by Raymond Chandler
1988 • Vintage Books
250 pages / 039475767X (paperback)
For an author whose novels have been faithfully and successfully adapted by Hollywood, Raymond Chandler...well...hated Hollywood.
Already an established crime novelist, Chandler entered the film industry as a screenwriter to work with Billy Wilder on the 1944 drama Double Indemnity, which earned both men an Oscar nomination. By the time Chandler's stay in Hollywood ended, he published a widely-read article in the Atlantic that decried producers' 'exploitation' of scribes and had a permanent falling out with Alfred Hitchcock over Strangers on a Train.
The Little Sister, published in 1949, is an anti-Hollywood novel fueled by Chandler's dealings with the studio system. Little surprise that it was only adapted for television during his lifetime and not touched by the film industry until Paul Bogart directed an updated version, Marlowe with James Garner, in 1969. Chandler could not have made new friends in Tinseltown with this angry, aggressive novel that shows Philip Marlowe at his most bitter and the author at some of his truly best.Six years had passed since Chandler released his previous Marlowe novel, The Lady in the Lake, in 1943. The Little Sister is his first novel set in the post-war era, which seems to have increased his - and consequently Marlowe's - irritation towards the United States as a military and economic superpower. Now 38, Marlowe laments the disappearance of 'old' Los Angeles when economic growth and urban sprawl changed the city's atmosphere and the attitudes of its people. Neither is his job getting any easier, by the way, and his assignment in The Little Sister is his most bizarre yet.
The story is centered on Orfamay Quest, a petite, childlike woman from Kansas who is trying to locate her brother, the employee of a California engineering company. Marlowe is immediately sucked into Chandler's plot maze, stumbling upon two murders just after they happen. He even runs afoul of the police, who place him under threat of arrest for suppressing evidence. Connections from the Los Angeles underworld lead him to an emerging Hollywood actress and the crude individuals she's surrounded by, who prove a wild experience in themselves.
The Little Sister, though with plenty of Marlowe humor, is a novel that will leave you feeling grim and a tad debauched. None of the characters Marlowe deals with are the least likeable and each person has a certain repulsive quality, coming across as a deadbeat, slut, or junkie. Even Marlowe falls into transgression when he crosses paths with good-looking and manipulative women, which creates more than enough problems for him when crime-solving.
Chandler's novel has a certain rawness that is not common to his other work and it's all the better for it. I found it far better made than The Lady in the Lake, which only shows traces of what makes Chandler a great author. The Little Sister has rounder characters and an airtight plot whose ending, while over the top, brings everything neatly to a close and left me completely satisfied. Though Marlowe does not visit unusual locations as in the previous novel, Chandler places the action in Los Angeles and Bay City (really Santa Monica) with eye-catching detail. You could almost smell the air freshener of expensive Hollywood suites and the mildew and stale booze of a run-down boarding house.
Though Chandler's novel was not a great success in bookstores and never adapted to film in his lifetime, The Little Sister now enjoys critical praise. It's perhaps not as stellar as The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, or The Long Goodbye, but it belongs at least on the next-to-highest tier of his output. While he could have spent more time depicting Hollywood and his wonderfully fluid writing (as usual) is sometimes too loose to the point of being long-winded or stilted, The Little Sister is still one of the best-written crime novels in English. Anyone with a stomach for shady people, seedy locations, and a touch of blood should be impressed by what Chandler pulls off.
Black Lizard, the crime label of Vintage Books, has done an exceptional job in rereleasing Chandler's novels, but there seems to be an unusual number of typos that were not fixed up before the 1988 edition of The Little Sister went to press. The 250-page volume is in Black Lizard's sleek format with Deco fonts and trim. Unfortunately, there were several instances where a word was misspelled and at least two cases where a word was omitted. Since Vintage has been exceptionally accurate in the other Marlowe novels, these mistakes jump off the page. This was hopefully corrected in later printings that are up to Vintage's established standard.
