Thu 11 Aug 2022
A PI Mystery Review by Tony Baer: RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Little Sister.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[12] Comments
RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Little Sister. Philip Marlowe #5. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1949. Reprinted many times.
A mousy little young lady, Miss Orfamay Quest from smalltown Kansas, hires Philip Marlowe to find her long lost brother. She’s terribly proper and is afraid her brother may have succumbed to the sinful temptations of Los Angeles.
The story’s as convoluted as Chandler’s usually are. But the patter is, for my money, the most hilarious of any of Marlowe’s adventures.
At first she’s not sure about Marlowe: “I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.â€
“Would it be alright if I peeled an orange?†Marlowe responds.
Marlowe’s got nothing better to do, so he takes her pitifully proffered twenty dollars and gets to work on it — but not before getting Miss Quest’s description of her brother. “He used to wear a little blond mustache but Mother made him cut it off.â€
Marlowe: “Don’t tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.â€
Marlowe meets up with some heavies at brother Quest’s last known address. He takes a skiv and pistol from the first guy he sees, who says: “Maybe we meet again some day soon. When I got a friend with me.â€
Marlowe: “Tell him to wear a clean shirt…. And lend you one.†“What happens to people who get tough with you? You make them hold your toupee?â€
He meets up with a Hollywood femme fatale “almost as hard to get as a haircut.†The walls in her apartment are “monkey-bottom blueâ€. When she pleads with Marlowe that she’s lonely, he suggests she “call an escort bureau.â€
As usual, it turns out that Marlowe’s client is full of shit. Miss Quest knows precisely where her brother is all along and she’s just trying to squeeze her way into his blackmail scheme against their much more successful Hollywood starlet of a half-sister. They’ve got some dirt on good old sis that ties her to the mob and they want to bleed her for all she’s worth.
Invited to join in the blackmail, Marlowe demurs: “I’d never get anywhere as a blackmailer. I just don’t have the engaging personality.â€
There’s murder and drugs and backstabbing galore, and Marlowe comes as close as ever to imprisonment and losing his license.
Marlowe metes out justice in his own idealistic ways, protecting the innocent at his own peril, while doing his best to make sure that the guilty get theirs, whether via the law or other more karmic means.
The book is one of Marlowe’s more neglected and maligned. But for me, it’s one of his best.
August 11th, 2022 at 9:12 pm
Absolutely agreed it is one of his best. His masterpiece is THE LONG GOODBYE in terms of what he wanted to accomplish with the form, and this is the dress rehersal.
August 11th, 2022 at 11:19 pm
“Neglected and maligned”? Maybe by some, but not by me. One of the top PI stories I’ve ever read. Thanks for the review, Tony. Reminds me that it’s time to read it again.
August 12th, 2022 at 7:44 am
Tony,
As Steve says above, “neglected and maligned”?
By WHO?? The only book Chandler wrote that you could say that about would be “Playback”. And to repeat what a friend of mine said years ago, if anyone else had written it, most would say it’s a pretty good book. It certainly is Chandler’s weakest by far. Thanks for the good review, regardless.
David,
I almost agree with you on “Long Goodbye”. I still think “Farewell My Lovely” is Chandler’s best and TLG is right behind it. That being said, I’ve read TLG at least four times in my short life that I can remember, more than any of his others. I guess that says something right there. And “Lady In the Lake” would be my number three!
August 12th, 2022 at 8:08 am
Tony’s right. LITTLE SISTER, coming right after THE LONG GOODBYE, tends to get overshadowed by that overrated opus. And coming right before PLAYBACK, it has even been seen as the beginning of a decline of Chandler’s talents. But it is, as Tony noted, a well-crafted and highly enjoyable book.
August 12th, 2022 at 9:01 am
But Dan The Little Sister did not come right after The Long Goodbye. Little Sister was published in 1949 and The Long Goodbye in 1954.
If backed into a corner I have to pick Chandler as my favorite PI author.
August 12th, 2022 at 9:23 am
The intro to Knopf’s “Raymond Chandler Omnibusâ€: “Now that he is dead and all his work published, we can look back over the seventy-one years of Chandler’s life and plot the art of his creative career; we can see how it rose slowly at first, then soared and remained at zenith for the duration of these four miraculous books [Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lively; High Window; Lady in the Lake], before it fell fast and sputtered out in The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye.â€
To me, Long Goodbye is the pinnacle rather than the sputtering out of Chandler’s genius.
August 12th, 2022 at 9:39 am
Chandler wrote in a letter to James Sandoe that The Little Sister was “The only book of mine that I have actively disliked. It was written in a bad mood and I think that comes through.†Anthony Boucher disliked it, damning it for what he felt was, “its scathing hatred of the human race.†https://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/the-little-sister-1949-by-raymond-chandler/
August 12th, 2022 at 6:06 pm
Isn’t a “scathing hatred of the human race” the essence of noir fiction?
August 13th, 2022 at 9:53 am
Beb,
No.
Noir is just crime fiction that has a dark, sinister atmosphere.
That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t have to have a philosophical position the author is trying to convince you of. It doesn’t have to have an urban setting. It doesn’t even have to end with protagonist in a worse position that s/he was in when the book started.
It just has to have a dark, sinister atmosphere.
Hard-boiled is crime fiction that has a tough, colloquial style.
Not all hard-boiled is noir. Not all noir is hard-boiled.
When Marcel Duhamel started the crime fiction line Serie Noire for Gallimard, he included such hard-boiled luminaries as Hammett, Chandler, W.R. Burnett, etc.
But he also published writers like Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, who weren’t hard-boiled, but who were able to project a dark, sinister atmosphere.
So Daphne du Maurier’s REBECCA is noir, but not hard-boiled.
Mickey Spillane’s ONE LONELY NIGHT is both noir and hard-boiled.
And Richard S. Prather’s PATTERN FOR PANIC (like ONE LONELY NIGHT, it pits its PI hero, Shell Scott, against a Soviet spy ring) is hard-boiled, but not the least bit noir.
August 13th, 2022 at 6:41 pm
Jim, You will hear no argument from me!
August 19th, 2022 at 9:03 pm
Also the basis for an excellent movie starring James Garner as Marlowe, and featuring Bruce Lee in his first appearance.
January 12th, 2023 at 2:35 pm
Agree re: “neglected and maligned,” and with Terry about the film. Garner is one of my favorite screen Marlowes (it’s ironic that such a beloved character has been played by so many actors I dislike, e.g., Robert Montgomery, Elliott Gould, James Caan). While I prefer period Marlowes, and aspects of its updating are somewhat vexing, I think Marlowe, too, is unfairly neglected.