The Little Sister (Book) (1949)

I was inspired to read The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler, after seeing the film Marlowe, which is based on it. The story in The Little Sister is told from the first-person point of view, that of Philip Marlowe, the famous private investigator. Orfamay Quest comes to Los Angeles from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her brother Orrin and hires Marlowe to help her. Orfamay Quest is not entirely forthcoming about her or her brother’s predicament: Orrin may or may not be involved in murder, blackmail, and misplaced family loyalty. But Marlowe figures it out by the end of the novel, and thus viewers do, too.

Saying more than that about the plot would give away too much, and The Little Sister should be enjoyed with as little preconception about the story as possible. For many, however, this is nearly impossible. Philip Marlowe has been around in literary circles since 1939, when Raymond Chandler wrote his first Marlowe novel and the private investigator got his start in pulp fiction. Since then, numerous radio shows, films, and television episodes have been based on the Marlowe novels.

I have not read all the Philip Marlowe novels, but Marlowe, as written by Chandler in The Little Sister, is not just a hard-boiled private investigator roughing up criminals. In fact, Marlowe is most often the recipient of or the witness to whatever violence occurs. The Little Sister doesn’t have much of it, in spite of the four or five murders that are part of the plot. Marlowe is a humorous, self-deprecating, poetic observer of his life and his profession.

Humorous, self-deprecating, and poetic are not the adjectives usually associated with detectives from the pulp fiction tradition. However, the novel has many humorous lines of dialogue and observations delivered by Philip Marlowe that show the private investigator is all three. To bolster my point, most of my blog post is going contain a lot of quotations. But you’ll still have plenty to enjoy if you should read the novel yourself. I read the novel twice. My only complaint about it is that it is too short!

(This blog post about the novel The Little Sister contains some spoilers.)

Here are some examples of Marlowe’s sense of humor:

◊ The first occurs during his first phone conversation with Orfamay Quest, who eventually hires Marlowe to find her missing brother:

“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”

                “Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

                I caught the sharp intake of breath at the far end of the line. “You might at least talk like a gentleman,” she said.

                “Better try the University Club,” I told her. “I heard they had a couple left over there, but I’m not sure they’ll let you handle them.” I hung up. (page 204)

◊ In the following exchange, Philip Marlowe talks to George W. Hicks, who is staying in the room on Idaho Street in Bay City once occupied by Orfamay’s brother, Orrin Quest:

“He coulda went somewhere without telling me,” he mused.

                “Your grammar,” I said “is almost as loose as your toupee.”

                “You lay off my toupee, if you know what’s good for you,” he shouted.

                “I wasn’t going to eat it,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.” (page 225)

◊ Philip Marlowe tells Orfamay Quest what he found on Idaho Street:

                She seated herself demurely and waited.

                “All I could find out,” I told her, “is that the dump on Idaho Street is peddling reefers. That’s marijuana cigarettes.”

                “Why, how disgusting,” she said.

                “We have to take the bad with the good in this life,” I said. (pages 230–231)

◊ Philip Marlowe’s answer to amorous advances from Dolores Gonzalez:

“Just for half an hour,” I said. “let’s leave the sex to one side. It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I’d better cut mine.” (page 356)

Philip Marlow is also self-deprecating:

◊ Marlowe after doing some inquires at the Van Nuys Hotel:

I nodded and went out. There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder. (page 240)

◊ Marlowe after being drugged in Dr. Vincent Lagardie’s office and coming to:

I was looking at the ceiling, lying on my back on the floor, a position in which my calling has occasionally placed me. . . . (page 329)

◊ Philip Marlowe refuses to help Dolores Gonzales with her blackmail plot:

She reached out the gauntleted hand across the desk. Her voice was cold. “Give it back to me, please.”

                “I’ll give it back to Mavis Weld. And I hate to tell you this, Miss Gonzales, but I’d never get anywhere as a blackmailer. I just don’t have the engaging personality.”

                “Give it back to me!” she said sharply. “If you do not—”

                She cut herself off. I waited for her to finish. A look of contempt showed on her smooth features.

                “Very well,” she said. “It is my mistake. I thought you were smart, I can see that you are just another dumb private eye. This shabby little office,” she waved a black gloved hand at it, “and the shabby little life that goes on here—they ought to tell me what sort of idiot you are.”

