The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler is the fifth novel in the series featuring hardboiled private detective Philip Marlowe. It seems that I read one Marlowe novel a year, so this is my book for 2013. What I will remember most about The Little Sister is my sense that this is the “odd” one. The story begins with Marlowe in his office. He obviously doesn’t have a case or anything to do, so his focus is on a blue bottle fly. Marlowe watches the fly, waiting for his chance, and when it finally arrives, his phone rings. Marlowe answers, asks the caller to hold a moment in a soft voice, and then squashes the blue bottle fly. Then he returns to his caller, Orfamay Quest. Orfamay is from Manhattan, Kansas, and she is in Los Angeles to find her brother, Orrin Quest, who has gone missing. She is the eponymous little sister of the title, and with reluctance on both of their parts, Orfamay becomes Marlowe’s client. Marlowe sets out to investigate, and in the course of two days he stumbles upon two murders, both of which he reports anonymously to the police. From the second crime scene, he takes a piece of evidence that eventually leads him to a Hollywood starlet, Mavis Weld. Though she declines his offer of assistance, Marlowe convinces her agent to retain his services so that Mavis Weld, too, is one of his clients and on whose behalf he can do further investigation. It is also for her benefit and protection that Marlowe gets further enmeshed into the morally corrupt and decaying world that is Chandler’s fictional world of Los Angeles, to the point that he too gets his hands dirty, all in the name of protecting his client. Ultimately, Marlowe does find Orrin Quest and solves the series of murders that occur during his investigation, and as readers have come to expect, Marlowe is irrevocably changed by his experiences and the choices that he makes. In The Little Sister, Chandler gives us a darker, edgier Philip Marlowe in the sense that it feels like, if Marlowe ever had any hope for humanity, it is now all gone. He’s 38 years old in this novel, five years older than the Marlowe we meet in The Big Sleep. It’s as though he has given up or lost some important part of himself and now all he has left is his personal code of ethics that drives his sense of duty to do the best for his clients. I felt this especially in Chapter 13, where Marlowe repeats the phrase: “You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.” There’s also a point in that chapter where he narrates: “Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not get into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I’m an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.” This is what I mean when I say Marlowe has lost something important, and here he states plainly what that something is: his humanity. It’s this loss of feeling human that plagues Marlowe throughout the novel, and what makes it more interesting is his response to the three women in the novel. Hardboiled detectives are always confronted with the femme fatale, and though they are tempted by them, they can never give into them. This blueprint is followed in The Little Sister. Orfamay Quest, Mavis Weld, and Dolores Gonzales (another actress) each represent sexual temptation and at various moments, damsels in distress in need of Marlowe’s help. Also typical of Chandler’s femme fatales, they express the extent of the moral decay and corruption of Chandler’s post-war Los Angeles. All three women are transplants to Los Angeles, and all three succumb to its corrupting influence and, like Marlowe, lose part of their own humanity. Not surprisingly, it is the woman who has kept some semblance of humanity that gains most of Marlowe’s support and becomes the one woman he’s willing to sacrifice himself for. Because even though this Marlowe is older and more cynical, we are still supposed to see him as the knight from The Big Sleep. Tarnished and forced to get dirty in order to serve his clients, but a knight nonetheless. But it’s Marlowe’s response to all of these women that intrigues me in that they throw themselves at him, and he doesn’t resist, but there’s also no pleasure either, and I think this is intended to further demonstrate his loss of human. No, he’s not supposed to care for these women in a romantic sense, but it’s also that he seems to lack the ability to care for these women beyond a detective-client relationship. I’ve always had difficulty with the way Chandler characterizes women, but at the same time, I can see how his characterization of them is intended to be representative of the world Marlowe is forced to navigate. This novel in particular, though, seems more intent upon developing the female characters so that they highlight the growing disillusionment and nihilism of Marlowe’s worldview. I said above that I would think of The Little Sister as the “odd” one. Throughout the novel, Marlowe is just bumbling along, not sure where he’s going or what he should do next. This is typical of hardboiled detective fiction, but this novel is even more chaotic and nonsensical than most. This wasn’t my favorite Chandler novel, but what I did like was the evolution of Marlowe’s character. If you’re reading the entire series, don’t skip this one; if you haven’t read any of the books in the series, definitely don’t start with this one. It can stand alone, but it isn’t the right one for an introduction to Philip Marlowe. My final analysis is that The Little Sister was okay, but I’m hoping the last novel, The Long Goodbye, will be better.
