Just Finished Reading: The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (FP: 1949) [298pp] 

Private detective Philip Marlowe knew he was cheap. His fee was $40 a day – plus expenses. Sometimes he went as low as $25. Even this was too expensive for the woman looking for her brother who had apparently vanished without a trace or so much as a goodbye. She was offering $20. Thinking it over Marlowe accepted his fee for two reasons. Firstly, jobs were hard to find right now but he was mostly intrigued by her story. He was convinced that almost every word out of her mouth was a lie and that made him wonder. It didn’t take long to discover that a missing brother was the least he would be dealing with. In less that 24 hours he had found two dead bodies, had been threatened twice at gun point, three separate women had tried to seduce him, and he had been offered a great deal of money to ‘look the other way’ if he knew what was good for him. Marlowe knew many things, but he had never learnt that particular skill. Some dangerous people were going to be very annoyed with him... 

Even taking the Marlowe/Chandler aspect out of the picture, I do like a detective story which starts out with something seemingly innocuous. Then, when the single thread is tugged on, things start to unravel and end up in a completely different ‘space’. The added spice was provided by the author himself. Weirdly, despite being a massive fan of Noir cinema, I only started reading Noir fiction and Chandler in particular because of Science-Fiction. In the early/mid 80’s I came across William Gibson and fell in love with his writing style in the ‘Sprawl’ series. One the back of one of his novels he was compared to Chandler – so I just had to check him out. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Chandler has a unique prose style which has been much copied and even more parodied. Personally, I love it. If you’ve ever watched a Noir movie (and I count bought Bladerunner movies in this definition) you know exactly what I mean. If that wasn’t enough the dialogue is quick, pacy and often hilariously funny – again much copied and much parodied! The story, and the crimes within almost (but never quite) take second place to the style of the novel but this certainly doesn’t mean that it's a simple matter of style over substance. The plot is rather convoluted at times – I lost the thread more than once – especially so as almost everyone involved was lying for any number of reasons. A few times Marlowe, I suspect to help the reader more than anything, had to sit down either with the cops or one of the other characters and catch up on how his investigation was going and which pieces he had managed to put together (sometimes mistakenly it later turned out). 

Despite all of that it was a delight of a read (for me) and I lost myself in the sleazy LA/Hollywood atmosphere more than once as time simply flew by. Although not my favourite Marlow outing (that’s The Big Sleep in both book and movie format) this was still a fun read on a number of levels. Chandler is a great author and this is, of course, definitely recommended.