A Meatier Pulp: Raymond Chandler

The fifth of his Philip Marlowe novels, The Little Sister (1949) highlights all that places Raymond Chandler among the masters of the crime thriller. Gangsters, starlets, dirty cops, a shady doctor, ice picks, blackmail, double-crosses, and a mousy receptionist from Manhattan, Kansas who just wants to find her beloved brother Orin. With those elements, Chandler crafts a story that shows the destructive mechanations of the corrupt human heart ultimately leading to destruction of the self. And he does it with style.

Chandler's prose is both elegant and witty, moving beyond the hard-boiled tough talk common to the genre and approaching a larger literary vocabulary. With only a few simple lines, he can sketch out a scene that reeks with life. Or he can wax poetic about the plight of big-city cops -- working stiffs ground down by the pressures of being everyone's enemy. His characters are complex and full of the inner contradictions that make us human. Marlowe's wise-cracks betray as much admiration as disdain for the cosmopolitan L.A. lyfestyle that gives him business. As a character, the detective has as many layers as that complicated social strata in which he lives -- a world littered with super-rich movie producers, down and out low life hoods, and jokers of all kinds who fight and scratch their toward the one even as they hurdle inevitably toward the other. Having seen the development of the Hollywood culture, Marlowe himself is soft enough help a desperate out-of-towner, naive enough to get duped into putting himself in a tough spot, and cynical enough to keep from getting completely taken. Nothing's simple nor sentmental about Chandler's style, nonetheless, it remains accessable and deeply human.