As Marlowe starts investigating the case, he discovers a lot of unpleasant facts about the General’s daughters – and when they both in turn try to seduce him, that’s the least of their sins. Dead bodies surrounding the case multiply with a terrifying speed, and, as I said above, Marlowe once gets very close to becoming the next one. But he survives – and though nobody asks him to, solves the mystery of the disappearance of Rusty Regan, the General’s son-in-law, the husband of his older daughter. Of course, this disappearance turns out to be the key to everything else.

This book is less depressing than “The Little Sister” written ten years later. Marlowe is younger and less gloomy, though his manners already leave something to be desired. The world we all live in doesn’t look as much like a sewer, but the tendency is already here; we can see that the author doesn’t think much of the mankind.

There are a couple of characters from the whole cast who – apart from Marlowe himself – deserve some respect. First, it’s the General, of course. Alas, he thinks he knows his daughters. In fact, he knows little about them. While he believes them to be merely naughty, they are complete monsters, especially the younger one. The other person who deserves at least some respect is Mona Mars, the wife of the local Mafia boss Eddie Mars. Apart from them, everyone is rotten, corrupted, disgusting or, in the best case, just indifferent to good and evil. So Marlowe deals with them as his conscience tells him.

What’s at the end? Nothing – just more emptiness and disappointment. Marlowe has solved the case, but the solution is not happy at all. The dead won’t come back to life; the rotten and perverted won’t reform or improve. The world just keeps going round with Marlowe in it. It does give some hope – there are people like Marlowe: rude, smoking, drinking heavily, exceedingly insubordinate and, according to himself, painfully honest. They keep it going round.

Peculiar ethics, I must add. Time after time he gets himself into a mess – and time after time he manages to crawl out of it without losing not just his head, but even his license. And at the end, when it’s time for explanations, we can see that he had his perfect reasons to be rude to an apparently nice girl – and good to an apparently naughty one. It’s unbelievable how low can some people fall while still maintaining that innocent look…

He doesn’t seem to respect the police much: supressing evidence is his daily routine. He doesn’t mind telling people a few things about them – things that might just happen to be slanderous, but somehow he knows they won’t sue him (what if he can prove it?) He doesn’t bother to be a nice guy – but he will never hurt an innocent person, and by some magic he seems to always know who that innocent person is, even if it’s the most unlikely one of all.

Raymond Chandler writes books that are very good for the occasions when you feel like you need to supress some of your extra optimism. The world in his books looks like a dirty hole; good people hardly exist. I know that he considered suicide many times through his life – upon reading some of his books I easily believe that. But the plot is always excellent and the final explanations of the true roles everyone has played are the kind you’d least expect. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good just on the last few pages: until then you are skilfully kept in the dark.

Another unexpected thing is that his book don’t have a depressing effect on me, despite all the doom and gloom of them. I think I’ll even re-read “The Little Sister” more than once yet – there’s an entertaining element in it for sure. What I don’t understand is why nearly every detective story writer thinks that his or her main protagonist just has to drink and smoke so much – is booze supposed to stimulate the brain? Hardly so. Philip Marlowe smokes and drinks a lot – no wonder he looks old at 38. Okay, maybe not exactly old, but definitely not young.

But for the lonely wolf that he is it’s probably just the right lifestyle…