Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister – Femme Fatale

I’ve become a big fan of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled novels featuring his private eye, Philip Marlowe. I previously reviewed his fourth book, The Lady In The Lake, and The Little Sister, published in 1949, continues Chandler’s bleak and disillusioned perspective on the seamy side of Los Angeles and its surrounding towns.

It opens with Marlowe alone in his office, when a woman calls him on the phone, asking him to find her missing brother. He insists on seeing her in person, which she resists, but eventually gives in. She is Orfamay Quest, and, as Marlowe describes her,

She was a small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 229-230). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

She has come all the way out to California from Manhattan, Kansas, because her brother, Orrin – who, she assures Marlowe, would never get into any kind of trouble – stopped sending weekly letters to her and their mother. Marlowe is naturally suspicious of Orfamay’s story, but he agrees to take on her case for twenty dollars.

What follows is a very complicated situation involving mobsters from Cleveland, corrupt cops, Hollywood B-listers, a doctor who supplies them with drugs, and a murderer who likes to kill by stabbing his (or her) victims in the neck with an ice pick. Suffice it to say that no one is particularly innocent and Marlowe’s natural cynicism is fully justified.

And yet, even in the most dangerous and tempting circumstances, Marlowe clings to his code of honor: refusing to take bribes, stating the truth to the police even when it puts himself in danger, and resisting the blandishments of a beautiful Hollywood actress. He knows he won’t get rewarded for his virtue, but like a medieval knight pledged to behave chivalrously, he never gives in.

As in The Lady In The Lake, one of my favorite ingredients of Chandler’s style is his deadpan humor. Here are a few examples:

I got my wallet out and handed him one of my business cards. He read it thoughtfully and tapped the edge against his porcelain crown.
“He coulda went somewhere without telling me,” he mused.
“Your grammar,” I said, “is almost as loose as your toupee.”
“You lay off my toupee, if you know what’s good for you,” he shouted.
“I wasn’t going to eat it,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.”
He took a step towards me, and dropped his right shoulder. A scowl of fury dropped his lip almost as far.
“Don’t hit me. I’m insured,” I told him.
“Oh hell. Just another screwball.” He shrugged and put his lip back up on his face.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 571-577). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve. He wasn’t alone, but I looked at him first. He was a large man and wide. Not young nor handsome, but he looked durable. Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 1364-1368). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The boss mortician fluttered around making elegant little gestures and body movements as graceful as a Chopin ending. His composed gray face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 2162-2163). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

And, of course, there are plenty of wonderfully descriptive similes to set the mood:

Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Location 683). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 795-796). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 1338-1339). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I took the wrinkles out of my lips and said aloud:
“Hello again. Anybody here needing a detective?”
Nothing answered me, not even a stand-in for an echo. The sound of my voice fell on silence like a tired head on a swansdown pillow.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Little Sister (Kindle Locations 2985-2987). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Either you love this stuff, or you don’t. I think it’s great – despite Marlowe’s world-weariness, he loves LA and the losers who populate its seediest neighborhoods. He knows one man can’t make much difference in the world, but he never gives up trying.

Chandler wrote The Little Sister after he had had some very frustrating experiences as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and his contempt for Tinseltown is as clear as a bell. (Or maybe like “two dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool”, to borrow a simile!) The plot is difficult to unravel at times, and just when I thought I had things figured out, he throws a curveball to surprise. That said, the ending is very good, and I would rank The Little Sister as one of Chandler’s best.

Raymond Chandler’s The Lady In The Lake – Classic Noir

The Lady In The Lake (1943) is the fourth novel by Raymond Chandler. He wrote quite a few short stories for pulp magazines before hitting it big with his first novel, The Big Sleep. That one introduced his hero, private detective Philip Marlowe, memorably played by Humphrey Bogart on the silver screen.

The Lady In The Lake is a far cry from the genteel and relatively sedate mysteries of Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie. The first word that comes to my mind is gritty. Marlowe is a tough man doing a tough job in a tough town, Los Angeles, CA. He is dogged in his pursuit of truth, and he tries to do the right thing, even when it could cost him his life. Surrounded by corrupt cops, unscrupulous businessmen, and scheming women, Marlowe never wavers from his desire to get to the bottom of the case, regardless of where it takes him.

This case begins with a high-powered executive, Derace Kingsley, hiring Marlowe to find his missing wife. She disappeared a month ago, and he received a telegram from her informing him that she was getting a Mexican divorce and marrying a Chris Lavery – a notorious young womanizer. Before too long in his investigation, Marlowe has discovered a woman who was drowned weeks ago in a lake, and who is married to doctor who provides drugs to a select clientele. This doctor lives across the street from Lavery.

Kingsley is having an affair with his office assistant, Adrienne Fromsett, whose handkerchief Marlowe finds at Lavery’s house. It’s very complicated, and the police are constantly giving Marlowe a hard time while he tries to unravel the web of deceit and corruption.

I really like Chandler’s style, especially when he describes a setting. He is the master of the unexpected yet apt metaphor and simile. Here are some examples:

On the wall there was a huge tinted photograph of an elderly party with a chiselled beak and whiskers and a wing collar. The Adam’s apple that edged through his wing collar looked harder than most people’s chins.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 184-186). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The clerk on duty was an eggheaded man with no interest in me or in anything else. He wore parts of a white linen suit and he yawned as he handed me the desk pen and looked off into the distance as if remembering his childhood.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 1287-1288). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2155-2157). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

A wizened waiter with evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone put a napkin with a printed peacock on it down on the table in front of me and gave me a bacardi cocktail.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2723-2724). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2900-2903). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2915-2916). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

You get the idea! There’s also a dry sense of humor that Marlowe employs to leaven the general grimness.

Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier. “One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”
Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?”
“Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”
Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.”
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 3143-3147). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Plot-wise, The Lady In The Lake holds up very well. Chandler does an excellent job making sure the reader can keep all the various threads of the mystery clear, despite it being complicated. And I was genuinely surprised by a major plot twist near the end. The Lady In The Lake is an example of American noir fiction at its very finest. Even though it is set in 1940s LA, it could just as easily happen today.