Solving the unsolved murder in Chandler's THE BIG SLEEP

Who killed the Sternwood Chauffeur? Raymond Chandler famously didn’t know the answer when he was asked by screenwriters for the adaptation of his classic novel, The Big Sleep, but some careful digging turns up a plausible answer, and possibly even a reason Chandler might have lied about it.

The Big Sleep was Chandler’s first novel, and the first appearance of Philip Marlowe, one of the most famous and frequently imitated of the fictional sleuths. Chandler wrote seven novels starring Marlowe, as well as a number of short stories. The character inspired ten movies, four radio series (and several one-off adaptations of the movies), and two series (plus one-offs) on television. Whenever a tough detective talks to himself, he seems to be using Marlowe’s voice, possibly filtered through Humphrey Bogart. And then there is the Marlowe Apocrypha (by which I mean stories by Raymond Chandler featuring detectives who would later evolve into Marlowe--not stories by other writers about Marlowe, in imitation of Chandler).

Writing did not come easily to Chandler. When it came to producing his first novel, he reached back to stories he’d already published in the pulps, a fairly ephemeral medium, adapting and borrowing from the adventures of detectives who were Marlowe in all but name: Carmady, Dalmas, Mallory, and others with and without name who already had the ethical toughness with a touch of poetry (Chandler had a classical education from Dulwich College, London, where he associated with the Bloomsbury group).

Chandler ‘cannibalized’ (his term) the earlier stories for plots, characters, and incidents, enlarging and adding detail in the process. Once he had done this, he closed the book on the stories, never allowing them to be reprinted. Three of the stories were reprinted in the 1940s — according to Philip Durham in his introduction to the collection “Killer in the Rain,” Chandler said this was done without his knowledge or permission. They had served their purpose, and whether he was embarrassed by his early work or felt that readers could be confused by their variant plotlines, or some other reason, he wasn’t interested in seeing them pop up again, even for money.

In writing The Big Sleep, Chandler cannibalized no fewer than four stories, but relied mostly on “The Curtain” and “Killer in the Rain.” As Durham notes, he also borrowed bits of “Mandarin’s Jade” and “Finger Man” for scenes and details, but the first two mentioned provided twenty-one out of thirty-two chapters in the novel. In “Killer in the Rain,” the dead chauffeur is named Carl Owen. His name is changed to Owen Taylor in The Big Sleep. We don’t see him alive in either one.

The scene where Marlowe watches them fish the car out of the water comes from “Killer in the Rain.” Inside the car was the body of Owen, chauffeur of the father of Carmen Dravec, who became Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. Owen had been hit on the head, non-fatally, before the car went into the water and he drowned.

[SPOILER ALERT]
At the end of the story, Marlowe talks to Joe Marty (who becomes Joe Brody in the novel and movie), who reveals that he had sapped Owen, but while his attention was elsewhere, Owen came to and sped off quickly. It’s assumed by Marlowe that Marty is telling the truth, and therefore the chauffeur drove off the pier in a confused mental state. This incident, however, didn’t make it into The Big Sleep.

So who killed Owen Taylor? In The Big Sleep, Brody is otherwise much the same as Marty in the original short story. Can we assume that events followed a similar course? (Before going back and reading closely, I had the idea that Owen had been done in by the same character who committed the murder in “The Curtain,” which made for a more elegant theory and a shorter explanation, but the theory didn’t hold up under examination.) Brody doesn’t live long enough to tell Marlowe the same story Marty told, but with the parallels between the two stories, he’s the best fit. We’ll say the evidence is circumstantial, and we’ll never know because the sentence was carried out on him before we could find out — let’s just say “Joe did it. Sort of.”

And what of Chandler? Did he forget what he wrote before? It seems unlikely, given that he must have looked closely at the story while he was rewriting much of it for the novel. I would speculate instead that he preferred looking a little foolish than bringing up the stories he cannibalized for the book. Anyway, to Chandler, the details of the plot were secondary to character and mood. He expressed scorn for most mystery writers (Dashiell Hammett being a notable exception) with their railway timetables, alibis, and unmasking scene in the living room. He didn’t care to revive a story he’d already recycled, and a neat, mechanical mystery and solution were never his first priority.