Michael Connelly and The Little Sister

 

I like to watch You Tube videos of author appearances, especially interviews. I recently saw Michael Connelly mention he regularly returns to Chapter 13 of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister for inspiration when he wants to be sure he’s getting LA right.

The Little Sister was published in 1949 so I wondered how what Chandler wrote serves Connelly today, as it obviously serves him well. I opened my copy to Chapter 13 and saw right away what Connelly is talking about. I suspect you will, too.

One small bit of context: private detective Philip Marlowe has had a rough day.

Now, in Chandler’s words: 

I drove east on Sunset but I didn't go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down onto Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupes and sedans winced and tightened their grips on the wheel and ploughed on north and west toward home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neon and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed toward the Ridge Route, starting up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the zoo.

Behind Encino an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds. Hold it, Marlowe. You're not human tonight.

The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the headlights hurt. The grade rose against the chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.

 I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out. Lots of business. We can't bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You're using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They're just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here you go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

I paid off and stopped at a bar to drop a brandy on top of the New York cut. Why New York, I thought. It was Detroit where they made the machine tools. I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how the option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They'd get around to it.

I drove on to the Oxnard cut off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrub woman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

[He thinks about the case for a couple of paragraphs.]

Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals. Now, wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You've got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. you're not human tonight.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There's a boy who really made something out of nothing.

Then he goes to a movie he doesn’t like.

 

I see how this helps Connelly but there is a downside: very little had actually changed over the past 75 years.