Turn left; now go 3.15 miles south and make a U-turn back .34 miles; go right 5.34 miles; and on and on. That was how this hard-boiled noir classic read for me from about half way through to the end. When I thought I had everything in its right place, who did what to whom and why, everything got jumbled again and I’m back to square one and not sure who did what in the last 20 pages I read. It was a very complex novel but an excellent example of my favorite genre from one of my favorite writers and the creator of noir, Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister is literally that, and named, hold on to your seat, Orfamay Quest from Manhattan. That’s not New York, folks, Manhattan, Kansas. That’s Miss Quest, thank you very much and on her "smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.” And of course she considers Marlowe crude and ungentlemanly. She’s in the big city of LA looking for her missing brother. Her and mom, back home, have allocated the big sum of $20 to hire a private eye to find him. Marlowe, with his big heart, is just the guy to move into action because, in part, he’s just bored. The book opens when he’s eyeing a bluebottle fly waiting for the fly to “sit down…he just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set.” That’s boredom, Philip Marlowe’s boredom anyhow. Famous for providing vivid color in words, in this book Chandler zeros in on the underbelly of Hollywood including thugs, starlets and cops who will do just about anything to close a case. Some cops anyhow. And the up and coming actress and her reputation must be protected at any cost due to the potential money she can make for ‘the company.’ People are being stabbed to death regularly with a filed ice pick and dying other ways, too. That’s just a small slice of this multi-layered cake of a book. Although it’s not considered Chandler’s best effort, it was satisfying to me especially for the multitude of ways Chandler describes the mouth and lips of the many characters. Here’s an example, “I put my hand up and rubbed my lip. My mouth had too many teeth in it.” And “his tongue pushed out his lower lip.” My favorite though is his describing the lips pulled back tight showing the little small teeth. When he talks like that, I just ‘see’ it and it just makes me all aflutter. His use of the English lanuage cannot be compared to another writer and many writers name him as being influential in their desire to write. High compliment indeed.Was looking at books from my ‘to read’ stack and reading the back of one book I came across the words ‘noir’ and ‘hard-boiled.’ Going to pass it up for another in the stack. I just finished a Raymond Chandler, the writer who created the genre...just finished with the real deal so I’ll wait awhile for any wannabe hard-boiled noirs.
What do You think about The Little Sister (1988)?
This novel used similes that were long and round and thin, like a rattailed file that has been ground smooth.This novel is a sort of sad whisper, like a mortitian asking for a down payment.This novel had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towl.This novel felt like a nice leg.This novel was brought up straight, like the wicked foreman of the Lazy Q.This novel sounded like somebody putting aways saucepans.This novel flashed like lightening.This novel burned like dry ice.This novel bounced me downstairs like a basketball.This novel made my brain feel like a bucket of wet sand.This novel spoke to me like a six-hundred dollar funeral.This novel made a sort of high keening noise, like a couple of pansies fighting for a piece of silk.This novel grew on me like scum on a water tank.This novel burned like a hot iron.This novel gave me the creeps. Like petting snakes.This novel felt like four years on a road gang.This novel had a jaw like a park bench.This novel had eyes cloudy and grey like freezing water.This novel was sad, like a fallen cake.This novel's similies poured like water through the floodgagtes of a dam.This novel fell on silence like a tired head on a swansdown pillow.This novel made me laugh like a child trying to be supercilious at a playroom tea party.
—Darwin8u
“Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt.”A woman from small town Kansas travels to California and hires Marlowe to track down her missing brother. In his quest to locate the man in question, Chandler will take Marlowe into the world of Hollywood and the shady characters that occupy it.In The Little Sister, Chandler packs about ten pounds of plot into a two pound sack. As many of his fans have said, trying to follow a Marlowe novel is about as simple as reading a road map upside down and backwards. Ice picks, gunshots and fist on face violence make up the fifth installment of Chandler’s signature series and while the plot twists hit harder than a flurry of punches to the solar plexus, it’s Chandler’s writing that once again blew me away.Not known for having a positive worldview, Chandler is increasingly bitter this time around. Briefly working as a screenwriter in Tinseltown, certain experiences soured him on the whole industry. Through Marlowe, he muses on the whole damn state of California, hitting it with stinging criticism.“California, the department store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.”“I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You’re using money space. See those people over there behind the rope They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. The could do better home out of a can.”“They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”Despite his general dislike for most of the people he meets, Marlowe spends the entire novel manipulating evidence and tipping the scales in favor of others which makes the ending all that more shocking. If you saw it coming, I’ll bake you a dozen cookies.I’m sad to see that I’m reaching the end of my Marlowe marathon. Two more Chandler-written novels remain with arguably the best of the best on the horizon. The Little Sister may not be sitting at the top but it’s certainly a worthy piece of Marlowe legacy.
—Brandon
Raymond Chandler's writing is still the most amazing stuff I've ever seen, don't get me wrong. This book seemed a little more worn than the others -- or maybe I'm getting more used to it. I still love the voice he's given to Marlowe, and I still think his work is probably worth reading no matter what, but this one didn't fill me with glee. It's easy to read, it's atmospheric, the actual writing is good, but... the plot is incoherent (no surprises there) and the characters, particularly the women, don't interest me at all.It's the whole time capsule thing again -- the setting and atmosphere is one of a time I don't know, won't ever know. That's interesting, up to a point, but it doesn't count for that much. The female characters actively irritated me this time, all histrionic and taking advantage of our dear shop-worn Galahad. It's amazing the way said Galahad gets himself out of trouble. I'm surprised he hasn't spent more time being arrested in the course of all these novels.I'd love to see Marlowe meet a decent woman or two. At this point, one would do.
—Nikki
