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
Big Little Book series to Perdition" (2002) showed a boy reading "The Lone Ranger" Big Little Book, but this was an anachronism since the movie is set during 1931, a year prior to the first Big Little Books and two years before "The Lone Ranger" premiered January 31, 1933 on radio. More than 1,300 Big Little Books and the many publishers are mentioned in Arnold T. Blumberg's "The Big Big Little Book Book" (Gemstone, 2004). From 1939 the British Woolworths Group sold "Mighty Midgets", 32-page books that measured 3¾ inches by 2½ inches (10 x 7 cm) and were sold at the artificially low