“They do,” I said. (page 340)

And Marlowe, private investigator, is poetically observant:

◊ Marlowe is outside Mavis Weld’s apartment building:

. . . Across the way [on Doheny Drive] a guy in riding breeches was sprawled with his legs over the door of a low-cut Lancia. He was smoking and looking up at the pale stars which know enough to keep their distance from Hollywood. (page 257)

◊ Philip Marlowe is present when Orrin P. Quest dies:

Something happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence. The face now had a vague inner amusement, an almost roguish lift at the corners of the mouth. All of which was very silly, because I knew damn well, if I ever knew anything at all, that Orrin P. Quest had not been that kind of boy. (page 332)

Marlowe, the film based on the novel, follows the novel rather closely—but with enough changes to make a small difference in tone. It’s unusual for me to say this, but I enjoyed the film a bit more than the novel. It’s also unusual for me to say that I’m glad that I saw the film first. In this case, however, both are true. The film was updated for the year that it was released (1969), and quite a bit of the humor was unique to the film and to the time of its release, even though many lines of dialogue were taken from the novel. I said in my blog post about the film that the film’s contemporary reviewers didn’t like it all that much and that it was just as hard to follow as Raymond Chandler’s writing. Now that I have read the novel that the film is based on, I refuse to contribute to—or subscribe to—the myth that the plots of Raymond Chandler’s novels and the films based on them do not make much sense.

Click here for my blog post about Marlowe, the film based on Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister.

I must admit, though, that I found a couple of minor plot holes after reading The Little Sister twice. For instance, the first time that the name Leila, which is linked to one of the main characters, is mentioned, it’s not clear how Marlowe knows who Leila is. Did he conduct a Quest family history or not? Chandler never states this clearly, but it’s hardly a major plot flaw. Readers can discern who Leila is without Chandler describing Marlowe’s investigation specifically.

Toward the end of the novel, Marlowe describes Orfamay Quest has returning to her original style of clothing and makeup. She arrived in Los Angeles from Manhattan, Kansas, looking a bit dowdy, supposedly altered her look while in Los Angeles, and then went back to looking a bit dowdy because she had every intention of returning to Manhattan, Kansas. I missed this transformation for Orfamay during my first reading of the novel. When I read The Little Sister the second time, I realized that Marlowe only imagined Orfamay Quest changing her clothes and hairstyle and wearing makeup. The way Orfamay presents herself is an important plot point, but nothing about her clothes, glasses, and makeup will prevent readers from understanding the plot.

The Little Sister is a fun read—I read it twice, just like I saw the film twice. I admit that the story, that is, Marlowe’s investigation, is a bit hard to follow, but it’s not impossible, as some film and book reviewers will have you believe. Chandler’s language and observations, as told through his character Philip Marlowe, are a real treat. Both the film and the novel were opportunities to lose myself in a great story.

Later Novels & Other Writings, by Raymond Chandler  •  New York: The Library of America, 1995  •  Chandler’s novel The Little Sister was originally published in 1949.

List of main characters:

Philip Marlowe, private investigator  •  Orfamay Quest, Marlowe’s client  •  Lester B. Clausen  •  George W. Hicks  •  Mavis Weld, film actress  •  Dolores Gonzalez, Mavis’s friend  •  Steelgrave, Mavis’s boyfriend  •  Detective Lieutenant Christy French  •  Detective Lieutenant Fred Beifus  •  Dr. Vincent Lagardie  •  Orrin P. Quest, Orfamay’s brother

The image of the front cover is from The Library of America anthology. The page references in this blog post refer to The Library of America publication listed above.

Marlowe (1969)

September 19, 1969 (Germany), October 22, 1969 (United States), release dates

Directed by Paul Bogart

Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant

Based on the novel The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler

Music by Peter Matz

Edited by Gene Ruggiero

Cinematography by William H. Daniels

James Garner as Philip Marlowe

Gayle Hunnicutt as Mavis Wald

Carroll O’Connor as Lt. Christy French

Rita Moreno as Dolores Gonzáles

Sharon Farrell as Orfamay Quest

William Daniels as Mr. Crowell

H. M. Wynant as Sonny Steelgrave

Jackie Coogan as Grant W. Hicks

Kenneth Tobey as Sgt. Fred Beifus

Bruce Lee as Winslow Wong

Christopher Cary as Chuck

George Tyne as Oliver J. Hady

Corinne Camacho as Julie

Paul Stevens as Dr. Vincent Lagardie

Roger Newman as Orrin Quest

Anna Lee Carroll as Mona

Read Morgan as Gumpshaw

Warren Finnerty as Haven Clausen

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Produced by Katzka-Berne Productions, Cherokee Productions

I wanted to see Marlowe for many reasons. I am a big fan of Stirling Silliphant’s writing. He wrote many of the episodes of two wonderful classic television shows: Route 66 and Naked City. And he adapted the screenplay for Marlowe from Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister. I haven’t finished Chandler’s novel—yet—but I’m more than halfway through. Seeing the film inspired me. I have read that many of the snappy lines of dialogue in the film are taken almost word-for-word from the novel, which is true so far and makes for fun reading.

