The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

It had been six years since we last saw Philip Marlowe as The Little Sister opens. The world had changed, a war had ended and upended a lot of things: it was now a shiny new 1949 post-war world.

Marlowe, though, hadn't changed. He doesn't seem to be six years older - still somewhere in his late thirties, another one of those detectives who don't quite age as quickly as the calendar turns - and he's still living in furnished rooms and working alone in a small office in a cheap building. That's how hard-boiled detectives are, a lot of the time: their books don't really change them; they are who they are for the course of the series.

Little Sister has that traditional hard-boiled plot, the lying dame who hires the detective to find someone for reasons that aren't quite the ones she tells him. It's fairly traditional that she comes across as a naïf, as well, either honestly or schemingly. See The Maltese Falcon for one of the famous examples of the scheming sort; Orfamay Quest here is not quite as much of a naïf as she plays at, but she's, I suppose, over on the honest half of the scale.

Orfamay is looking for her brother Orrin, who worked an an engineer in Bay City but recently stopped sending letters back home to her and their mother in Manhattan, Kansas. She claims to be worried about him, and just wants to know he's safe.

She doesn't mention her other sibling, a sister who has a burgeoning career as the rising starlet Mavis Weld. Or that Orrin had been in touch with Mavis. Or their connections to a club owner named Steelgrave, who may have been a mob figure back in Cleveland under a different name.

Marlowe investigates Orrin's former rooming-house, discovering a marijuana-packaging operation (which he doesn't care about) and stumbling upon a murder, which is more of a problem for a private detective. As is traditional for PI novels, it's only the first murder - Marlowe finds at least two killed by ice-pick, which strongly suggests a connection.

Marlowe talks to the police, but doesn't tell them as much as he should - this is common in a lot of the novels of the series; it's one of the major ways Chandler manages the plot and the flow of information. Along the way, he learns of Mavis and goes to visit her, also meeting another rising starlet, Dolores Gonzales. And he gets the material that the murders were committed for: a picture of Mavis and Steelgrave in his club, with a newspaper proving it was on a day Steelgrave was supposedly held in jail and a mobster was murdered.

So Marlowe knows this was a blackmail scheme, and thinks that Orrin took the picture - was blackmailing his own sister. He tries to get through - to keep his license and protect his client and maybe even see justice done.

I found the very last chapter to be almost tacked on - it does close the last few loose ends, but it also felt like an editor - or maybe Chandler's internal voice - wanted someone to pay for the crimes of the novel, and this was the only way he could figure out to make it happen. If I'd been his editor - twenty years before I was born; so this is purely blathering - I'd have urged him to be parallel: start with the little sister, and end with the little sister. But he's Raymond Chandler, and I'm not, and maybe I want things to be too neat.

I found Little Sister to be even more quotable than the novels immediately before it - it has that famous "you're not human tonight, Marlowe" sequence, and a half-dozen other lines and thoughts almost equally powerful and true. Hard-boiled fiction doesn't get better than Chandler - and that's not primarily because of his plots, or even his people, but because of the insights into the world he gets to along the way.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Later Novels & Other Writings. I don't think there are any textual discrepancies in editions of Chandler, but I'll always recommend LoA for American writers, particularly if you think you'll want to read more than one book.)