Story Skeleton—The Big Sleep

Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. Our ongoing exploration now delves into mysteries, illustrating yet again the universality of story structure, albeit from a different angle.

 

By David Griffin Brown

The Knight in the Stained Glass

When Raymond Chandler published The Big Sleep in 1939, he was a forty-nine-year-old first-time novelist who had been writing short stories for pulp magazines like Black Mask for several years. Before that, he'd been a failed oil executive and an alcoholic who, by his own account, had learned American slang “like a foreign language.” Chandler brought a lyrical sensibility to the hardboiled tradition, reinventing the detective novel with a prose style that fused streetwise wit and poetic flourish.

The noir subgenre was already taking shape in the hands of writers like Dashiell Hammett, whose novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) grounded detective fiction in the grit and moral compromise of real-world crime. Like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe operates by a personal code—an internal compass that gets tested at every turn. But Chandler took that internal code a step further. Marlowe isn’t just a man who solves cases; he’s a knight errant in a corrupt city, guided by a chivalric ethic that isolates him as much as it defines him.

Marlowe is a philosopher with a revolver. He drifts through Los Angeles like a sardonic ghost, narrating his observations in crystalline prose. Chandler’s language does more than evoke atmosphere—it delivers gut-punches of character insight in a single line.

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

These lines, and others like them, have become part of noir’s DNA. Writers imitate Chandler at their peril. His similes are often copied but rarely matched. His voice was singular: a mix of moral fatigue, gallows humor, and a stubborn refusal to let the world go completely to hell.

The plot of The Big Sleep is famously murky—even Chandler didn’t know who killed the chauffeur. But the story’s power doesn’t come from puzzle logic. It comes from immersion. From mood. From Marlowe’s voice. From the sense that justice is in the eye of the beholder.

Plot Points

The Detective and His Code

A traditional mystery usually opens with a scene in which the detective demonstrates their skills that will be central to solving the case. Things work a bit differently in noir.

Similar to Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Chandler’s detective has a code. Unlike Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe isn’t willing to take advantage of women to close his case. (He will, however, check out their legs at every opportunity.) In fact, Marlowe is symbolically a knight on a quest, and his journey will present a series of maiden-saving opportunities.

It’s fitting, then, that the story begins with Marlowe at his client’s house—the oil-rich General Sternwood—checking out a stained-glass portrayal of a knight trying to rescue a naked woman bound to a tree. “He didn’t seem to be really trying,” Marlowe thinks. “I’d have to climb up and help him eventually.”

Enter the first maiden: Carmen Sternwood stumbles upon Marlowe, and it seems she’s drunk or high. She flirts with the detective and then slumps into his arms.

The Initial Puzzle

General Sternwood’s health is failing.  Marlowe explains that he once worked for the district attorney, but he was fired. “I test very high on insubordination.” This might not seem like the best thing to say to a prospective employer, but the detective has done his homework, which he also demonstrates by sharing what he has learned about the general’s two “wild” daughters. The elder, Vivian, is on her third marriage—this one to a bootlegger named Rusty Regan.

The general laments that Regan has disappeared. But this is not why he has called Marlowe to this meeting. Still, it will turn out to be an important detail. The pressing issue is his daughter Carmen and how her behavior around town has led more than once to blackmail. First a man named Joe Brody was paid off to the tune of $5000. Now it’s a man named Geiger who claims he is collecting on Carmen’s gambling debt.

The detective has been handed his inciting incident. He is being hired to deal with this blackmail threat. However, as we will see, this task wraps up rather quickly. In other words, sorting out the blackmail is not Marlowe’s true narrative goal. He is a knight in service to a lord. The lord’s problem is his wild daughters: they keep getting into trouble, and it’s making life difficult for their old, sick father. As it turns out, solving General Sternwood’s problems will mean doing something he hasn’t asked for: finding Rusty Regan.

After he leaves the general, Marlowe talks to Vivian. She tries to find out what her father wants with a private detective. He checks out her legs while refusing to answer. Maiden number two. But does she need saving?

On his way out of the Sternwood mansion, Marlowe surveys the family’s oil fields—a symbol of their wealth, but also a note of foreshadowing.

Gathering Evidence

Marlowe visits Geiger’s bookstore and quickly confirms it’s a front. The clerk doesn’t recognize a fake book title he asks for, and a shady exchange ends with a young man walking away with a suspicious package. Marlowe tails him—until the man panics and hides behind a tree, ditching the package. It’s pornography.

