The Little Sister [Paperback]

Before reading this book, make sure you have a large blackboard and plenty of chalk. At least half a dozen different colors. Because that's what you'll need to diagram out the plot of The Little Sister. Keeping straight who's who and who did what to whom and why will give you plenty to do as you read and reread the pages of this Philip Marlowe mystery. Now I know what you're going to say. With Raymond Chandler, it's not about the story, it's about atmosphere. True enough. But I still have to believe that the reader's enjoyment is greatly enhanced if the writer has provided a coherent plot as a framework for displaying literary dexterity. In other words, the story itself isn't all important, but it is somewhat important.
As I see it, there are no less than four ways to view this novel.
The first way is as a murder mystery. A young woman from Manhattan (Manhattan, Kansas that is) hires Marlowe to find her missing brother. His subsequent search does eventually locate the young man but not before a drunk and a grifter are both murdered with an ice pick to the vicinity of the medulla oblongata. What is the motive behind these grotesque slayings? The motive is the urgent need to find a particular photograph. A photograph that shows two people sitting down to dinner in a restaurant. I'm not kidding.
The second way to view The Little Sister is as an affectionate sendup of noir crime writing in general and Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon in particular. This might explain why the complications are endless and so very difficult to follow. Perhaps Chandler felt the need to exaggerate the number and degree of plot twists in order to make a satiric point.
Thirdly, The Little Sister is a withering look at Hollywood and the recognizable types who dwell within. Second rate actors, self important talent agents, ambitious starlets, jaded actresses and befuddled studio heads are all lampooned to one degree or another here. I found this aspect of the book to be highly entertaining and would have liked to have seen it emphasized even more.
And lastly, this book can be taken as a view into the mind of a man slowly losing his grip. This Marlowe is world weary, tired. He's lonely and exasperated. Chandler has Marlowe questioning his own sanity for continuing to pursue his chosen profession.
Marlowe's investigation takes him to many places in and near Los Angeles. A seedy hotel, a rundown boarding house, the police station, and a working movie set to name only a few. Chandler brilliantly describes all locales with an amount of detail that serves to set the exact mood he wants to convey. Marlowe's steady output of cynical quips, some spoken, others only thought, are first rate and at times absolutely priceless. It is a tribute to Chandler's originality, as well as his keen wit, that readers never tire of this ongoing patter.
The Little Sister has a lot to recommend it. I just don't think one should have to work so hard to be able to follow a storyline. And oh yes, be sure to read The Maltese Falcon first.

Over the course of the last 2 years I've read 5 out of the 7 Philip Marlowe detective novels of Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959). "The Little Sister" (1949) is the fifth Marlowe novel, and even though parts of it intrigued me, I couldn't help but feel a tad disappointed...

By 1944, Chandler had become a household name both in the USA and around the world for his tough-yet-sensitive, cynical-yet-romantic prose masterpieces. Around this time, Hollywood had come knocking. Chandler co-wrote the screeplay for "Double Indemnity" with Billy Wilder, and the first Marlowe novel "The Big Sleep" was made into a classic motion picture starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The money came rolling in: Chandler and his wife Cissy moved into a luxurious house in L.A.'s ritzy Pacific Palisades section. The Hollywood temptation came as well: Chandler began an affair with a secretary at Paramount Pictures and his chronic alcoholism--which was already bad--began to worsen.

In addition, during this time (the late 1940s), Los Angeles was rapidly transforming from what was once a small, coastal, desert community when Chandler had first moved there 30 years prior--into the enormous, sprawling, congested, and smoggy metropolis it is today. It's telling that Chandler moved 100 miles south to La Jolla, CA not long after this book was published.

One can sense while reading "The Little Sister" that Chandler was becoming bitter and weary--not only at the direction of his own life and the Hollywood movie machine (where writers are traditionally the low man on the totem pole) but also how his adopted home was changing...and not for the better, calling L.A. "a neon slum" and "a big, hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup." While world-weariness had always been present in all the Philip Marlowe private detective novels, here, unlike Chandler's other books, it almost weighs down the storytelling.

The story itself is the standard, convoluted Chandler fare: Ms. Orfamay Quest--a pretty young woman from Manhattan, Kansas--seeks Marlowe's help in locating her missing brother Orrin P. Quest. Marlowe immediately suspects that Orfamay is not all she appears to be, yet--lacking any other clients--he accepts her case nonetheless. From this unlikely setting, both Marlowe and the reader are brought into a world of movie stars, agents, gangsters, backstabbers (both real and metaphorical) and small-time hustlers. While it's hard to figure out exactly who is doing what to whom, this confusion is the hallmark of all Chandler novels--particularly the ones of any worth.

For the Chandler enthusiast, "The Little Sister" is an above-average book, with some of the punchiest, toughest dialogue that Chandler ever wrote. It's far from the worst Chandler I've ever read (that would be "The Lady in the Lake"--1943) However, for the enthusiast as well as the more casual reader, "The Long Goodbye" (1954) is Chandler's true masterpiece, with "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940) coming in a close second. "The Little Sister" is well worth the read, but I expected more from the potent combination of Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe & Hollywood.

The latest in a long series of visits to LA had me refreshing my memory of one of my favourite novelists. As a young man I knew the Philip Marlowe books nearly by heart before I ever set foot in the city they put on the literary map. I have always thought that Chandler counts as literature not just as crime fiction. He was a professed admirer of the ultra-craftsman Flaubert, and it shows in the way he works at every sentence, indeed every word. He was English and as far as I know unrelated to the 'real' LA Chandlers (he attended the same school as P G Wodehouse, if you can believe it). He maintained that 'the American language' can say anything and in The Simple Art of Murder he took a brilliant potshot at the Agatha Christie school of English crime fiction , all tight-lipped butlers polishing the georgian silver and respectful upper-middles gathered to hear the amateur master-sleuth analyse over 5 or 6 pages which of them dunnit. His power of creating atmosphere is phenomenal, his dialogue is legendary, and for me The Little Sister is the best of the 7 Marlowes. It's at the crest of the hill, before he started to lose concentration in The Long Goodbye and lost just about everything in the sad Playback. I can still feel the heavy heat at the start of the book, and the dialogue is the best he ever did. Is there any other instance of anyone silencing Marlowe with an answer the way the beat-up hotel dick does when Marlowe tells him he is going up to room such-and-such and the hotel dick says 'Am I stopping you?'. And I cherish the bit about the same character tucking his gun into his waistband 'in an emergency he could probably have got it out in less than a minute'. I can't even yet follow the plot, but actually I have never been able to follow any Chandler plot, though I suspect the author himself lost his way in this one. It's maybe the first sign of the decline that set in next -- Marlowe is beginning to feel old and tired and he is probably speaking for more than himself. The plot is really neither here nor there. The only fully developed character is Marlowe himself, but Mavis Weld comes over well, the little sister herself is a memorable grotesque and see what you make of Dolores Gonzalez. The other major character is Los Angeles itself, which fascinates me as it obviously fascinated its adopted son Chandler. Half a century and more on from the time of writing I can still get the feel of Chandler's LA.