The Little Sister

The story is a typical detective mystery written in a style that shows it age. It was refreshing to read a book that is not full of vulgarity, so prevalent in today's writings. For that reason alone, I would recommend it and other Raymond Chandler books..

I strongly recommend NOT purchasing the Kindle edition of The Little Sister due to the tremendous amount of errors. I found and reported 31 errors, most of which are not in the paperback edition. The e-book edition is loaded with typos, formatting mistakes, and even two passages with a number of missing words. In short: this book is a mess.

the store's response to my complaint was prompt and appropriate. I received a phone call and two e-mail messages from an the store representative. He informed me that the book had been "pulled for review," and he assured me that I will be notified when a corrected edition is available. I was also offered a promotional credit to compensate me for the poor quality of this book.

This was my first Kindle book, and it has seriously dampened my enthusiasm for purchasing any more e-books or a Kindle reader. Many of the errors in the book are directly attributable to the scanning and OCR process (for example, "lips" ---> "ups" and "comer" ---> "corner"). Obviously the e-book was not checked for errors after scanning. I would presume that the other Chandler novels and many other older books contain a copious amount of similar errors.

I plan to update this review when I eventually receive a corrected version of the book from the store.

I was very disappointed with this Audio version, starring Toby Stephens, as Philip Marlowe.

Those of us who have listened to the "original" BBC releases starring Ed Bishop, as Philip Marlowe, will
quickly notice the differences in these two voices.

It just isn't the same.

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) published seven full-length novels during his lifetime. His eighth was completed and published by Robert B. Parker after his death. The Little Sister was Chandler’s fifth hard-boiled novel featuring Philip Marlowe. It was published in 1949.
Chandler did not start to write stories until he was 49-years-old. His hero in all of his book is the private detective Philip Marlowe, a decent, wisecracking semi-alcoholic, like Chandler himself, although some of his early short stories use a different name for the PI. Marlowe was a loner, living in Los Angeles in the 1940s when the city was rife with corruption. He, like his author, was disgusted with how tycoons, politicians, police, and government and civilian attorneys fleeced innocent parties.
Chandler’s first short story was "Blackmailers Don't Shoot." This tale was published in 1933 in the pulp magazine Black Mask, which later published many of his other stories. The detective in the tale is Mallory. In later books, he changes the detective's name to Philip Marlowe. Chandler was working for an oil syndicate since 1922 as an accountant, ending up as a vice president. He was fired in 1932 for drinking and absenteeism. Drinking plays a background role in many of his stories. In 1933, he spent five months working on this fifty plus page tale.
His first big break came after he published “The Big Sleep” in 1939. People began to read his books and money began to role in. He took a job with one of the movie studios as a screenwriter and remained there for several years until he became disgusted with what he saw. He quite, and in 1949 published “The Little Sister,” which reflected his distain of Hollywood.
Chandler created some of his novels by cannibalizing some of his short stories, such as combining two of his short stories to produce a full-length novel. He did so, for example, with “The Big Sleep,” combining the two short stories “Killer in the rain” (published in 1935) and “The Curtain” (published in 1936); and also inserted small parts of “Finger Man” and “Mandarin Jade.” “The Big Sleep,” a reference to Philip Marlowe’s attitude to death, was published in 1939 as his first novel. All of his novels, with the sole exception of his last novel Playback, published in 1958, were made into movies, some more than once.
In 1950, Chandler wrote an introduction where he reflects on writing pulp mysteries like his own. These stories, he tells, stressed the atmosphere of the events, times, and places, rather than the plot. “(T)he scene outranked the plot…. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.” In the good hard-boiled story there is “some very determined individual (who) makes it his business to see that justice is done.
In “The Little Sister,” mousy-looking Orfamay Quest enters Marlowe’s office and begs him to find her older brother for a discounted fee. The search evolves into Marlowe becoming involved with three women, including his client, all of whom lie to him, and there are several murders. As in some other of Chandler’s novels, Marlowe acts as a white knight, and protects a woman by hiding a crime from the police.

The Little Sister

Phillip Marlowe receives a visit from Orfamay Quest. She came from Kansas to track down her brother Orrin; he moved to Los Angeles a year earlier and has stopped writing home. Marlowe visits Orrin's last address, a rooming house in the seedy part of town. The room now contains G. W. Hicks, who is moving out, and knows nothing. When Marlowe leaves, he notices the manager is now dead! Later Marlowe receives a phone call, hiring him for a job. When Marlowe shows up at the hotel room, he finds a dead G. W. Hicks, killed with an ice pick like the rooming house manager. Somebody searched the room, but Marlowe found what they missed. The Police are called again. Marlowe uses the claim check to retrieve photographic prints. The hotel detective noticed a woman visitor, and gives Marlowe her license plate number. Now the investigation continues into new territory.

