The Big Sleep cover design competition

I am aiming to enter the Penguin Design Award competition. This year, entrants are tasked with designing with the symbolic crime/detective novel by Raymond Chandler.

After reading the book, there is a few scenes and characters that could be used in a design concept.


Below are a few examples of previous cover designs, all have a common theme of guns and girls, it's my feeling that these themes have been used to death for this type of novel, so I'm looking to create something slightly different...

I have created a preliminary mock up of an idea I've had, as seen below:

I have used a very simple graphic image, with the main character  casting a shadow of a knight chess piece in a doorway. The Knight idea came from the running theme in the book of Marlowe (the lead character) being a knight in a dirty, corrupted world.

The deadline for competition submissions is the 9th of April, I have some more development work to do to be ready for that approaching deadline.