The Big Sleep: 25 Classic Covers, Ranked / July 20, 2018 By CrimeReads

This week marks the 130th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s birth, an event worth celebrating any number of ways, whether you pick up a copy of Vintage/Black Lizard’s The Annotated Big Sleep, read Lawrence Osborne’s new Philip Marlowe novel Only to Sleep, watch the Bogart/Bacall noir or the Robert Mitchum 1978 new wave noir, or just go the old-fashioned way by re-reading Chandler’s seminal classic, the 1939 books-and-blackmail crime story that stands alongside The Long Goodbye as the author’s most enduring and influential work.
Here at CrimeReads, we’ll celebrate in our traditional way, which is to collect and very scientifically rank book covers from around the world. With The Big Sleep, the image that’s singed onto your brain most likely involves Bogart and Bacall or, for some initiates, Dorothy Malone. But the same evocative world that inspired Howard Hawks also inspired countless cover designers. So many covers. And we’ve collected them here! Publishers, years, countries of publication and, where available, artist information, are included and quite possibly error-riddled. As always, we defer to our friend J. Kingston Pierce of Killer Covers and The Rap Sheet (and a frequent CrimeReads contributor) for a detailed and accurate breakdown of Marlowe cover art. This is just our own dilettantish and over-enthusiastic effort.
So let’s take a tour around the wide world of The Big Sleep.


25. Vintage (1976). Oh, that hair. Definitely not 1940s appropriate.

24. Penguin Books (2005). Yes, we get it. It’s a large gun.

23. Pocket (1950). What is he about to do with his hand?!?! And why is that moment on the cover?

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