I wrote about the surrealism of The Little Sister as a way of getting into what really bothered me about the book: its cop-loving politics. Here too, though, I don’t know whether I ought to be bothered or not. The book seems to be doing something different than it explicitly claims to, maybe even something different than what Chandler has in mind.
Like in a lot of Chandler novels, Philip Marlowe gets tangled up with the cops. This time, they maybe think he murdered some people. Certainly the set up is good: he’s in the room with about four different corpses, including those of elder brother Orrin Quest and ex-gangster Steelgrave which have been produced using bullets, the hardboiled detective’s favorite murder method. Inexplicably, Marlowe ends up getting off. The DA, Endicott, lets him go without even putting the squeeze on him to place his client (the big sister, not the little one) in a sordid plot that would have destroyed her career in movies just by association.
Why? It’s just public relations. “We think of the law as an enemy,” says Endicott. “We’re a nation of cop-haters.” “It’ll take a lot to change that,” Marlowe replies, “on both sides.” “Yes,” Endicott agrees, “it will. But somebody has to make a beginning. Thanks for coming in.”
Who’s this little speech for? If it’s for Marlowe, I just don’t buy it: the national problem of cop-hating is hardly going to be solved by letting a fellow law-enforcement pro off the hook for maybe a quadruple-homicide. That’s liable to make things worse. It’s endorshing a conspiracy of silence among detectives, which really calls for a different speech.
No, the intended audience has to be us, the loyal readership. Endicott has Marlowe dead to rights. When he lets him go, it’s like he’s giving us back a hostage. Marlowe won’t be spending the next ten years in jail; he won’t even get his license suspended. This isn’t the last Marlowe adventure (a possibility that Chandler raises and then drops at the end of practically every novel).
So the fact that a fictional district’s attorney doesn’t throw the book at a fictional detective is supposed to do something to make us less of a nation of cop-haters. “Somebody has to make a beginning.” But it’s not the cops or the public (“civilians,” in the grotesque paramilitary lingo of today’s pigs); it’s the novelist, helping us see the police in a different, kinder light.
That’s what this book, more than any other Chandler novel I’ve read, goes out of its way to do. Sure, Christy French, the long-serving and ulcerated homicide detective, throws a punch at Marlowe – but only after a monolog about how copping has been so hard on his marriage. And Biefus, his partner, catches the punch.
Well, they’re not exactly loveable, especially as long as we’re still seeing them from the criminal’s – i.e. Marlowe’s – point of view. A sympathetic portrait of hostile forces is still, in narrative terms, a portrait of evil.
What can you do about that? Chandler’s pretty wild solution is to let Marlowe hallucinate his own true policeman. Stuck up all night at the station, not charged but unable to go home, Marlowe imagines he’s playing double-handed solitaire with a cop whose delicate finger motions disclose a talent for piano-playing and a case for Mozart.
This isn’t, let’s say, a functional policeman: “I don’t take confessions. I just establish the mood.” It is, however, a model for the policeman as protagonist, someone potentially as interesting as Marlowe. That would be the model followed up by Bones, Dexter, and all the rest – the whole genre that hides the brutal realities of policing behind a set of personal idiosyncrasies.
Chandler knows the real problem with cops isn’t so much that they’re brutal as that they’re boring. Both of those things are “problems,” of course, but only one of them is going to get in your way if you’re trying to sell the public on cops as an entertainment product, which is how, in actual fact, we went from being “a nation of cop-haters” to a nation split between people with thin blue line bumper stickers who would gladly tongue-polish a cop’s boot and people whom cops can murder with impunity.
Part of the usefulness of a book like The Little Sister is that it sets delusion and reality side-by-side. What appeal this particular book has, aside from that usefulness, lies in the way you can’t tell which is which. That’s what I’ve been calling the book’s surrealism, the way it layers one reality over another. In most respects, the novel creates its sense of ending by peeling one layer away and throwing it in the trash. With cops, what Chandler is up to seems less clear: he might really be trying to sell us the delusion. 70 years later, though, at a time when we’re practically living it, The Little Sister instead has the effect of reminding us that you have to be very, very worn out and exhausted before you start hallucinating anything so imaginary as a good cop.