The story echoes “Farewell, My Lovely” and other stories. A private detective is hired to find somebody. The client doesn't tell the Whole Truth. Coincidences and complications pop up to carry the story forward. The Whole Truth isn’t revealed until the last pages, and the final deaths which tie up the story without loose ends. Again, the scandals and crimes that created the murders aren’t revealed until the end. There are only shades of gray, no blacks and white. All the characters have something to hide. A recurring theme in Chandler’s stories is that crime leads to blackmail, and blackmail leads to murder. Can a snapshot of a couple at a restaurant result in six dead bodies? Chandler makes it believable. [I suspect the story was based on a true crime. Chandler published his novel before Gardner could publish “The Case of the Postponed Murder”.]

The Little Sister

Phillip Marlowe receives a visit from Orfamay Quest. She came from Kansas to track down her brother Orrin; he moved to Los Angeles a year earlier and has stopped writing home. Marlowe visits Orrin's last address, a rooming house in the seedy part of town. The room now contains G. W. Hicks, who is moving out, and knows nothing. When Marlowe leaves, he notices the manager is now dead! Later Marlowe receives a phone call, hiring him for a job. When Marlowe shows up at the hotel room, he finds a dead G. W. Hicks, killed with an ice pick like the rooming house manager. Somebody searched the room, but Marlowe found what they missed. The Police are called again. Marlowe uses the claim check to retrieve photographic prints. The hotel detective noticed a woman visitor, and gives Marlowe her license plate number. Now the investigation continues into new territory.

The story echoes “Farewell, My Lovely” and other stories. A private detective is hired to find somebody. The client doesn't tell the Whole Truth. Coincidences and complications pop up to carry the story forward. The Whole Truth isn’t revealed until the last pages, and the final deaths which tie up the story without loose ends. Again, the scandals and crimes that created the murders aren’t revealed until the end. There are only shades of gray, no blacks and white. All the characters have something to hide. A recurring theme in Chandler’s stories is that crime leads to blackmail, and blackmail leads to murder. Can a snapshot of a couple at a restaurant result in six dead bodies? Chandler makes it believable. [I suspect the story was based on a true crime. Chandler published his novel before Gardner could publish “The Case of the Postponed Murder”.]

How Marlowe doesn't cringe every time someone walks through his door I have no idea. He must have deadened that reflex or has a thirst for putting himself through the wringer. What always seems to distinguish him isn't that he's the smartest detective in the city, or the fastest draw, or even the toughest, but the one with the most stamina and a good sense of moral timing, knowing when there's a need to hurry and knowing when it's just better to stand back and let events take their inevitable course.

This, however, is the first one where he feels honesty tired. In the earlier novels, Marlowe never seemed to evoke a specific age. He had enough experience to not be a young man but wasn't ready to call himself an old man either, but this novel has the first signs that some metaphorical greys are starting to show at the edges of the hair. There's more of a sense of troubled inertia, of a need to see this through because no one else really wants to, including him. He feels more duty bound in this one, especially since nobody seems to like him very much and he's caught between conflicting forces, all of whom would like him to pitch for their side. Except Marlowe prefers his own. Even if it's rather lonely there.

This was Chandler's first novel in about five or six years and the early chapters do show signs of him shaking off some rust. There's a visit by the titular little sister, a girl from a small town looking for her brother who vanished in the big city and may have been caught up in some unsavory business (clearly through no fault of his own). Before long, the trail has led Marlowe to places that aren't quite the beach and he continues his streak of being a magnet for corpses, stumbling upon one after the other until even the police have to start wondering it's a one man walking plague. But it becomes clear that the brother is in trouble and the trouble may have to do with a picture taken of an up and coming starlet with a reputed mobster, one who was supposed to be in jail.

As I said, some of the earlier scenes feel forced, especially the banter between Marlowe and the little sister and chunks of it have the sound of being on auto-pilot, Marlowe saying all the right things but not quite having the snap that it normally does. However, once a target is found and the bodies start stacking up, the book suddenly gains a laser beam focus, with the lens directly on the Hollywood studios. Chandler had apparently spent some time doing screenplays in Hollywood and was raring to adapt the good and the bad he experienced into the novel (mostly the bad, by the looks of it). Continuing the notion that taking Marlowe out of his comfort zone makes for better reading, Hollywood comes across as another planet, one where everyone speaks the same language but is twice as seedy and twice as glitzy. Everyone is covered is layers, no one can be accessed and the assumption from the start is people are lying about lying, unless money is involved and especially if money is involved.

The end result still has a bit too much sprawl to it, becoming blurry at the edges and anyone trying to follow the twists and turns of the plot may start to feel like how the police do, half a step behind at all moments, as motivations shift when new information comes to light and nobody good or bad is what they seem at first glance. Along the way he finds time not only for an array of harrowing scenes (the doctor's office, for one, and the heavy sense of doom that precedes his conversations with the police) but surprising introspection, the weariness of a man who has treaded on his own shadow one too many times coming through with a palpable ache, giving rise to some of the book's best scenes (the justly famed "Marlowe, you're not human tonight" sequence, among others), the feel of a man who having his back against the wall would be an improvement of his situation. It works best when Chandler illustrates all the moving parts of the various factions infesting the city, with Marlowe as their unbending intersection, and watching him navigate everyone being out to get him for different reasons (the chats with the police have a racing tension, the sense that not only is Marlowe playing with fire, he just doesn't care anymore because he figures he's cooked anyway, and the police walking the line between wanting to pump him for information and just beat the living daylights out of him because he's made them look silly) gives the impression of someone trying to find a balance before it all collapses on top of him.

