Out in the 1940s Crime Noir Night –Raymond Chandler’s Little Sister

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

Little Sister, Raymond Chandler, Vintage Crime Books, New York, 1949

Everybody told Marlowe to stay away from the Hollywood crowd, to duck anytime a job came up in that postal zone, to go hide in a closet when that word was even mentioned. Way back in the 1930s when he started out as a hot shot investigator fresh out of college working in the D.A.s office an old hand, Detective Sergeant Towers, warned him to stay the hell away from those cases because they were nothing but trouble with a capital T. The only one who would wind up taking the fall was the guy from the D.A.’s office who assumed that, everything being on the level, justice, rough justice anyway would prevail even in Hollywood.  Marlowe nevertheless was hung out to dry in the Chapman case back then, the one where Sybil Riley, yes, that Sybil Riley, shot her boyfriend, paramour, lover or whatever they call the stud guy to the female lead, six ways to Sunday and walked away like nothing happened, nothing at all. Marlowe, for his efforts to pursue the case, got a damn reprimand. That was one of the points that led him to stop chasing public servant windmills and go out on his own. He figured if he was going to chase windmills it would on his own terms.      

Even Miles Archer, his old partner when he first went private, a guy who was nothing but a skirt-chaser, a pretty boy, who one would think would be dying get beside some rising starlet in need of help warned him off the Hollywood crowd as dangerous to his health. Miles had taken a divorce case involving adultery, the next young rising female star, a famous director, and a couple of others and was lucky to come out with his head still on. One night a couple of hard boys, boys straight for Q it seemed, at the direction of that famous director made it abundantly clear that his life was worthless if he kept snooping around. Hell. Even I told him on this last case, this case he called The Little Sister case,   when I heard the names of the parties involved warned him to head to Vegas, head to London, damn, head back to Butte or Gary or wherever he was from. And pronto before the night of the long knives came.

But would our boy Marlowe listen? No, he had to play the hand that was dealt to him, had to play it out to the bitter end. He said, if you can believe this, that this case was different, that it started out a young woman from Podunk Kansas looking for a missing brother had nothing to do with Hollywood and so, as he got his head handed to him on a platter, he insisted that it didn’t follow that rule. Sure thing, Marlowe. What our boy didn’t know because  that little, well, bitch from Podunk played him false, played him cheap and played him about that six ways to Sunday mentioned before was that this was nothing but a Hollywood case from fact number one.

So what started out a simple missing person case for cheap dough and a lark wound up very differently. See the little sister had a big sister (half-sister, really) who was a rising star in Hollywood, a name once he found out what it was (not from little sister by the way) that should have sent bells ringing. On top of that the missing brother was putting the squeeze on sis (half-sis) for dough. And, more importantly, making an enemy of the sister’s boyfriend who just so happened to be a gangster from back East trying to outmuscle another gangster from back East for the booming criminal trade on the West Coast. More bells. But not for Marlowe, as the body count kept mounting, as the cops kept taking dead aim at him, as the Hollywood big guys kept squezing him out to dry, as he kept playing that fated hand. The last I heard he was hanging around his office, doors locked, a single light on, day or night, and taking deep draws on a few bottles of Old Forrester that he kept in a deep desk drawer, smoking Camel after Camel, and thinking, well, I hope he is thinking anyway, how he could have played it another way. Or no way at all. Read the book to figure where he went wrong.

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the book. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett ( the author of  The Thin Man , and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade maybe the most famous tough  guy detective of them all. Who, come to think of it, also had  a judgment problem when it came to women, although not Hollywood women) turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes.

The list of descriptions goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly , old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down (that spill your guts thing a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of having). He had come from them, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.         

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He has a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high- ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.                     

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back East looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s honor code.   

And of course over a series of seven books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he honed back in the 1930s . Yes, Marlowe  the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.