I read through all the big Raymond Chandler novels in a single summer, about a decade ago. I thought that was it, but I was definitely wrong: there’s a lot of Chandler out there that hasn’t been canonized by Vintage Classics. I recently came into a pile of this, old paperbacks that trigger my dust allergy, and I dove into it with great expectations. Having just finished The Little Sister (a Marlowe adventure so second-string that it never even got a straight film adaptation), I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or not.
The main thing that distracted me were the cracks showing through in Chandler’s style. A lot of what looked like attitude when I was reading The Big Sleep ten years ago looks like greasepaint now. I don’t know whether to blame this on the author or credit it to myself as a more mature reader. Consider this description of a police-station lady typist:
“The orange queen wrote without looking up. To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.”
This is a vaudeville bit. The point, I suppose, is to show that Marlowe maintains enough ironic detachment from this (and every) situation to crack wise in his head, but it’s still vaudeville. The punch-line/setup structure belongs to a different era of stand-up comedy, and that’s why its modular character now seems obvious. It’s a building block of narrative, as wordpress so irrelevantly calls the paragraph. Any number of other building blocks – any one at all marked positive for “joke”- would have worked just as well.
Chandler’s style in The Little Sister is modular throughout. You can’t ignore it, and it makes the book harder to enjoy than it might be. You could say something similar about the characters, too, since they’re all types as well – the gangster, the sultry Mexican seductress, the small-town girl – in a way that the main players in The Big Sleep, to my recollection, weren’t. Except that Chandler knows it, and, if the stock characters with their stock dialogue are a sign of being pressed for time or money, he makes a virtue out of necessity. The gangster is a victim, not a menace; the Mexican turns out to be from Cleveland; and the small-town girl sells her own brother’s life for a thousand dollars. In Chandler’s only Hollywood novel, the point seems to be that the types are all fake; the eponymous little sister, whose older sibling has made it in pictures, turns out to be by far the better and deadlier actor of the two.
In combination with an odd, almost garish treatment of setting that’s also not what I remember from the big three Chandler novels, this gives the whole book an air of un- or surreality, like the whole thing itself might be a movie or a pre-death hallucination on Marlowe’s part. Everyone’s mask might just come off at any moment. Reality is elsewhere – in particular, Manhattan, Kansas, the weirdly misnamed town from which several of the protagonists hail. That’s where, as the novel wraps up, we imagine little sister squabbling with mother about how to divide up the money the former earned by selling out brother. Reality is sordid; reality is about what people will do for a little bit of money.
Marlowe himself is even more above monetary considerations than usual. Chandler makes much of the little sister’s repeated, failed attempts to compensate him for his work; he ends the book by incinerating a series of incriminating photos whose blackmail value probably exceeds his annual income, which is not made out to be very great (“I had a client once…”) From that point of view, Marlowe turns out to be probably the most fantastic character in The Little Sister, a Socratic type who never earns any money but somehow gets fed just the same. The dreamwork behind the book’s apparent surrealism would be that Marlowe gins up a cast of characters just as unbelievable as he is; his job, to protect them from Kansans, is basically also to protect them from reality.