THE LITTLE SISTER

It was a blast. Not quite as good as The Lady in the Lake; Chandler’s wife was dying of cancer while he wrote it, and also, he was working on screenplays in Hollywood at the time, which definitely seems to have embittered him. Every character in the book is unlikeable (at least The Lady in the Lake had decent-hearted, homespun Sheriff Patton to take the edge off everyone else), some parts are repetitive (all three female characters seem irresistably attracted to Marlowe as soon as they meet him, and I can’t believe I'm saying this, but the sexy banter eventually wears thin), and Marlowe himself seems extra-despairing, possibly in danger of going off the rails. Still, Chandler’s writing continues to prompt a lot of page-dogearing from me—so many good parts! Here are the high points:

• Cat-related metaphors pop up in Chandler with unusual frequency, and I’m glad he seems to find the word “kitten” as endlessly amusing as I do. This one is the best, though: “She probed the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.”

• People are constantly drinking and smoking in Chandler books, providing him with some running action to describe during the dialogue scenes. At least Marlowe calls himself on it occasionally: “I killed my cigarette and got another one out and went through all the slow futile face-saving motions of lighting it, getting rid of the match, blowing smoke off to one side, inhaling deeply as through that scrubby little office was a hilltop overlooking the bouncing ocean—all the tired clichéd mannerisms of my trade.”

• I love it when Marlowe gets all jaded and world-weary: “We went on staring at each other. It didn’t get either of us anywhere. We both had done too much of it in our lives to expect miracles.”

• Chandler’s character descriptions are always priceless: “A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve… Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.”

• Good scenery descriptions, too: “The Chateau Bercy was old but made over. It had the sort of lobby that asks for plush and india-rubber plants, but gets glass brick, cornice lighting, three-cornered glass tables, and a general air of having been redecorated by a parolee from a nut hatch. Its color scheme was bile green, linseed-poultice brown, sidewalk gray and monkey-bottom blue. It was as restful as a split lip.”

• Four great sound-related similes:
  1. “Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup.”
  2. “The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake.”
  3. “Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.”
  4. “She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel.”
  

• Poor Marlowe. Always too smart for the room:
  “‘Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.’
  ‘Never the time and place and the loved one all together,’ I said.
  ‘What’s that?’ She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.
  ‘Browning. The poet, not the automatic. I feel sure you’d prefer the automatic.’”