This makes the plot become gloriously layered and complicated but for once all the convolutions nearly do the novel in, forcing you to merely ride the wave of the plot instead of seeing it interlock and become revelatory, scraping the worst paint away to find its even uglier underneath. The impact becomes diluted and if not for Marlowe's personality and the emotional honesty of the narration shining through (even without explicitly telling us how he feels, Chandler's great gift), the novel might feel like a regular detective story (although at one point it gloriously flirts with becoming a noir version of "Reefer Madness"). After a while I gave up on trying to solve it as Chandler seemed intent on piecing together scattered tangents into the least likely outcome, then backtracking to have it all make sense. It hardly matters, with Marlowe at the center. Inhabited and intent, tired and pressing on, swayed not by sexy women or silly women, undaunted by guns or repeated blows to the head, he finds there are people with honor and people without it and sometimes who is who winds up being the most surprising deduction of all.

_The LIttle Sister_ is typical Chandler fare: dames in trouble, double-crosses, snappy dialogue and the noir plot, characters and setting description that he helped create and for which he is famous. The story revolves around the epynonymous sister, fresh out of Manhattan Kansas and wide-eyed at the language and vice of L.A. seeking Marlowe's help in finding her missing brother. Reluctantly taking on the investigation, Marlowe beomes immersed in the seedy world of Hollywood. The strong dislike Marlowe has for producers, directors and actors vitrually oozes from the page.

As Chandler writes it, "I used to like this town ... a long time ago. There were trees along WIlshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills was a country town. ... Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. ... Little people who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum, either. ... Now we've got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys ... The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. ... Without Hollywood (Los Angeles) would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else."

The disdain Chandler holds doesn't detract from the story - rather, it adds depth and nuance to the story, the corruption and vice and the intertwining of gangsters from "back East" getting involved in the film industry an important part of the story. In many ways, _The Little Sister_ is a more bitter version of Get Shorty. Why the four stars (as opposed to the five stars I typically give Chandler)? I was confused (more than once) with the female characters. I realize the obfuscation was intentional, but more than once I caught myself having to go back and get my bearings about which woman was connected to what part of the case. In all fairness, this may have been a function of my pikcing up and putting down the book over a period of time (and thereby losing my bearings), but I was still mildly frustrated at the lack of individuality among them.

Fans of Chandler will not be disappointed - all the elements that make his story-telling so attractive and compelling are here in abundance, with the added bonus of "Hollyweird" bashing. For those new to the author, I would recommend starting with The Big Sleep or The Lady in the Lake.

The Little sister by Raymond Chandler.

Philip Marlowe has a small and dirty little office. Marlowe is a private detective. some days he's on the side of the police and some days not. One of those days Orfamay Quest walks into his office with a request...find her brother Orrin. He's been gone from home back in Manhattan, Kansas for a long time and his letters have stopped.
This begins Marlowe's long and complicated journey in finding Orfamay's brother. The twists and turns that come with each character is only the beginning.

This book is without a doubt the original that all other P.I. books are based on. Marlowe's dialogue is on it's own orbit that is far and above any that come after him.

There are lots of wonderful adjectives that can be used to describe Raymond Chandler, but "prolific" is not one of them. Like his literary predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, Chandler didn't publish many books in his career, especially compared to some of his pulpier successors: authors like Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block and John D. MacDonald would turn out multiple books in a year, but Chandler would publish only once every few years.

As much as I like Westlake, Block and MacDonald, however, I can see the merits of Chandler taking his time: his books are very well-written. Even The Little Sister, which I personally find to be one of his weaker efforts, is still very good, merely not quite the measure of his true classics.

This novel opens with the title character, Orfamay Quest, hiring private eye Philip Marlowe, to locate her older brother, Orrin. Both the Quests hail from a small town in Kansas. Orrin has apparently disappeared in the big city of Los Angeles, and Orfamay wants him found. Superficially, Orfamay is a mousy prude, but Marlowe can see that is just a facade.

More out of pity and boredom than any sense of financial gain (Orfamay has virtually no money to pay), Marlowe takes the case, and soon, the dead bodies are piling up. It all has to do with a mobster, a blackmail scheme and, in the center of it all, an up-and-coming movie actress.

As usual, Chandler's writing is almost perfect, but there was something in this particular plot that didn't grab me as much as his other stories. By no means is this a negative review, however: even decades after this book was written, it still tops most of the mysteries coming out today. That is why the Marlowe books are classics and why Chandler is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Choose to read this book after reading a comment by Michael Connelly that he had been inspired by it and its style. It is the noir style of the forties. With the main character as narrator and lots of aside comments. It has a lot of great description but the style isn't as popular today as we like our mysteries fast moving and first person or multiple POV's. It was a fun read and reminded me of the Humphrey Bogart films of that time. He played Philip Marlowe in one of his films and Marlowe is the protagonist in this book.

