15 March, 2002
The Little Sister
Raymond Chandler
1949
213 pp
Warning: I couldn't write coherently about this book without including spoilers. Proceed with caution.
More Chandler. In this one, Marlowe is hired by a flakey girl from small-town Manhattan, Kansas to find her missing brother. This girl, Orfamay Quest, hires and fires Marlowe several times over the course of the book, and doesn't pay him very much, either. However, his search for the brother leads him to a real client, up-and-coming film actress Mavis Weld, who's being blackmailed over her romantic involment with a ex-mobster who might not be as "ex-" as he'd like the cops to think.
The previous Chandlers I've read were certainly not what I'd call "shiny happy detective stories" (contrast, for example, Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey stories), but they contained definite elements of goodness which offset the grime and grit of the world. The Little Sister is a lot bleaker. Chandler depicts Los Angeles as a city without a soul, only the empty glamour of Hollywood. A parasitic city, which devours the life and heart of its inhabitants, leaving at best attractive but empty shells, and at worst-- well, something much worse:
Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas carhop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blase and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt.And by remote control it might even take a small-town prig like Orrin Quest and make an ice-pick murderer out of him in a matter of months, elevating his simple meanness into the classic sadism of the multiple killer.
Usually, Marlowe manages to maintain his dignity and honor, in spite of the corruption and sleaze he constantly deals with. This time, however, he falls hard for the movie star, Mavis Weld, and kind of loses his moral direction. At one point, he goes so far as to screw up the evidence at a crime scene, to cover up her presence. In addition to this, or maybe because of it, Marlowe comes off as particularly alienated from the rest of humanity. There's even a long section where he muses again and again on how he doesn't even feel human-- "You're not human tonight, Marlowe."
The theme continues on to the very end of the book, as Marlowe considers the future success of Mavis Weld, and the ultimate futility of his attraction to her:
"That would be kind of silly. I could sit in the dark with her and hold hands, but for how long? In a little while she will drift off into a haze of glamour and expensive clothes and froth and unreality and muted sex. She won't be a real person any more. Just a voice from a sound track, a face on a screen. I'd want more than that."Eventually, Hollywood will suck all the soul, all the realness out of her, like it does to all its victims/stars.
The Little Sister is almost a perfect portrait of alienation and isolation in the modern world, for which Hollywood is really just a stand-in. I say "almost," because, in the end, Chandler pulls his punch. Marlowe destroys evidence to hide Mavis Weld's presence at Steelgrave's murder, but she didn't actually kill him. Instead, Chandler's plot contorts itself wildly to produce culprits who don't present as much of a conflict for the detective. It's one thing for an author to mislead the reader about the true nature of a character, but doing so for just about every important figure in the case is a bit much.