Raymond Chandler: Deep Sleep. A detective novel of the American rough school with the detective Phil Marlowe

If anyone replaced Sherlock Holmes on the throne of the great detective, it was Raymond Chandler’s Phil Marlowe. Chandler (and Dashiall Hammett before him) took the murder from the drawing room of the English mansion and put it back on the street.

Today’s detective novel has learned more from a lonely man in a hat and a cigarette who watches the door of a house in an old car, behind which a shot is shortly heard, than from a brilliant eccentric playing the violin.

Ramond Chandler (1888 – 1959) created a new icon in the gallery of great detectives. His seven Phil Marlowe novels are also some of the few detective novels to be found in most relevant literary dictionaries. The so-called America’s tough detective school has turned logical charades into full-blooded realistic stories from the world we know.

Phil Marlowe, who first appeared in 1939 in the novel Deep Sleep, became a model for all other private detectives or policemen who fight the injustice of the world on their own.

It describes a world in which a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to prison for a bottle of liquor in his pocket, in which the mayor of your town condones murder as a money-making tool, in which no one can walk safely down a dark street because law and order are things , which we talk about, but which we prefer not to practice. …. It is not the world that smells, but the world in which we live.

Raymond Chandler (translated by T. Korbař)

Czech Radio Dvojka would like to gradually introduce, in the order in which they were written, other novels with Phil Marlowe: Goodbye My Love, High Window, Lady in the Lake, Little Sister, Farewell to Lennox and Case upside downin order to introduce listeners to the last great hero of modern times.