To verify his hunch, Marlowe visits another rare book dealer and asks for the same fake title. This clerk immediately clocks it as nonsense. Geiger’s store is part of a smut distribution ring, likely linked to Carmen’s blackmail.

Point of no return

Marlowe stakes out Geiger’s house. Then—gunshots, a scream, and silence. When Marlowe bursts onto the scene, he finds one very dead Geiger and one very naked—and drugged—Carmen Sternwood.

Note that the detective’s initial job has effectively wrapped up. With Geiger dead, there is no blackmail to worry about. However, the subtext to the job was about getting Carmen out of trouble. And here she is, very much in a bad situation. She’s high on ether and laudanum. He searches the house. There’s a camera hidden inside a totem pole, and someone has taken the film—presumably the shooter—and escaped out the back window. In one of the bedrooms, Marlowe finds a coded ledger, which he pockets.

Geiger’s murder is a point of no return. A murder raises the stakes. Whatever Carmen is involved in is a lot worse than a gambling debt, and with the film missing, another blackmail threat is around the corner. She is a maiden in trouble, so the knight has no choice but to keep digging.

Gathering Evidence

Marlowe drops Carmen off at home, then walks back to Geiger’s house in the rain. He doesn’t want to risk bringing his own vehicle back into the vicinity of a murder, and he’s not willing to trust a cab driver to keep their mouth shut. Back at the house, he is surprised to find Geiger’s body is gone. He searches the rest of the place: there is one room with feminine decorations, another with masculine.  Outside, there are skids in the dirt, like from someone dragging a corpse.

Complication #1

In noir, the rising action tends to be based around a series of complications—usually the arrival of a dangerous new character who adds to the stakes but also provides a clue about the bigger picture.

Ohls, the district attorney’s investigator, calls Marlowe with the news that a Sternwood vehicle was found in the ocean with a body in it. It’s the Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor. He was known to police from an attempted robbery as well as for taking Carmen across state lines before she was of age.

There is no apparent connection to the previous night’s shooting—not yet at least. And in fact, there is nothing in the papers about Geiger’s murder.

Complication #2

Marlowe heads back to Geiger’s bookstore where there’s a truck moving boxes out of the back. He follows the truck to Joe Brody’s apartment building. This is the guy who was paid $5000 to leave Carmen alone. The boxes, according to the movers, are full of books. But clearly Joe Brody is moving in on Geiger’s pornography stock, which means Brody must know that he’s dead.

Complication #3

When Marlowe returns to his office, Vivian Regan is waiting for him. Someone has sent her naked photos of Carmen with a demand for $5000. She explains that she doesn’t have the money, not unless she borrows it from a gangster named Eddie Mars who runs a gambling club. Despite the fact that her husband Rusty ran off with Eddie’s blonde wife, she insists that she’s “a good customer” of his.

Marlowe promises to look into the new blackmail angle.

Complication #4

Back at Geiger’s house, Marlowe finds Carmen hiding and giggling—frantic, animal-like. She won’t cooperate. When he asks if she’ll identify Joe Brody as the killer, she laughs.

Then Eddie Mars arrives, all in grey. He sends Carmen out and probes Marlowe for information. They circle each other, trading half-truths. Mars reveals he owns the house and that Geiger was a tenant.

Two of his men arrive with guns, trying to strong-arm Marlowe. He doesn’t budge.

This scene widens the scope. Carmen isn’t the only problem. Mars enters as a potential antagonist, and Marlowe’s refusal to share what he knows reinforces his code—and his isolation.

Midpoint

The detective heads back to Joe Brody’s apartment. At first, Brody denies knowing Geiger, but Marlowe says, “You got the books, Joe. I got the sucker list.” He has guessed that the coded ledger he found in Geiger’s house is a list of clients. Brody ushers Marlowe inside and pulls a gun, at which point the blonde woman from the bookstore—Agnes—steps out from where she was hiding behind a curtain.

Brody insists that he didn’t kill Geiger. Marlowe counters that it doesn’t really matter—as things stand, Brody is likely to be charged with the murder. Especially since he has a witness willing to sing his name to the police. To make it clear who the witness is, he then suggests that Brody is in possession of a nude photo of her.

Then the doorbell rings. And rings. And rings. Brody gets out a second gun and gives it to Agnes, who aims it at Marlowe. Then he answers the door. And fancy that, it’s Carmen Sternwood with a gun of her own. Things escalate quickly. Brody tackles Carmen. Marlowe disarms all three of them, noting the engraving on Carmen’s gun: Carmen from Owen. A clue, and a warning.