Another reason to see the film was James Garner. I have always been a fan of his, and I thought it would be interesting to see him in the role of Philip Marlowe. Humphrey Bogart made Philip Marlowe, the detective in the rumpled trench coat, his own in The Big Sleep. I wondered how Garner would fare in the role (just great, by the way). And then there’s Rita Moreno and Carroll O’Connor in supporting roles. I had high hopes—and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I watched the film twice, two days in a row, because it was so much fun the first time. (It was fun the second time, too.)

And films from the 1960s and early 1970s are fun in their own right. The clothes, the hairstyles for women, the décor: all of it makes these films seem even more dated than films noir from the 1940s and 1950s. But in Marlowe, they also serve a purpose: The film opens with Marlowe driving up to a ramshackle hotel call “The Infinite Pad.” The hotel’s façade is covered with peace signs and flower-power symbols. People in hippie-style clothing lounge about on the front stairs and porch. And Marlowe shows up in his suit jacket and tie, trying to find the lost brother of his client, one Ofamay Quest. The juxtaposition of the traditional with the new reinforces the idea that Marlowe, the character, is a throwback to the past, a relic of pulp novels from the 1930s and 1940s. But Silliphant’s screenplay and James Garner’s acting make him relevant still in 1969.

I have always said that viewers have to pay attention to the details in many films noir, and the same can be said of Marlowe. Even the opening sequence, with its pop theme song and neon colors, is important, and not just because of the opening credits. The stills and film shots are included for a reason. It’s easy to be distracted by the clever design and the eye-popping colors. I was! The bright colors, constant movement, and catchy theme song meant I had to restart the film so I could catch the credits, too. But the opening sequence should be considered part of the exposition of the upcoming narrative. The photographer taking the pictures in the opening sequence is the person in the photo stuck between the metal parts of the dashboard in Marlowe’s convertible, and it is the person Marlowe is looking for in the rundown hotel.

The manager of the hotel, Haven Clausen, is sleeping soundly. Marlowe tries nudging him awake, and when that doesn’t work, he stuffs a towel in his mouth and pinches his nose. In another juxtaposition between Marlowe and the counterculture of the 1960s, Clausen reaches for a joint, not a cigarette, and Marlowe lights it for him. (A lot of people were still smoking tobacco in 1969, by the way.) Marlowe needs a passkey from Clausen to get into Orrin Quest’s room. When he gets into the room, he learns that it is now occupied by Grant W. Hicks and that Quest left ten days earlier.

Before Marlowe leaves the hotel, he checks for the register, but it’s been tossed in the wastebasket and the page registering Quest has been ripped out. He also checks a telephone directory for Dr. Vincent Lagardie because Clausen called him earlier, when Marlowe first questioned him. He suddenly realizes that Clausen has been awfully quiet, and when he checks on him, he finds Clausen has been killed with an ice pick to the neck. Marlowe’s missing person case now includes murder.

Marlowe returns to his rented office in a large building that reminded me of an old high school. Next door is Woodbridge College of Cosmetology, Hair Styling. The proprietor is Chuck, who informs Marlowe that the client from Kansas is back. And so she is: Orfamay Quest. She has hired Marlowe to find her brother, but she is not very happy with his work so far.

Marlowe’s office and office building (above) also remind me of Harper’s (below) in Harper. Click here for my blog post about Harper, starring Paul Newman.

While Orfamay Quest complains about Marlowe’s lack of results finding her brother, he calls Dr. Vincent Lagardie, who denies knowing Orrin Quest. (Ofamay is more interested in complaining than in giving Marlowe a chance to explain why he is calling the doctor.) He also gets a phone call from Grant W. Hicks, who will pay him to come to the Alvarado Hotel and get some information (Hicks wants Marlowe to save him from Orrin Quest, but he doesn’t tell Marlow that). When Marlowe arrives at the Alvarado Hotel, he finds Hicks, who is now dead with an ice pick to his neck, and a well-dressed woman, who threatens him with a gun. She injures Marlowe enough to keep him from following her, but the hotel’s security cop, Oliver (Ollie) J. Hady, follows her, learns that she is driving a pale yellow Jaguar, and writes down her license plate number.