My comments refer to the Phoenix Books audio edition, thus the three stars which only refer to the abridgment itself, not necessarily the quality of Chandler's story and writing. Elliott Gould is a marvelous reader but what we have is a bare bones version of Sister which is all story, and not much left at that. As a result so much of the magic of Chandler's long descriptive passages is lost.
Still, Chandler is in good form, his irresistibly twisty turny prose and convoluted plotting never more beguiling. Here he turns his jaundiced eye to the Hollywood gestalt, something he knew a little about, and his observations have seldom been more pungent, gleefully so it would seem. But please, in the future, could spoken versions include all the text and not these maddeningly trimmed down versions . . . .

From the moment when the `Little Sister' appears in his office -pathetic, appealing but with something strangely phoney about her- private detective Philip Marlowe gets into a series of strange and increasingly violent happenings. Marlowe tries futilely to reunite a scattered family: a dead blackmailer, a rising movie star and a girl named Orfamay Quest. In sorting out the mystery, Marlowe gets involved with picture people, including a powerful agent, a half-senile studio head and the muscle the studios call out to deal with blackmailers. Some of them have ice picks sticking out of their necks. And of course, he has to take care of those corrupt small-town cops from Bay City.

From the first words of the Little Sister you immediately get into that typical film noir mood. The way Chandler describes the shabby office of Philip Marlowe gets you really going. You breathe and smell the decadence of the 1940's and know that you have to get ready for a rollercoaster ride through many intrigues. With the hand of the master Chandler weaves all the evidence into a complex web and keeps you on edge to find the solution. But be prepared, the plot is getting complex very fast and the denouement might come as a total surprise if you do not watch out very carefully. But then again, the real joy of the novel is not in trying to figure out who is who, and who did what, but in the way Chandler lets the mystery unfold.

By the time Raymond Chandler wrote The Little Sister, he had written several screenplays for Hollywood pictures. He did not earn that much money by writing books, so he needed the dough he was offered by the Tinseltown people. This does not mean that he enjoyed this very much. There is plenty of cynicism directed towards Hollywood. It seems as if The Little Sister is some kind of getting even with how Chandler was treated by the major film bosses.

This book needed two editors: one to help with the plot, an agonizing mess at times, Chandler's struggle with the plot as evident -- what a surprise! -- as an alcoholic's struggle with cravings; and it didn't have to be so hard, just get a good editor to shake it out; and a good copy editor. Dialogue segues are sloppy, words are missing -- this from the first Vintage book edition, 1988. And at times the writing is almost a parody of itself.

But for lesser Chandler, it still has some great, great stuff, including one of his very best lines: "On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young." Or how about this, describing death: "Something happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence." Or only a few pages later, this description of Tinseltown: "Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blase and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershort."

Private detective, Philip Marlowe, has been hired to find a missing brother of a concerned sister for a measly sum of twenty dollars. Little does he know that he will soon be drawn into a dangerous situation involving mobsters, blackmail, beautiful women and murders.
This is a graphic adaptation of the classic Raymond Chandler novel. You will find Michael Lark's artwork to be a little rough and dark but you will soon get drawn in and find that it does fit in superbly with the noir/pulp styling of the novel. As this is based on a novel you will find that the story revolves around the writing so don't expect any action sequences, but this will make the experience of `The Little Sister' better, longer and more memorable, especially the sarcastic comments from detective Philip Marlowe, who is a likeable ...P>Recommended for a change from the overwhelming superhero graphic novels, this classy detective thriller will satisfy you with both is storytelling and artwork.

THE LITTLE SISTER is terrific mystery that concludes with a gruesome incident of sudden (albeit implausible) poetic justice. By my count, TLS has five murders and a suicide, with Philip Marlowe a step too slow to prevent any crime but way ahead of the cops (and this reader) as he identifies the perps and unravels their interlaced motives.

There are lots of standard Raymond Chandler elements in TLS, including gangsters, devious deadly dames, and a film-noir Los Angeles. But in contrast to other Chandler novels I've read, there seems to be even less effort to elucidate the sour integrity of the lonely Marlowe. Since this is the fifth novel in the series, Chandler probably felt such explication would add little to, and might actually detract from, his spare and disciplined style. On the other hand, Chandler tells us more about the movie business in TLS and his dialogue is never better. Among my marginalia is: "Conversation as combat."

In TLS, it's the cops that bring out the best in Ray. When they're on the page, Chandler's wonderful metaphors seem sharpest, his skillful screen writer's dialogue carries the most freight, and his rhetoric absolutely soars. Here's Chandler letting loose, as Lieutenant Christy French berates Marlowe:

"It's like this with us, baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn't have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn't get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor. ...We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don't get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don't come home anymore. And nights we do come home, we come home so [expletive] tired, we can't eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake at night in a cheap house on a cheap street..."

Highly recommended.

