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 Book of Dust quipped that it alternatively be titled "His Darker Materials". Pullman conceived "The Book of Dust" before the publication of "Lyra's Oxford" in 2003. On his website in April 2005, he wrote that the book was "under way". In 2007, he described it as "a big, big book". In a 2009 interview with Oxford University newspaper "Cherwell", Pullman stated that "The Book of Dust" was "growing" but that he was "encountering complexities that seem to be making it longer than I thought it would be." In 2011, Pullman said that he was considering writing "The Book of Dust" in two volumes,