At the B&N Reads blog he tagged five famous books that contain huge mistakes, including:
The Big Sleep, by Raymond ChandlerRead about the other entries on the list.
Chandler’s classic hardboiled detective novel—the gold standard for stories of world-weary private investigators—has a plot so famously dense and twisty that an entire murder not only goes unsolved, but completely ignored. At one point, a chauffeur is found murdered in the car. The reader is given the details of the crime scene, implying it’s going to be important, and then it’s never mentioned again. When Hollywood made a film version a few years later the producers contacted Chandler to ask who killed the chauffeur, and Chandler’s response has become the stuff of legend: “Damned if I know!”
The Big Sleep also appears on John Sweeney's top ten list of books on corruption, the Telegraph's top 23 list of amazing--and short--classic books, Lucy Worsley's ten best list of fictional detectives, Becky Ferreira's list of seven of the best books set in Los Angeles, Ian Rankin's list of five perfect mysteries, Kathryn Williams's reading list on greed, Gigi Levangie Grazer's list of six favorite books that became movies, Megan Wasson's list of five top books on Los Angeles, Greil Marcus's six recommended books list, Barry Forshaw's critic's chart of six American noir masters, David Nicholls' list of favorite film adaptations, and the Guardian's list of ten of the best smokes in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