Marlowe concentrates on Hicks. He now has one missing person and two murders, both by ice pick, and an alarming trend to consider. In Hicks’s toupee, Marlowe finds a claim ticket for Benson’s Camera Shop. Suspecting that a claim ticket hidden in a toupee has to be important (why else would it be hidden in a toupee?), Marlowe mails it to himself from a mailbox in the lobby of the Alvarado Hotel. He counts Hicks’s cash, a substantial sum, and leaves everything else as is.

The film cuts to the police investigation of the Hicks murder scene. Marlowe called the homicide detectives, and among them are Lieutenant Christy French and Sergeant Fred Beifus. They are well acquainted with Marlowe, and Christy grills him about what he knows, but they decide finally to let Marlowe and Hady go. Marlowe catches up with Hady because he wants to know what happened to Hicks’s money; the sum noted by the police detectives didn’t match Marlowe’s count. Hady pocketed over $100, but he refuses to give it up until Marlowe threatens to turn him in. But Marlowe gives it back, bill by bill, when Hady provides one piece of information after another that he has on the woman who escaped: what she was wearing, the car she drove, the license plate number, and so on.

Marlowe uses the information from Hady to find Mavis Wald, a very popular television actress, and her address. When Marlowe gets to Mavis’s penthouse apartment, he finds Dolores Gonzáles, a friend of Mavis’s. Mavis refuses to talk, and when Marlowe leaves the apartment building, Sonny Steelgrave is waiting outside. Three of Steelgrave’s henchmen beat Marlowe and rip his favorite suit jacket when he refuses to hand over the photos.

When Marlowe returns to his office, Winslow Wong (played by Bruce Lee in his first role in an American film) pays him a visit. The first thing Wong does is kick a hole in the wall between Marlowe’s office and the Woodbridge College of Cosmetology, Hair Styling next door. Then he kicks the glass lighting fixture into shards. Chuck and his students rush in to Marlowe’s office to complain, but they leave when Marlowe says that he is just “redecorating.” Wong has a proposition (a bribe) for Marlowe, courtesy of his boss Steelgrave, but Marlowe refuses.

At this point in the film, viewers have met most of the main characters, but several plot twists and turns are still to come. As you can already guess, Marlowe is as complicated as any film noir, with several interconnecting characters and a detailed plot and subplots. I enjoyed following the story, and I enjoyed the subtle humor even more. Garner, as Marlowe, has a good sense of timing and delivers all his lines perfectly. The film lived up to all my expectations.

I had one complaint about the film, and it might be more a function of the DVD presentation than the film itself. The music on the soundtrack was great, but it was extraordinarily loud. I missed some lines of dialogue because they seemed to be overwhelmed by the music, and even when there wasn’t any music, they just weren’t loud enough. If the DVD had come with closed captioning or subtitles, I might not have noticed, but without either option, the lack of clarity for some the actors’ lines became obvious.

Reviewers writing about Marlowe when it was released in 1969 apparently weren’t very kind toward the film. I tried to read some reviews, starting with Roger Ebert’s, but Ebert got it all wrong so I stopped there. Everybody wants Marlowe to be Humphrey Bogart (or is it the other way around?), and I couldn’t disagree more. I agree that Humphrey Bogart was good in the role of Marlowe in The Big Sleep, but others can play Marlowe, too. I don’t want to see an actor playing Marlowe imitating Humphrey Bogart. The comparison between Bogart and every other actor who portrays Marlowe, perhaps inevitable, is unfair in so many ways.

Another complaint about the film’s contemporary reviewers is the tendency to reinforce the myth that the plots of Raymond Chandler’s novels and the films based on them do not make much sense. Supposedly no one can follow the plot of Chandler’s novels, and film viewers shouldn’t try either. Nothing could be further from the truth! Yes, there are a lot of characters to keep track of; yes, there are plots within plots within plots. But what’s the fun of solving a mystery if the answer is given to you at the outset? Isn’t it realistic to present a detective story, one that is told from the point of view of the detective, the way he or she experiences it: with a puzzle that is missing a lot of pieces because someone, maybe more than one person, doesn’t want anyone knowing the details?

Click here for my blog post about The Big Sleep, which includes some discussion about the plot of that film. The Big Sleep is based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name.

Please don’t let comparisons between leading actors and disparaging comments about Chandler’s plots prevent you from seeing Marlowe. Forget about Humphrey Bogart. Forget about Raymond Chandler. Enjoy Marlowe on its own terms. I enjoyed Marlowe enough to see it twice.