Books: Murder at the Old Stand

THE LITTLE SISTER (249 pp.)—Raymond Chandler—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

To be caught with a Raymond Chandler whodunit in hand is a fate no highbrow reader need dread. When The Big Sleep, his first, was published in 1939, it not only wowed the choosiest mystery reviewers; it also won him a large audience in which even the most determined intellectual could feel at home. Chicago-born and an ex-jack-of-many-trades, Chandler proved in his next three books that the cheers were justified. They had everything a good detective story needs: ingenuity, suspense, pace, credibility. But they had a lot more. Their private-eye hero, Philip Marlowe, was just tough enough, just sentimental enough to move like a born natural through the neon-nylon wilderness of a Los Angeles world that the movies never made until Chandler showed them how. Chandler’s tense situations mushroomed naturally with almost no trace of fabrication. Best of all, he wrote fresh, crackling prose and it was peppered with newly minted similes: a face “that fell apart like a bride’s piecrust,” “old men with faces like lost battles.”

The movies bought all of Chandler’s books, made them into better-than-average pictures. They bought Chandler, too, and for years the cult prayed for the master’s early return. Last year he got fed up with his Hollywood writing job, turned back to the world of Philip Marlowe. The Little Sister, his first book in six years, bears the unmistakable Chandler trademark; but, except for the somewhat leaner prose, it is still the same old Chandler. Readers who have been hoping that Chandler would step out and show his class in something more like a full-blown novel will have to rest content with the mixture as before.

Young Thing. Philip Marlowe’s latest adventure began on a lovely summer day when Marlowe had nothing better to do than to stalk a bluebottle fly with a swatter. The client who shattered his boredom “was a small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses.” She wore “a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.” She came from Manhattan, Kans. Her name (the most improbable thing in the book) was Orfamay Quest. Her brother Orrin had come out to California to work but hadn’t been heard from in several months. Would Marlowe find him for $20?

From this unpromising beginning, Chandler punches out a taut, sound thriller from which plot-and-motive addicts will have their fun. Marlowe finds Orrin all right, plunges through a maze of hunches and clues to clear up a few ice-pick murders and assorted incidental knaveries. But the real kick for many readers will come from Chandler’s exact and vigorous storytelling.

Old Thing. His description of a seedy boardinghouse in a run-down slum makes the reader a witness. When Marlowe offers the boozy, hung-over manager a drink, “His hand came out to it with the beautiful anxiety of a mother welcoming a lost child.” A nymphomaniac actress is to Chandler as “exclusive as a mailbox,” and a hidden wire recorder makes a “high keening noise, like a couple of pansies fighting for a piece of silk.” (He can also be embarrassingly bad: “She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.”)

Chandler is at his best in conveying the special flavor of depressing police-station offices, the even more depressing outlook of cynical policemen and cheap-hotel dicks. He makes Marlowe good, but not too good to make mistakes, human enough to feel resentment and despair. Yet with all its virtues, The Little Sister fails to take Chandler beyond the achievement of his first book. Moving over & over again in the same groove, even genuine talent can get to be a cliché. Shamus Marlowe is in real danger of becoming an old retainer, Chandler of becoming a gifted hack.