Postwar L.A. -- and especially Hollywood -- is the setting for Chandler's fifth Marlowe novel which, like the time and place (and the author himself), is a little "off." Marlowe's beginning to tire, his loneliness is a bit more apparent, and the disillusionment has started to etch permanent lines on him.
None of which stops him. Neither does it make "The Little Sister" a bad work. In fact, it holds up remarkably well alongside Chandler's first four novels.
Chandler draws upon contemporary events and personages for much of his inspiration here (something he did in several earlier stories and novels, to a lesser degree); the photo which triggers the action in "Sister," for example, is based on an incident involving gangster Bugsy Siegel . . . but then the character of Steelgrave, himself, bears a more than passing resemblance to the then-recently deceased hood. It's equally evident that Chandler relied upon his recent screenwriting experience (and exposure to Paramount and Universal studios) for material and characters. There's an element of gleeful revenge, I suspect, for example, in the character of agent Sheridan Ballou: certain characteristics, such as his tendency to strut up and down his office twirling a mallaca cane, can only have been inspired by director/screenwriter Billy Wilder (with whom Chandler, collaborating on the screenplay for "Double Indemnity," shared an entirely mutual loathing).
Other characters, primarily a pair of mismatched thugs sent to intimidate Marlowe, are pure burlesque; Chandler appears to be simply indulging himself here (while he simultaneously manages yet another dig at the movie industry). But then, in scenes such as a Bay City boarding house or -- even more on point -- a mood-laden confrontation in a doctor's office ("Things are waiting to happen.") -- Chandler emerges as still the master at stretching tension beyond its breaking point.
There's also that memorable passage when Marlowe takes a latenight drive over Cahuenga Pass ("Easy, Marlowe, you're not human tonight."), in which Chandler shows himself unmatched at juxtaposing mood and movement and thought, particularly when he wants to advance the plotline and divulge his protagonist's mindset without appearing to do so. This, for me, has always been Chandler's greatest skill: the ability to achieve art without letting himself get caught at it.
But is "The Little Sister" Chandler's best? Not close.
But Chandler still delivers. As does Marlowe.

On one of those clear bright mornings in Los Angeles the little sister sashayed into the spartan office of Private Investigator Philliip Marlowe. The dame was from Manhatten Kansas fresh from Sunday School and service in a doctor's office. Her name was Quest and she was seeking her brother who had left the cornfields for the lush sinful landscape of 1949 Los Angeles. This is the opening scene in the "The Little Sister" which is an excellent late novel by Raymond Chandler author of such hardboiled detective classics as "The Big Sleep"; "The Long Goodbye";
"Farwell My Lovely"; "The Lady in the Lake" and "Playback."
The plot is convoluted and difficult to follow; the characters are grotesques from Miss Quest to movie queen Mavis Weld, the evil Steelgrave a mobster from Cleveland and the Latino beauty Dolores Gonzalez (who seeks to seduce Marlowe). We also get a trip to a movie studo; rich allusive writing about Los Angeles and the world weariness endemic to the disillusioned soul of Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe is the narrator of this opus.
Chandler could turn a phrase and keep your fingers flipping the 250 pages of another crime classic. Excellent writing and an entertaining visit to the underworld will keep you enthralled. Read Chandler at all costs!

Before reading this book, make sure you have a large blackboard and plenty of chalk. At least half a dozen different colors. Because that's what you'll need to diagram out the plot of The Little Sister. Keeping straight who's who and who did what to whom and why will give you plenty to do as you read and reread the pages of this Philip Marlowe mystery. Now I know what you're going to say. With Raymond Chandler, it's not about the story, it's about atmosphere. True enough. But I still have to believe that the reader's enjoyment is greatly enhanced if the writer has provided a coherent plot as a framework for displaying literary dexterity. In other words, the story itself isn't all important, but it is somewhat important.
As I see it, there are no less than four ways to view this novel.
The first way is as a murder mystery. A young woman from Manhattan (Manhattan, Kansas that is) hires Marlowe to find her missing brother. His subsequent search does eventually locate the young man but not before a drunk and a grifter are both murdered with an ice pick to the vicinity of the medulla oblongata. What is the motive behind these grotesque slayings? The motive is the urgent need to find a particular photograph. A photograph that shows two people sitting down to dinner in a restaurant. I'm not kidding.
The second way to view The Little Sister is as an affectionate sendup of noir crime writing in general and Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon in particular. This might explain why the complications are endless and so very difficult to follow. Perhaps Chandler felt the need to exaggerate the number and degree of plot twists in order to make a satiric point.
Thirdly, The Little Sister is a withering look at Hollywood and the recognizable types who dwell within. Second rate actors, self important talent agents, ambitious starlets, jaded actresses and befuddled studio heads are all lampooned to one degree or another here. I found this aspect of the book to be highly entertaining and would have liked to have seen it emphasized even more.
And lastly, this book can be taken as a view into the mind of a man slowly losing his grip. This Marlowe is world weary, tired. He's lonely and exasperated. Chandler has Marlowe questioning his own sanity for continuing to pursue his chosen profession.
Marlowe's investigation takes him to many places in and near Los Angeles. A seedy hotel, a rundown boarding house, the police station, and a working movie set to name only a few. Chandler brilliantly describes all locales with an amount of detail that serves to set the exact mood he wants to convey. Marlowe's steady output of cynical quips, some spoken, others only thought, are first rate and at times absolutely priceless. It is a tribute to Chandler's originality, as well as his keen wit, that readers never tire of this ongoing patter.
The Little Sister has a lot to recommend it. I just don't think one should have to work so hard to be able to follow a storyline. And oh yes, be sure to read The Maltese Falcon first.

