The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

A few posts back, I mentioned Raymond Chandler's taste for complex, labyrinthine, and for some people, incoherent plots.

This taste is very much on display in The Little Sister, a novel first published in 1949 and considered by some to be Chandler's finest.

It's a novel starring legendary Chandler gumshoe Phillip Marlowe. At first, the story seems pretty cut and dried. Orfamey Quest, a young lady from Manhattan, Kansas, drops by his dusty and faded hole in the wall office and tells him about the disappearance of her brother Orrin. It seems he has been swallowed up in the big bad maw of Los Angeles. Orfamey is a very prim and proper smalltown girl who at once repels and captivates Marlowe. He teases her and plays games with her, but in the end, he accepts the case.

All Marlowe has to go on is the address given him by Orfamey of the boarding house Orrin was last known to be staying at. When he gets there, he finds the place to be rundown and stuffy and choked with the stink of cigarette smoke and marijuana. He also finds the landlord, a hard and suspicious man, counting rent money. Thinking Marlowe is a robber, he lets him have the run of the place. Marlowe pokes around in Orrin's old room and finds nothing. When he returns to the front room, he finds the landlord has been stabbed with an ice pick.

After this, things get complicated. Very complicated.

Many factors come into play. It seems Orrin had stumbled onto extortion photographs of a rising young Hollywood starlet having lunch with a known gangster who was up on murder charges. The pictures themselves are harmless, just a couple having lunch, but it's the company the starlet is keeping that could cause problems for her. Where did he get the pictures from? Did he stab the landlord, or was it someone else? Who exactly is involved in this conspiracy to extort this young starlet?

Of course, extortion pictures are a well-traveled plot line in hardboiled. In Chandler's own The Big Sleep, extortion pictures of the amorous exploits of a general's daughter and a lending library for pornographic pictures are the hinges of the plot. What makes this novel interesting isn't so much the plot as Chandler's telling of it; Marlowe's persistent, hunch and happenstance unraveling of the conspiracy, the peeling away of false exteriors to reveal an ever widening circle of human duplicity, lust and greed.

And along the way, we are treated to some find noir atmosphere and Chandler's often caustic and pungent observations of human nature as presented through Phillip Marlowe.

Some examples:

I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that's been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful.

On the terrace of The Dancers, a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch.

It's specimens of acerbic writing like this that make Chandler worth reading, regardless of how convoluted or implausible some of his plots may be. The man had a real flair for the telling detail, the apt observation made with sharp, economical and witty language. If nothing else, Chandler should be turned to as a guide of how to knowingly and keenly describe your surroundings.

I highly recommend The Little Sister. If you've never read it, you should maybe read it before The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Yes, the plot does get complicated, but there are so many facets of brilliance in this novel that they more than overcome any frustration you may have in trying to figure out who is stabbing whom in the back and why.

Raymond Chandler: The Simple Art of Murder and Pickup on Noon Street

Raymond Chandler's 1944 essay, The Simple Art of Murder is pretty much the only statement of the credo of hardoiled, noir fiction. The only other one that comes to mind is perhaps George Orwell's Raffles and Miss Blandish, but that was written as a condemnation of hard boiled story telling which Orwell loathed for what he considered to be its trivialization of violence.

Chandler doesn't have much use for violence as fantasy either. In the essay, he vents his spleen at the cozily genteel and thoroughly unreal world conjured up in the early detective yarns of Agatha Christie, A.A. Milne. and even Arthur Conan Doyle - he is especially harsh on Doyle saying that many of his plots were rendered pointless by their errors in logic, or scientific or legal fact. He only lets Doyle off by saying that he at least was an originator of the genre and had to find his way around and couldn't always be successful.

Chandler is frustrated and disgusted by fake mystery tales in which murder was committed to provide a corpse for the detective to find and the murder itself was achieved, not with plausible weapons, but with such clever plot contrivances as "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish."

Chandler praises Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon for bringing realism to mystery fiction and for writing about people with "a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there." He then writes memorably and eloquently of the true role of the mystery writer, "The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities...It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in."

Chandler certainly lived by this credo and this was amply demonstrated in one of his most effective works of fiction, "Pickup On Noon Street." Frankly, I've always found Chandler to be an acquired taste. Although I enjoyed The Long Goodbye, his classic novel starring his famous private eye creation Philip Marlowe, I've always been baffled by the appeal of Chandler's best known Marlowe tale, "The Big Sleep" with its almost incoherent multiple plots and numerous red herrings.

This is certainly not the case with Pickup on Noon Street, a novella Chandler wrote for the pulp detective magazines of the 1930s. The limited word count he would have been allowed as well as the story requirements of the various magazine editors he would have been dealing with forced Chandler to rein in his weakness for rambling and concentrate on telling a tightly constructed tale. Yet this is no piece of mechanical hack work but a carefully contrived tale of extortion, murder and corruption that takes place in an all too believable America of mean streets, fist fights and people who see no problem in settling quarrels with a gun.

Pete Anglich is a small time private eye, a seedy man who lives in cheap motels, sleeping most of his days away in a drunken stupor. At the outset of the story, he is approached in his motel room by a man who tries to hit him up for some money. Anglich shoots and kills him. Afterward, he pays a bribe to the motel's front desk clerk to keep him quiet, saying, "I'm a man who likes to pay my way."

The sordidness continues as Anglich walks down Noon Street and picks up for a young woman standing on the sidewalk a package that has been tossed out on to the road for her from a passing car. It turns out the package is extortion money being paid out from a Hollywood actor eager to keep a lid on some not so publicity-friendly goings on (Remember, this was before the present era of Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton!). Anglich quite literally gets caught like a deer in the headlights as the police pounce on him, thinking he is the extortionist:

He stiffened, whirled and the light caught him between the eyes. It came from the dark window across the street, a blinding white shaft that impaled him against the billboard.
His face leered into it, his eyes blinked. He didn't move any more.

The story is filled with brilliantly described sequences such as this which put you right into the scene and that even after almost eighty years, still ring horrifically true.

If you would like a small slice of Chandler's writing that gives you a good taste of his outlook, and his style, but without the complex plot excesses of some of his novels, Pickup on Noon Street is a good story to try out.