THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT
The smaller booktube channels, the ones that don't cover the newest releases or the ones trending on social media, often offer special reading "events". Things like "June on the Range" were viewers are invited to read westerns in the month of June. Or "Rocket Summer" where you read vintage SF throughout July. The book I'm reporting on today is a "PI July novel." And when it comes to PI's you know who I turn to ...
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler A
It has been decades since I read this book. but in my memory, I remember considering it the best of the bunch. It proved to be every bit as good as I remembered it. And, as I side note, I love the covers of this run of Chandler stories, this is the mass market paperback that I own. They are all great.
As for the story, we have a young lady from Manhattan Kansas. Miss Orfamey Quest, arriving at Philip Marlowe's office. She wants to locate her brother, Orrin, who has stopped writing to her and her widowed mother. She has come to LA to try to find him, fearing something is wrong with him. She's rather strange, but talks Marlowe down to a $20 fee to look for her brother at his last known residence, a seedy apartment building in Bay City (i.e. Long Beach), a city that has not delt kindly with Marlowe in the past. Well, within three or four hours Marlowe has encountered two murders... which is typical Chandler. I won't go further into the details, as Chandler doesn't do who-done-its, and in this case, I'm not really sure who did what and why. You just go with the flow, the flow of language.
Raymond Chandler is a key figure in my taste in reading and writing. I discovered him in my early 20's, likely because I was a big fan of Humphry Bogart, and The Big Sleep movie that he stared in was based on a Chandler novel. Reading Chandler opened up my eyes to what writing could be. Prior to that I had read mostly science fiction stories, with a little Sherlock Holmes and Dr Fu Manchu tossed in. Many of them were very good and entertaining stories with competent, if non-descript writing styles.
Chandler showed me what writing could be. He showed me that there was more to a story than a story. There could be style, there could be flavor, there could be fun in how words could be put together. Just the way a sentence read could be a joy completely independent of the story. While there are many masters of writing, who have their own styles, it is Chandler's and not long after, Wodehouse's way of stringing words together that became my preferred style. The interesting thing is that both Chandler and Wodehouse went to the same school, Dulwich, outside of London, and within a few years of each other. I owe a great dept of gratitude to whoever taught them how to write.
Chandler's stories are chaotic, his writing exuberant, his characters deftly drafted with a minimum of words. I don't know how they've aged. They well may be too florid for this day of age, but they are a part of my youth, and I simply marvel at how he writes. To hell with plot.
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