Literature / The Little Sister

I hung up.
It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.

The Little Sister is a 1949 detective novel by Raymond Chandler and featuring Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is approached by Orfamay Quest, a Country Mouse trying to find out what has become of her older brother since he came to LA. Although she doesn't have the money to cover his usual fee, Marlowe agrees to take the case, partly from chivalry and partly because he has nothing better to do.

He soon comes to regret it, as he finds himself entangled in a complex web of deceit and revenge involving mob bosses, film stars, and a photograph that too many people want to get their hands on.

Filmed in 1969 as Marlowe with James Garner as Marlowe.

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This novel contains examples of:

• Blackmail: The web of crime Marlowe uncovers centers on a photograph that is being used for blackmail purposes, although who is being blackmailed and why is not as obvious as it seems at first.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early in the novel, Marlowe inadvertantly walks in on a man who is annoyed at being seen without his toupee on. At the time it just seems like a bit of character colour. After the man is murdered and his room ransacked, Marlowe finds the paper that the murderer was searching for taped to the inside of the toupee.
  • The weapon used in the final murder was previously seen as the knife Dr Lagardie was nervously toying with when Marlowe came to see him.
• Continuity Nod: When Marlowe visits Dr Lagardie's private clinic in Bay City, he's reminded of the trouble he had the last time he visited a private clinic in Bay City, back in Farewell, My Lovely.
• Destroy the Evidence: At the end of the novel, Marlowe burns the negative and prints of the blackmail photograph, figuring that now Weepy Moyer has been dealt with the only thing it can do is cause undeserved trouble for Mavis Weld. He gets some additional satisfaction out of doing so in front of Orfamay Quest, who had hoped to continue to profit from the photograph.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Dolores Gonzales peppers her speech with Spanish words and phrases as part of her exotic ethnic persona. By the end of the novel, it's starting to grate on Marlowe, particularly since she has a limited repertoire so he's been hearing the same couple of words over and over.
• Horrible Hollywood: The case takes Marlowe into the underbelly of Hollywood, with backstabbing movie stars and celebrities who have dangerous secrets and studios willing to pay well to hush them up. Though in a surprise twist, the "immoral" starlet dating a gangster turns out to be the most moral of her family, and her small-town, churchgoing brother, sister and mother are murderously devious.
• If Only You Knew: Played for drama. When he first meets Steelgrave, Marlowe tells him that he doesn't know who he is and what's more doesn't care. As a rhetorical flourish, he adds that he wouldn't care who he was even if he were Weepy Moyer, the fugitive mob boss. As Marlowe learns soon afterward, Steelgrave is Weepy Moyer, a fact which underlies the entire plot.
• The Ingenue: Marlowe's client Orfamay (the little sister of the title) looks and acts like one. Marlowe refuses to believe anyone can be that innocent. He's right — not only is she willing to seduce him (by trying to get him to seduce her), she's blackmailing her own sister and sells out her own brother.
• I Was Never Here: Near the end of the novel, Marlowe phones Dolores Gonzales to suggest what she should tell the police if she's asked what happened that night. The conversation ends like this:
  Dolores Gonzalez: One moment, you have not told me what happened.
  Marlowe: I haven't even telephoned you.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Marlowe. He keeps trying to do the right thing, even though he's cynical about whether he's actually achieving anything worthwhile in the long run.
• Lemony Narrator: Marlowe. It gets worse when he's in a bad frame of mind, like the chapter where he's feeling depressed (and keeps going off on cynical tangents and then reining himself in with the refrain "You're not human tonight, Marlowe") or the scene where he gets slipped a sedative and takes two pages of increasingly disjointed narration to lose consciousness.
• Listing the Forms of Degenerates: Marlowe monologues that Los Angeles has lost its soul:
  Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that bailed me out back there. We've got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit — and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs that they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.
• Love Makes You Evil: From the motive rant of one of the villains: "...none of this — absolutely none of it — was for money. It was for love. No matter how many lovers a woman may have, there is always one she cannot bear to lose to another woman. He was the one."
• Nothing Is Scarier: The conclusion has Marlowe investigating an isolated estate on a private road. The lack of traffic or people makes it eerily quiet as it is, but then even Marlowe himself suddenly announces something seems off.
  [The living room] was curtained and quite dark, but it had the feel of great size. The darkness was heavy in it and my nose twitched at a lingering odor that said somebody had been there not too long ago. I stopped breathing and listened. Tigers could be in the darkness watching me. Or guys with large guns, standing flat-footed, breathing softly with their mouths open. Or nothing and nobody and too much imagination in the wrong place.
• Pretty in Mink: In one scene, Mavis Weld is wearing an expensive coat of marten fur. She tells Marlowe that it's worth forty thousand dollars, but also that it's only rented for her current film role, a reminder that her career has not yet taken off to the point where she can afford to own a coat like that outright.
• Private Detective: Marlowe, repeatedly called a cheap gumshoe. He's actually a skilled detective, but too principled and proud for his own good, meaning that he ends up losing out on both money and prestige for a lot of the easy but shady work that comes his way.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: After Marlowe reveals that he knows exactly how innocent Orfamay Quest isn't:
  The light glinted on the glasses. There were no eyes behind them.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
• Smart People Play Chess: While in police custody, Marlowe plays solitaire to pass the time, but mentions that his preferred pastime is chess.
• Spicy Latina: Dolores Gonzales plays the hot-tempered Mexican temptress on screen and in real life, but Marlowe notes that she's not really Mexican.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Marlowe gets arrested late at night for tampering with a crime scene and has to sit up what remains of the night waiting for the appropriate official to arrive to deal with him, having a somewhat surreal conversation with a cop who's guarding him. When the arresting officer arrives to report that the district attorney is ready to see Marlowe, he looks away from the guard sitting opposite him, and when he looks back the guy is gone — "Nothing was there but a chair pushed in neatly to the table and the dishes we had eaten off gathered on a tray. For a moment I had that creepy feeling."
• Talks Like a Simile: A feature of Marlowe's narration.
• Tap on the Head: Marlowe gets knocked on the head just before he finds the second corpse of the novel. He doesn't lose consciousness, but is dazed long enough for the person who ambushed him to get away.
• Weather Report Opening:
  It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in. The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains.

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