The Big Sleep racketeering; Al Capone and Meyer Lansky were not role models. A figure like A. G. Geiger, the dirty-books racketeer in Raymond Chandler's "Big Sleep" (1939) who supplements his business activities as owner of a pornographic lending library in Hollywood by arranging sex orgies and blackmailing rich customers, is a fascinating but lurid exaggeration. However susceptible film personalities were to blackmail, it was not the métier of book dealers." The Big Sleep The Big Sleep (1939) is a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. It has been adapted for film twice, in 1946
The Big Sleep (1978 film) "senselessly gaudy" and "overloaded with big names, and in this case the net effect of an all-star cast is to make an already confusing mystery even harder to follow." Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film 1.5 stars out of 4 and wrote, "All of the zigs and zags of the original story are in the remake; what's missing is the enthusiasm. Talented actors such as Edward Fox and Oliver Reed sleepwalk through their parts." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" panned the film as "a flat, routine procedural detective mystery utterly devoid of any "film noir"