Los Angeles. Private detective Philip Marlowe takes on a case for the Sternwood family. The old General Sternwood, confined to a wheelchair, is being blackmailed and asks Marlowe to solve his problem. But Marlowe also faces another issue: Sternwood's two rebellious, carefree daughters are roaming the seedy haunts of the City of Angels. Marlowe follows them and gets distracted from his work - and this is before he even stumbles upon the first corpse...
The Big Sleep was published in 1939 and established the then fifty-year-old Chandler as the leading figure of hard-boiled detective fiction. It was adapted into films in 1946 and 1978, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles, respectively.