Once the dust settles, Marlowe gets the nude photos from Brody, promising Carmen that he will take care of them. She leaves. Maiden rescue: accomplished.

As far as midpoints go, this one offers quite a lot of action. And it’s not over yet.

Brody confesses: Owen Taylor shot Geiger, took the photo, and tried to get away. Brody merely stole the photo from him.

Then the doorbell rings again. Brody opens it—and is shot twice. Marlowe chases the killer and finds it’s the young man from Geiger’s store: Carol Lundgren.

Carol was Geiger’s lover and believed Brody was the killer. Marlowe takes him back to Geiger’s house. In the bedroom, Geiger’s body is laid out with candles burning low.

With that, Marlowe calls in Ohls, but not before asking him if Owen Taylor was found with a gun that had fired three bullets. He was, and it had.

With that final clue, the midpoint ends, and in fact, the entire (initial) case is now fully solved. Owen was in love with Carmen. He didn’t like how Geiger was using her, so he shot him, stole the nude photo of her to protect her, only to lose it when Brody tracked him down. Meanwhile, Carol hid Geiger’s body so that he could arrange a private last goodbye for his lover.

But how did Owen end up in the ocean? Even Chandler doesn’t have an answer for this one. It’s a messy world, and not all mysteries get solved. That’s one possibility, at least. Or maybe it’s just a plot hole that Chandler forgot to deal with.

Now What?

We’ve just passed the midpoint, yet it seems like the story has entered the resolution stage. Marlowe goes over all the details with Ohls and other police officers. He hands over the coded client ledger. In an effort to buy privacy for his client, he notes how the Hollywood police must have known about the pornography racket and allowed it to operate in plain sight. The cops take the hint and agree to keep the Sternwood family out of their reports.

The detective heads home, has a drink, and cleans Carmen’s gun. Mars calls and wants to know if Marlowe mentioned his name to the police. He didn’t. Mars asks if Marlowe is looking for Rusty Regan. He insists he isn’t. The following morning, the crimes are written up in the newspaper, but the details make it sound like a cut and dried affair, one that paints the police in a favorable light.

It seems like the narrative is wrapping up.

And yet Marlowe isn’t ready to let it go. He hasn’t been looking for Rusty Regan, but people keep mentioning the bootlegger like there’s something that ought to stay hidden. Something hidden could mean another problem for the general, especially if his daughters are caught up in it.

Unanswered Questions

Marlowe gives in to the questions swirling about Rusty Regan and decides to start digging. He visits Captain Gregory at the Missing Persons Bureau. On his way, he notices a gray Plymouth sedan following him.

Key clues:

• Regan disappeared on Owen Taylor’s day off.
• Nobody saw him take his car out.
• The car showed up in the garage of Eddie Mars’ wife Mona four days later—they were separated but on good terms. Mona is also missing.
• Eddie Mars won’t give them any photos of his wife. He doesn’t apparently care that the two ran away together, and he wants her left alone.

When Marlowe is home, the butler calls to say the case is considered closed. But then—because Marlowe can’t resist—he heads to Mars’ Cypress Club. He asks Mars if Rusty may have been behind Geiger’s blackmail, but Mars rejects the idea. He asks whether Mars “owns” Captain Gregory, but Mars says they’re just friends. And he asks if Mars has put anyone on his tail, which the gangster denies.

In the club, Marlowe runs into Vivien playing roulette. She puts $16k on a single bet, which Mars covers, and she wins. Once outside the club, a masked man pulls a gun on her and demands the cash. Marlowe intervenes and recovers her winnings. It’s maiden rescue number three.

They leave, buy some whiskey, and then end up kissing. But Marlowe interrupts the make-out session to ask what Eddie Mars has on her. He’s still on the job, and her father didn’t hire him to sleep with his daughters. He notes that she didn’t seem surprised when the robber popped out to take her money.

But she’s not giving anything up, so he drives her home.

Complication #5

When Marlowe gets home, Carmen Sternwood is in his bed, and she’s naked. She implores him to sleep with her. When he refuses, Carmen hisses at him. It’s an escalation of her dangerous performativity. This detective is learning her secrets. The seduction is a last-ditch play for control.

Marlowe considers a problem he’s been studying on his chessboard. He picks up a knight and says, “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.” This is a significant moment where his code is being tested. Carmen is the primary maiden he has been hired to protect, so giving in to her would completely betray his personal ethics. Not that he’s tempted. He’d like to throw her out, but instead he makes her a drink. “I’m working for your father,” he says. “He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts.”