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe detective stories certain vary in quality. While always capturing the ambiance on 1940s sleazy Los Angeles, the author often constructs mysteries with too many characters and implausible scenarios. I'm often too baffled half-way through to really care how the book ends, although reading Chandler's prose and punchy dialogue is certainly enjoyable as it is. Fortunately The Little Sister is one of Chandler's better efforts.
In The Little Sister we have a discreet set of characters loosely connected to a young woman who hires Marlowe to find her brother. Of course no one is as they seem, and all the beautiful ladies fall in love with Marlowe. Thankfully there are only about a dozen characters in total to keep track of, and Chandler gives his Marlowe character some of the best (and rudest) one-liners I've ever read. Believable? Not for a moment. But delicious escapism.
Bottom line: not one of his better know works, but The Little Sister is one of my favorite Raymond Chandler novels. (My favorite is The Lady in the Lake.)

Orfamay Quest is the little sister. Marlowe is the man. The story offers sex and murder. The dialogue is Chandler. So why is there no click, no snap?
"Now that you have hit me, maybe you ought to kiss me", one of the women in the story says. That is the sort of line that is out of place, a Chandler crack of the sort that sings in other books but seems strange here. Few women would ever say such a line, and the woman in this story would not have, and why have her say it? The same is true of the story, where the death and murder never seems quite serious.
There is a scene in the book where two actors playing tough guys try to muscle Marlowe by acting tough. Both appear to be caricatures of characters from the Maltese Falcon. That is the problem with this book - it is too self-consciously tongue in cheek and self-wise. Is it a parody or a novel? Marlowe's wise-cracking diffidence takes over the entire book.
But Chandler on an off day is always worth a read, and his bad writing (or half-parody)sings better than most modern writers, so if you can find it in a used book store, snap it up!

Update 2013

Everybody told Marlowe to stay away from the Hollywood crowd, to duck anytime a job came up in that postal zone, to go hide in a closet when that word was even mentioned. Way back in the 1930s when he started out as a hot shot investigator fresh out of college working in the D.A.s office an old hand, Detective Sergeant Towers, warned him to stay the hell away from those cases because they were nothing but trouble with a capital T. The only one who would wind up taking the fall was the guy from the D.A.'s office who assumed that, everything being on the level, justice, rough justice anyway would prevail even in Hollywood. Marlowe nevertheless was hung out to dry in the Chapman case back then, the one where Sybil Riley, yes, that Sybil Riley, shot her boyfriend, paramour, lover or whatever they call the stud guy to the female lead, six ways to Sunday and walked away like nothing happened, nothing at all. Marlowe, for his efforts to pursue the case, got a damn reprimand. That was one of the points that led him to stop chasing public servant windmills and go out on his own. He figured if he was going to chase windmills it would on his own terms.

Even Miles Archer, his old partner when he first went private, a guy who was nothing but a skirt-chaser, a pretty boy, who one would think would be dying get beside some rising starlet in need of help warned him off the Hollywood crowd as dangerous to his health. Miles had taken a divorce case involving adultery, the next young rising female star, a famous director, and a couple of others and was lucky to come out with his head still on. One night a couple of hard boys, boys straight for Q it seemed, at the direction of that famous director made it abundantly clear that his life was worthless if he kept snooping around. Hell. Even I told him on this last case, this case he called The Little Sister case, when I heard the names of the parties involved warned him to head to Vegas, head to London, damn, head back to Butte or Gary or wherever he was from. And pronto before the night of the long knives came.

But would our boy Marlowe listen? No, he had to play the hand that was dealt to him, had to play it out to the bitter end. He said, if you can believe this, that this case was different, that it started out a young woman from Podunk Kansas looking for a missing brother had nothing to do with Hollywood and so, as he got his head handed to him on a platter, he insisted that it didn't follow that rule. Sure thing, Marlowe. What our boy didn't know because that little, well, bitch from Podunk played him false, played him cheap and played him about that six ways to Sunday mentioned before was that this was nothing but a Hollywood case from fact number one.

So what started out a simple missing person case for cheap dough and a lark wound up very differently. See the little sister had a big sister (half-sister, really) who was a rising star in Hollywood, a name once he found out what it was (not from little sister by the way) that should have sent bells ringing. On top of that the missing brother was putting the squeeze on sis (half-sis) for dough. And, more importantly, making an enemy of the sister's boyfriend who just so happened to be a gangster from back East trying to outmuscle another gangster from back East for the booming criminal trade on the West Coast. More bells. But not for Marlowe, as the body count kept mounting, as the cops kept taking dead aim at him, as the Hollywood big guys kept squezing him out to dry, as he kept playing that fated hand. The last I heard he was hanging around his office, doors locked, a single light on, day or night, and taking deep draws on a few bottles of Old Forrester that he kept in a deep desk drawer, smoking Camel after Camel, and thinking, well, I hope he is thinking anyway, how he could have played it another way. Or no way at all. Read the book to figure where he went wrong.

