Customer Reviews

The Little Sister/Large Print (Curley Large Print Books)

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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.

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.

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

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.

Over the course of the last 2 years I've read 5 out of the 7 Philip Marlowe detective novels of Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959). "The Little Sister" (1949) is the fifth Marlowe novel, and even though parts of it intrigued me, I couldn't help but feel a tad disappointed...

By 1944, Chandler had become a household name both in the USA and around the world for his tough-yet-sensitive, cynical-yet-romantic prose masterpieces. Around this time, Hollywood had come knocking. Chandler co-wrote the screeplay for "Double Indemnity" with Billy Wilder, and the first Marlowe novel "The Big Sleep" was made into a classic motion picture starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The money came rolling in: Chandler and his wife Cissy moved into a luxurious house in L.A.'s ritzy Pacific Palisades section. The Hollywood temptation came as well: Chandler began an affair with a secretary at Paramount Pictures and his chronic alcoholism--which was already bad--began to worsen.

In addition, during this time (the late 1940s), Los Angeles was rapidly transforming from what was once a small, coastal, desert community when Chandler had first moved there 30 years prior--into the enormous, sprawling, congested, and smoggy metropolis it is today. It's telling that Chandler moved 100 miles south to La Jolla, CA not long after this book was published.

One can sense while reading "The Little Sister" that Chandler was becoming bitter and weary--not only at the direction of his own life and the Hollywood movie machine (where writers are traditionally the low man on the totem pole) but also how his adopted home was changing...and not for the better, calling L.A. "a neon slum" and "a big, hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup." While world-weariness had always been present in all the Philip Marlowe private detective novels, here, unlike Chandler's other books, it almost weighs down the storytelling.

The story itself is the standard, convoluted Chandler fare: Ms. Orfamay Quest--a pretty young woman from Manhattan, Kansas--seeks Marlowe's help in locating her missing brother Orrin P. Quest. Marlowe immediately suspects that Orfamay is not all she appears to be, yet--lacking any other clients--he accepts her case nonetheless. From this unlikely setting, both Marlowe and the reader are brought into a world of movie stars, agents, gangsters, backstabbers (both real and metaphorical) and small-time hustlers. While it's hard to figure out exactly who is doing what to whom, this confusion is the hallmark of all Chandler novels--particularly the ones of any worth.

For the Chandler enthusiast, "The Little Sister" is an above-average book, with some of the punchiest, toughest dialogue that Chandler ever wrote. It's far from the worst Chandler I've ever read (that would be "The Lady in the Lake"--1943) However, for the enthusiast as well as the more casual reader, "The Long Goodbye" (1954) is Chandler's true masterpiece, with "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940) coming in a close second. "The Little Sister" is well worth the read, but I expected more from the potent combination of Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe & Hollywood.

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."

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.

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.

not Chandler's best. The book was written during his wife's dying and death. Chandler could not bring himself to reread it, therefore some of the language oddities can be forgiven as well as character inconsistencies. There are terrific descriptions as usual, but motivation for the many violent things people do isn't apparent and in the end the bottom drops out. That said, you could do worse in the genre.

I just finished reading "The High Window" and got hooked so I went right out and bought "The Little Sister". I'm not sorry. It's even better! Now I'll have to go buy "Trouble is My Business". I only have about 40 pages left and I don't want it to end yet. Raymond Chandler is the best.