Having read a Philip Marlowe continuation novel, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne, I felt it was time to return to the original novels by Raymond Chandler. A long time ago, he used to be a real favourite of mine. How would his writing seem to me now, a lifetime later?
I assumed that I had read all the Philip Marlowe books, so when I took The Little Sister out of the library, I thought I would be re-reading it. As I started reading, it did not seem very familiar and I realised that I had missed this one.
What a treat it was to have a Marlowe story come up fresh! I think it might just be the best of them, having a slight edge over The Long Goodbye. What I had forgotten is the intensity of Chandler’s writing, the visual quality that makes reading him feel like watching a film noir in one’s mind’s eye. He is such a marvellous prose stylist. Let’s face it, he’s a considerably better writer than many other American writers of the second half of the twentieth century who have more “literary” reputations.
He didn’t invent that distinctive first-person style, but he did refine and perfect it. Every now and then we get a hint that Marlowe is an educated man. “Browning, the poet not the gun.”, for example. This justifies the language in which his thoughts are framed.
So many of the writers I have liked over the years use a style that derives from Chandler. Len Deighton borrowed quite heavily from Chandler in his early novels, perhaps most of all in Billion Dollar Brain where the assassin uses the same killing method as in The Little Sister. Derek Raymond went so far as to adopt “Raymond” as his pen name. Philip Kerr used a world-weary, Marlowe style detective to examine the Third Reich.
This time, I’m not going to bother with a detailed description of the plot. Chandler himself was famously unconcerned about that side of things. During the filming of The Big Sleep, when asked to confirm a detail in the plot, he said he had no idea. What plot there is here is driven by the search for some photographs that could compromise the career of a rising Hollywood star. But why are people prepared to kill to get them?
It’s the atmosphere, the sense of place, the feeling that Marlowe is involved in murky goings-on that he can’t quite understand, that are so compelling. Marlowe’s not really a logical detective in the Holmes manner, more of an intuitive one like Maigret.
This story seems even more cynical than the others. It’s full of quotable passages, including the famous line about Los Angeles: “A city with all the personality of a paper cup”. There is a description of a well-off lawyer: “He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.”
Perhaps it is the Hollywood setting that makes this one so good. Chandler had seen it all from the inside by the time this was published and he uses his knowledge to great effect. He had worked very successfully in the film industry, writing the original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia and adapting Double Indemnity. As the movie mogul says “Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars’ worth of book-keeping”.
The reference to the studio owning “1500 theatres” is a reminder that this was published in 1949 and set in the late 1940s, just before the legal challenge that forced the studios to sell off the cinemas, thus ending their monopoly of the business that was more or less a licence to print money.
It’s a detective story but also a look at the dark side of Hollywood glamour. Money values have become the only values in Los Angeles, making the city a target for all kinds of criminal interests and vulnerable to corruption. This is something more than a murder mystery and Chandler is a serious writer who cannot be confined to a category marked “detective story”.
He is contemplating serious matters here as in this description of Marlowe coming across a dead man: “Something had happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence.”
The Good Reader 