The Big Sleep (1939)
RAYMOND CHANDLER

(opening of Chapter One)

   It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.  I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them.  I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.  I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.  I was calling on four million dollars.

    The main hallway of the Sternwood Place was two stories high.   Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.   The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere.  I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him.

    There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible.  Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs.  Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof.  Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

    On the east side of the hall, a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance.   Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about.  They didn't look as if anybody had ever sat in them.   In the middle of the west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at the corners.   Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame.  The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war.  The officer had a neat black imperial, black moustachios, hot hard coal-black eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with.  I thought this might be General Sternwood's grandfather.  It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties.

    I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs.  It wasn't the butler coming back.  It  was a girl.

*    *    *

(concluding paragraphs, Chapter Thirty-Nine)

   I went quickly away from her down the room and out and down the tiled staircase to the front hall.  I didn't see anybody when I left.  I found my hat alone this time.  Outside, the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light.  I got into my car and drove off down the hill.

    What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?  In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill?  You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.  Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.  You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.  Me, I was part of the nastiness now.  Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.  But the old man didn't have to be.  He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting.  His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur.  His thoughts were as gray as ashes.  And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.

    On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches.  They didn't do me any good.  All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again.