Nothing is getting through to her, so he gives her three minutes to dress and leave. She hisses some more but finally complies.

Complication #6

The gray sedan tailing Marlowe is still outside. He sneaks up and confronts the driver: Harry Jones, working for Agnes. Jones offers information—for a price. He claims Eddie Mars had Rusty Regan killed after Regan ran off with Mona, and that one of Mars’ thugs, Lash Canino, visited the Sternwoods to collect something from Vivian.

Marlowe shrugs it off—until Jones says he knows where Mona is hiding.

When Marlowe returns later to pay for the tip, he finds Jones mid-meeting with Canino. Marlowe hides and listens. They share a drink. Moments later, Jones is dead—cyanide.

The stakes shift again. Mars isn’t just a shadowy figure now—he has a killer on the payroll, and Mona Mars may be his hostage. The knight has a new maiden to save.

Complication #7

Marlowe meets up with Agnes, and once he pays her, she tells him where Mona has been hiding out—in Realito. Just as he’s arriving, he hits some tacks in the road and two of his tires blow out. This is just down the road from a mechanic shop, and Canino’s car is parked outside.

He arms himself, then bangs on the door and demands help, pretending to be a random passerby, but he plays a tough act—too tough, because Canino and the mechanic catch him by surprise and knock him out.

When he wakes, he’s handcuffed and tied to a chair. The only person in the room with him is Mona Mars.

Complication #8

Mona refuses to explain why she’s hiding out there. She swears she’s not being held against her will, and that Mars didn’t kill Regan—in fact, she thinks Regan is still alive. But the fact that he’s missing has put a target on Eddie’s back. Mona shows Marlowe that she’s wearing a wig—she cut off all her hair to prove to her husband that she’s cooperating in the plan to keep her hidden.

But Marlowe doesn’t buy it. Mona and Eddie were separated. When something happened to Regan, he arranged for Mona to disappear as well. The fact that she’s being guarded by a killer like Canino reads hostage situation, even if Mona thinks she’s a co-conspirator. If she doesn’t toe the line, he has no doubt that Canino will do what needs to be done.

In other words, this is maiden rescue number four.

Mona cuts his ropes but can’t do anything about the handcuffs. He tries to convince her to come with him, but she refuses.

Marlowe retrieves his backup gun from his car, sets a trap, and kills Canino when the thug comes running.

All is Lost

Marlowe has saved another maiden, but he is no closer to figuring out what happened to Rusty Regan. It’s definitely looking like he’s dead, and Mars is going to great lengths to sell the cover story that Rusty and Mona ran away together. But what does he have on Vivien?

The detective returns to the Missing Persons Bureau to press Captain Gregory for more information. It seems like Gregory is covering for Mars somehow. He tells Marlowe to stay away from the Sternwoods and to stop looking for Regan.

Gregory knows something, but he’s not budging, so the case has reached a dead end. The next day, Marlowe is called in to talk to General Sternwood. The old man is not happy that his knight has kept digging. Marlowe apologizes and offers to return his fee but also explains that he intuited how much Rusty meant to the general and he felt he owed it to him to keep looking.

It seems like the quest could end here, in defeat, but then the general offers him $1000 to find Regan.

Climax

On his way out, Marlowe encounters Carmen. He returns her gun, and she tries flirting with him again. When he rejects her, she asks him to teach her to shoot and recommends a nearby oil field. He sets up a can, but she turns her gun on him and fires. But Marlowe’s not stupid. The bullets in her gun are blanks. He catches her just as she has a seizure. When she wakes, she remembers nothing.

The earlier shootout with Canino may be more action-packed, but this is the true climax of The Big Sleep—the moment the central mystery is solved. While Marlowe was hired to protect Carmen from predatory men, she was the real threat all along.

Something is deeply wrong with her—a personality disorder, perhaps, layered with addiction, trauma, and bouts of epilepsy and memory loss. Her family has the power to hide it all, even to hire a knight to follow her around and clean up the wreckage.

Resolution

The detective has found his way to the truth. Like Marlowe, Rusty Regan must have rejected Carmen’s advances, and she’s not someone people say no to, so she killed him. Vivien enlisted Eddie Mars’ help in cleaning it up, which is why she’s beholden to him.

But what happens next? Marlowe still has his mercenary code. He’s been hired by the general, and it’s to the general he owes his allegiance. Turning Carmen over to the police isn’t part of that deal—even if it means justice is not served.

