Raymond Chandler - The Little Sister

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not one of Chandler's best

I think Raymond Chandler was a truly great writer of English and at his best a truly great novelist. Sadly, this isn't one of his great novels.

At his best Marlowe is tough, certainly, but he is also a thoughtful, moral and humane man. His meditative reflections on things are insightful and witty and although they're sometimes very world-weary, there is a sense of decency and sometimes compassion to them. He takes no nonsense from anyone and is quite often provocatively rude, but he has genuine sympathy for people like General Sternwood in The Big Sleep and Anne Riordan in Farewell My Lovely, for example, and his befriending of Terry Lennox and its consequences in The Long Goodbye are genuinely touching. However, in The Little Sister there is a pretty unremitting tide of jaded cynicism, unredeemed by much in the way of humanity.

Chandler is plainly disgusted by much of what he saw and experienced as a Hollywood screenwriter and is attacking it here - which is fair enough - but the unrelenting nastiness and sarcasm much of the time in The Little Sister isn't really worthy of such a great writer. Dialogue, too, is too often reduced to interchangeable tough guys trading wisecracks, rather than the individual, realistic voices sprinkled with brilliant lines which he produced at his best. There are none of the superbly drawn more minor characters he creates in other novels, like Jim Patton, Eddie Prue or Lieutenant Nulty, to name just three which spring immediately to mind. The similes are still there, of course, but seldom of the quality of "he was as thin as an honest alibi" or "I felt like an amputated leg." Marlowe's interactions with women are for the most part downright unpleasant as, one after another, they throw themselves at him...and so on.

I first read The Little Sister over forty years ago. In that time I have re-read Chandler's five truly great novels at least half-a-dozen times each but haven't gone back to The Little Sister until now, and I have been reminded of why. It's not actively bad, but it's no better than a lot of average hard-boiled detective fiction of the period. For a Chandler devotee it's a disappointment; I'm glad to have reminded myself of it, but I probably won't be bothering again. Other devotees will want to read it, of course, but if you're new to Chandler, my advice is to skip The Little Sister and to start with one of these instead - they are genuine classics and immensely enjoyable:
The Big Sleep
Farewell, My Lovely
The High Window
The Lady In The Lake
The Long Goodbye