitation, and imitation.  Here, you'll encounter cliches before they became tired, better yet understand why they became cliches in the first place.

The plot is self-evidently standard stuff: A dying millionaire (check) hires a hard-boiled private eye (check) to solve a blackmail case (check) that is further complicated by the interference of the patriarch's beautiful and deadly daughters (check, check, check). If it all sounds ho-hum, believe me, Chandler literally wrote the book on this stuff, and you'll find yourself sinking into his dissonant symphony of corruption and double-dealing like it was scribed last week.  His prose is like a hypnotist's watch, drawing you into his world for its own sake--one borne of a singularly dark worldview: The men are violent, the women are treacherous, the only people of any humanity are dead, dying, killed or imprisoned. But all this only ups the stakes, energizing the mysterious, often erotic charge of every exchange.

As for Chandler's famous protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, there's no fictional character I can think of whom I'd rather spend a book filtering my brain through. He's all implacable honor and barely-disguised frailties, a steel-encased softie whose idealism knew too much to live.