Back at the house, he confronts Vivian and tells her everything. At first she denies the truth, and then she tries to pay him off. But that too would go against his code. Instead, he demands that Vivian get help for her sister.

And with that, there’s just one thing left for this hardboiled detective to do: buy himself a drink.

The Knight Who Fails

The Big Sleep opens with a knight frozen in time. He’s trapped in stained glass, halfway through a rescue that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Marlowe jokes that he’ll have to climb in and finish the job himself. But by the end of the novel, that knight hasn’t budged—and Marlowe has learned why.

Chandler drew heavily from Arthurian legend. One of his early fictional detectives was even named “Mallory,” a direct nod to Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. He later renamed the character Marlowe. In The Big Sleep, Marlowe becomes a modern Lancelot—a noble figure bound to serve a corrupt court, protecting those who may not deserve it, entangled in loyalty to a faltering king.

General Sternwood is a Fisher King stand-in: impotent, cloistered, surrounded by hot-house rot, waiting for some form of restoration that never comes. His daughters, the twin princesses of this poisoned realm, can’t be rescued in any conventional sense. Vivian lies to protect the family name. Carmen kills for sport and forgets about it afterward. Marlowe rides from castle to dungeon—from the mansion in the hills to pornographers’ hideouts and gambling dens—but the grail remains out of reach. What he uncovers isn’t redemptive truth, just more ruin, carefully swept aside to spare the king.

In some versions of the Grail cycle, Lancelot is denied the grail not because he lacks strength or courage, but because he is flawed. He’s too human. Too conflicted. The same applies to Marlowe. He’s noble but weary, chaste but tempted, loyal to a code that delivers no rewards. Chandler even evokes this knowingly in The High Window, where a woman calls Marlowe “a shop-soiled Galahad”—a knight past his prime, stained by the world he won’t stop trying to fix.

The Big Sleep doesn’t offer a triumph. The knight doesn’t save the maiden. He doesn’t cleanse the kingdom. But he does hold the line. Marlowe chooses again and again to act with decency in a world that mocks it. It’s a bleak kind of heroism. And for noir, it’s foundational.

Troubled Maidens and Sexy Lamps

Chandler gives us three women who illustrate the narrow range of female roles common in early noir: Vivian, Carmen, and Agnes. Vivian is smart, strategic, and loyal—to a point. Carmen is volatile and dangerous. Agnes is forgettable.

Vivian fits the femme fatale mold, but with a twist. She lies, flirts, and obstructs Marlowe’s progress, but she’s not a predator. She’s trying to protect her sister, shield her father, and navigate a corrupt world with limited tools. Her scenes with Marlowe crackle with sexual tension, but he keeps his distance. By the end, she’s left with the full weight of the family secret. She doesn’t win, but she survives.

Carmen, by contrast, is at the heart of the rot. Chandler doesn’t frame her as evil—he frames her as ill. She giggles through crime scenes, lashes out when crossed, and dissociates from her own actions. Her final breakdown is not just villainous—it’s clinical. Readers today might recognize signs of a personality disorder, compounded by trauma and addiction. Chandler doesn’t name her condition, but he doesn’t reduce her to “crazy,” either. For 1939, this is surprisingly nuanced. Carmen is human. Poisoned, yes—but not hollow.

Agnes, on the other hand, is hollow. She shows up, takes orders, spills information, and disappears. By the standards of the Sexy Lamp Test, she’s decorative but interchangeable. Swap her for a lamp with a voice box and the plot stays intact.

These characters reflect a pattern across early noir: the femme fatale often serves as a sexual counterweight to the detective’s machismo. Her desires—and her danger—are cast as threats to his code. This dynamic can be compelling, but it also narrows the range of female characterization. When the primary function of a woman in a story is to tempt or test the hero, her humanity is diminished. She becomes a symbol of the world’s corruption rather than a fully realized participant in it.

Of the three, only Vivian has real agency. Carmen has impact but no control. Agnes is along for the ride. Together, they outline the limits of how women were often written in noir: the survivor, the casualty, and the prop.

In Conclusion

The Big Sleep reshaped what a mystery novel could do. Its impact can be seen everywhere—from the burned-out detectives of Ross Macdonald and James Crumley to the existential sprawl of The Big Lebowski. Chandler’s version of noir made mood just as important as plot and gave us a detective whose voice could carry a story even when the case refused to cooperate.

For mystery writers, its legacy is a challenge: don’t just map out a clever puzzle. Build a world thick with tension, and a protagonist strong enough—or stubborn enough—to keep walking through it.

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David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.