The Little Sister/Audio Cassettes [Textbook Binding]

Raymond Chandler (Author), Ed Bishop (Author)

Product Details

• Textbook Binding
• Publisher: G K Hall Audio Books (June 1985)
• ISBN-10: 0816197776
• ISBN-13: 978-0816197774
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)

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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An underrated and underestimated effort, December 7, 2001

By 

Paul Dana (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Little Sister (Paperback)

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.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a Crime Novelist, September 15, 2002

By 

DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Little Sister (Paperback)

The latest in a long series of visits to LA had me refreshing my memory of one of my favourite novelists. As a young man I knew the Philip Marlowe books nearly by heart before I ever set foot in the city they put on the literary map. I have always thought that Chandler counts as literature not just as crime fiction. He was a professed admirer of the ultra-craftsman Flaubert, and it shows in the way he works at every sentence, indeed every word. He was English and as far as I know unrelated to the 'real' LA Chandlers (he attended the same school as P G Wodehouse, if you can believe it). He maintained that 'the American language' can say anything and in The Simple Art of Murder he took a brilliant potshot at the Agatha Christie school of English crime fiction , all tight-lipped butlers polishing the georgian silver and respectful upper-middles gathered to hear the amateur master-sleuth analyse over 5 or 6 pages which of them dunnit. His power of creating atmosphere is phenomenal, his dialogue is legendary, and for me The Little Sister is the best of the 7 Marlowes. It's at the crest of the hill, before he started to lose concentration in The Long Goodbye and lost just about everything in the sad Playback. I can still feel the heavy heat at the start of the book, and the dialogue is the best he ever did. Is there any other instance of anyone silencing Marlowe with an answer the way the beat-up hotel dick does when Marlowe tells him he is going up to room such-and-such and the hotel dick says 'Am I stopping you?'. And I cherish the bit about the same character tucking his gun into his waistband 'in an emergency he could probably have got it out in less than a minute'. I can't even yet follow the plot, but actually I have never been able to follow any Chandler plot, though I suspect the author himself lost his way in this one. It's maybe the first sign of the decline that set in next -- Marlowe is beginning to feel old and tired and he is probably speaking for more than himself. The plot is really neither here nor there. The only fully developed character is Marlowe himself, but Mavis Weld comes over well, the little sister herself is a memorable grotesque and see what you make of Dolores Gonzalez. The other major character is Los Angeles itself, which fascinates me as it obviously fascinated its adopted son Chandler. Half a century and more on from the time of writing I can still get the feel of Chandler's LA.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Whodunnit?, August 20, 2005

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Little Sister (Paperback)

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