The Little Sister by Val McDermid Raymond Chandler

The Marlowe we remember has done all this and more. The case won’t be closed until Marlowe runs up against blackmailers, femmes fatale, crooked doctors, Hollywood heavies, tough-nosed cops and mobsters. The story opens when a damsel in distress walks into Philip Marlowe’s office. The book offers us many of the conventions that we might expect to see in a hardboiled novel or a film noir derived from it. The Little Sister’s Marlowe, however, is a character more deserving of a place in the noir canon than Bogart’s more familiar Golden Age portrayal. The Philip Marlowe that emerges from this novel is a less admirable, less secure character. No-one is likely to read the Little Sister and imagine Humphrey Bogart.

Arguably, The Little Sister is important because there is no corresponding image of Marlowe from film. While it may not quite reach the heights that other Raymond Chandler novels do, The Little Sister offers unique insights into Philip Marlowe and the hardboiled hero. James Garner notwithstanding, The Little Sister deserves attention. The Little Sister became 1969’s Marlowe, a film starring James Garner and best remembered as a sort of prologue to the actor’s television fame on The Rockford Files. Other novels such as The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely are better-known, perhaps because of more successful film adaptations. Nevertheless, The Little Sister is hardly Raymond Chandler’s definitive Marlowe novel.

Philip Marlowe is one of the definitive hardboiled detectives, with few equals in crime fiction.

The Little Sister by Val McDermid Raymond Chandler