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the book. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett ( the author of The Thin Man , and creator of The Maltese Falcon's Sam Spade maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Who, come to think of it, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, although not Hollywood women) turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

In Chandler's case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe's environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let's say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe's eyes.

The list of descriptions goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly , old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down (that spill your guts thing a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of having). He had come from them, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He has a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood's in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock's in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high- ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe's mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell's highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back East looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe's honor code.

And of course over a series of seven books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he honed back in the 1930s . Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company's nightmare and a guy who could have used some Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.

Original review

Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's classic noir hard-boiled private detective forever literarily associated with Los Angeles and its means streets is right at home here in his search for the inevitable 'missing person'-this time-a missing brother being looked for by his sister from Kansas. But she ain't no Dorothy and the plot thickens from there. There is plenty of sparse but functional dialogue, physical action and a couple of plot twists, particularly as we get a glance at the seedy side of those above-mentioned mean streets of Los Angeles. More so than earlier Marlowe adventures Chandler here gives his take on the changes in his former quiet little town of L.A. as a result of the double infusion of Hollywood hyp and war production during World War II. The gangsters naturally followed the money and the fame. Oh, and maybe they just came for the sun.

Marlowe is older and 'wiser' here but he still has that funny habit of tilting after windmills. He is at the beginning of a 'mid-life' crisis in this story. But what is a guy to do when there is a Hollywood movie star damsel in distress to rescue and the frame is on. And little Ms. Kansas is there to gum up the works. Besides he has cut a couple of corners in his pursuit of justice and the cops are mad. Damn, you know he has got to square things up. How does this this work compare with the other Marlowe volumes? Give me those background oil derricks churning out the Stearnwood wealth while looking for Rusty Regan in Big Sleep or the run down stucco flats in pursue of Moose's Velma in Farewell, My Lovely any day. Nevertheless here, as always with Chandler, you get high literature in a plebian package. Read on.

I just finished Chandler's "The Little Sister," or at least I think I did. That is, I have no idea what I was reading so therefore am not sure that I'm not still reading it. Somehow a young girl from Manhattan, Kansas named of all things, Orfamay Quest, hires Marlowe to find her brother Orrin who is missing and the fun begins. But how the skein of lies becomes unraveled, well, that was beyond my comprehension. I have no crystal ball, I don't know why Chandler seems to lose us in this cobweb or why the characters all seem like walk-ons except for Marlowe. The nympho, the babe, little Orfamay who is described as on a par with Lady Macbeth when she's introduced, the tough cops--they all seem to like I said enter and go away. So do we care about any of them? And of course, Marlowe is the star, the hero, the anti-hero, the guy with the chip on his shoulder, the seeker of truth with his bottle of expensive booze someone gave him. But still there is magic in this book and yes I am over the emotional age of thirteen so you can trust my opinion. I also just reread "The Lady in the Lake" which I thought far superior, including Marlowe's weary wary persona.

I think this is the novel where Chandler started to take his press clippings seriously and tried to write an Important Book. While it's a very good book, the book feels like a lesser sequel to his previous four classic novels perhaps because it strays a little more from its pulp roots. In the earlier books, he showed us the seamy side of Los Angeles, and the characters demonstrated their basic corruption through their actions. There is some of that in this novel as well, but he also feels the need to tell us what Philip Marlowe actually thinks about your average person. "Tired men in dusty coupes and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west toward home and dinner, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives." True, probably. Pleasant, no. Marlowe also occasionally indulges in self pity. A flawed hero is one thing; an unlikable one is something else altogether.

There's no leavening the unpleasantness as even Marlowe himself doesn't come off well. As misanthropic as Marlowe becomes in this novel, you wonder why he even bothers to do his Don Quixote thing. In this book, I think Chandler strays somewhat from his original concept of Marlowe, and the book suffers as a result. Still a good read, but far from classic.

Marlowe is sitting in his office swatting at a fly when Sweet Polly Purebread from Kansas strolls in carrying her Bible and sob story about a lost brother. Something doesn't smell right to Marlowe and you guessed it, it does stink.

Chandler paints beautiful scenes as always in his unique hardboiled style, with Marlowe wisecracking like a pro. But the reader needs to keep notes to keep up with the dizzying cast of characters in this difficult to read story. I think this one is about as hard as The Big Sleep, which according to lore, was so complicated that even Chandler didn't know who killed one of the characters. Consider this a thinking man's whodunnit.

Everyone, one way or another. Everyone except maybe Marlowe.

This isn't one of Chandler's better-known stories; as far as I know, it was never made into a movie. Maybe it's just a little too complex for a movie. It starts in the usual way. A young woman, beautiful (if she lets herself be) and in trouble, asks private detective Marlowe for help. She needs to find her brother, a small-town boy who's lost his way in the big bad city.

She's not quite what she claims to be, though, and the brother isn't what he should have been. As the story progresses, Hollywood and all the people in it lose their shine, and get darker and dirtier. And the bodies start to pile up ---

Maybe Chandler didn't invent American noir of the post-WWII era, but he certainly made it his own. If you liked 'The Big Sleep' and 'The Long Goodbye', you're sure to like this as well.

//wiredweird

Marlowe is on the prowl again, when the petite sibling of the title arrives at his dingy office with a crisp new twenty and a sob-story about a brother who has vanished. The holier-than-thou attitude and the pouting lips pique Marlowe's interest, and he soon finds himself looking for the truth among the sordid sorority of Hollywood elite. As always, Chander is the master of the poetic line and the brilliant image...the English language has never been served so well. The plot? Well, I must admit that I'm still a bit unclear about exactly what happened and why, however, I loved the book anyway. I know that Chandler is a "languager" not a "plotter," and I relish the words he chooses. A great book by an American master!

Chandler is my favorite author, and this graphic novel captures Marlowe the way he is in the books: a solitary figure without the movie star detective pizazz Humphrey Bogart gave Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Bogart's a great actor but he didn't capture the true essence of Marlowe the way this work does. When I read this, it's exactly the way I have always pictured Marlowe. A tired, unflashy, cynical gumshoe.

The artwork is crisp and expertly rendered without being to Marvel-esque, the shadows are deep and black creating a true noir environment, and the convoluted storyline is masterfully condensed. This graphic novel captures Marlowe the way he was written. I wish the authors of this gem would do another Chandler adaptation, maybe of Red Wind, probably one of the best hard boiled detective stories written. The opening paragraph of that story is worth the price of admission alone. If you are unfamiliar with Raymond Chandler, reading his works will spoil it for you with other crime writers, he's that good. This work does Chandler justice.

Excellent plotting; very good writing. Three women turn up in the life of private detective Philip Marlowe. And there is one missing man. Could that man be involved with all of these women? L.A., over sixty-five years ago (along with the fictional Bay City) is the scene and there is more than one crime that confronts one of fiction's best-known private detectives of all time.

As always, Raymond Chandler's writing technique is excellent in "The Little Sister." And while the premise is good--- a woman from Kansas coming to Philip Marlowe in hopes of locating her missing brother--- the story and its characters dissolve into eccentricity by the end of the book.

Chandler was such an excellent story teller, and part of his appeal was writing colorful mysteries that had the right mix of gritty reality and just a few dashes of improbable situations. The characters in this book start off well, but become more cartoonish as the story moves along.

In my opinion, there is no terrible Raymond Chandler book, but this does come close. If you have never read any of Chandler's work, this may not be the best place to start. "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The High Window" would be my personal picks as his finest work, but any of his other novels are superior to this.

Having read every other "Marlow" novel, I figured that this would follow the pattern established by the previous stories, each one being better than the last. Unfortunately, this one dropped the ball. I wish I could say why - all the usual ingredients are there from seductive women brandishing sex to dangerous mobsters and other assorted degenerates brandishing guns, ice picks and dodgy cigarettes. The accustomed hazards of a private eye!
But... this time it never seems to catch fire. The traditional Marlow observations and asides. The chess like dialogue. The characters oozing deceit and human frailty. It's still there, but it's kinda got all formulaic. A sort of writing by numbers. Chanlder was by this time famous, well off and held in some esteem, so perhaps he had lost his early enthusiasm and drive. I don't know, but it certainly seems that way.
The plot itself starts out tired and, like some of the hapless people in the book, eventually turns up DOA. Again, all the ingredients are there but the recipe is off. Hollywood, starlets, The Mob, bent cops - perhaps it's just too easy a target. It's complex, as one would expect from Chandler, but about two thirds the way through, the author seems to stop bothering to explain (even in a general manner) how we got where we are and loose interest in the narrative. And so did I.
Never mind, I have ordered The Long Goodbye and that seems to get glowing reviews, so perhaps this was just a bit of an aberration. Please don't be put off trying the other Marlow stories, or even this one. At his worst, Chandler is still head and shoulders above 99% of other detective writers.

"The Little Sister" was my introduction to Raymond Chandler and his immortal private detective, Philip Marlowe. I opened it up for the first time four years ago and have read it twice more since then.
I had never read a hard-boiled mystery before, and "The Little Sister" exceeded my expectations. The punchy dialogue, the terrific characters, Chandler's trademark similies, Marlowe's toughness interlaced with a penchant for justice, the contemporary view into the Hollywood of the late 1940's. "The Little Sister" electrified me and sparked an insatiable appetite for more Chandler. I read his remaining novels in rapid succession, always buying the next one before reaching the end of the novel at hand so I could immediately plunged back into Marlowe's long-vanished world.
I have since read all of Chandler's novels and short stories, and "The Little Sister" still remains my favorite, closely followed by "Farewell, My Lovely."

The overly restrained Orfamay Quest (from Manhattan, Kansas) hires Philip Marlowe to find her recently gone missing brother, Orrin. Marlowe, being bored, takes the case and soon wishes he hadn't. Any attempt at plot description beyond that will only lead to confusion. Suffice to say that Chandler is in fine form here, with a tense, baffling, and witty mystery among Hollywood's tarnished stars. Highly recommended.

Often during a movie or graphic novel adaptation of a book you get the feeling of something not matching up. Especially during a movie, even if I don't know it is based on a book, there is some quality that tells me it must have been.
This illustration doesn't have that missing quality. The two fit. A very enjoyable read.