Other editions of book The Little Sister

Crime fiction master Raymond Chandler's fifth novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times). In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure private eye Philip Marlowe into the less than glamorous and more than a little dangerous world of Hollywood fame. Chandler's first foray into the industry that dominates the company town that is Los Angeles.

Philip Marlowe heads to Hollywood exploring the underworld of glitter capital, trying to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother; a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret. Her name is Orfamay Quest and she’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or leastways that’s what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe’s feeling charitable - though it’s not long before he wishes he wasn’t so sweet. You see, Orrin’s trail leads Marlowe to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops, and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks. When trouble comes calling, sometimes it’s best to pretend to be out…

Philip Marlowe heads to Hollywood exploring the underworld of glitter capital, trying to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother; a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret. Her name is Orfamay Quest and she’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or leastways that’s what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe’s feeling charitable - though it’s not long before he wishes he wasn’t so sweet. You see, Orrin’s trail leads Marlowe to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops, and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks. When trouble comes calling, sometimes it’s best to pretend to be out…

Philip Marlowe heads to Hollywood exploring the underworld of glitter capital, trying to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother; a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret. Her name is Orfamay Quest and she’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or leastways that’s what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe’s feeling charitable - though it’s not long before he wishes he wasn’t so sweet. You see, Orrin’s trail leads Marlowe to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops, and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks. When trouble comes calling, sometimes it’s best to pretend to be out…

Philip Marlowe heads to Hollywood exploring the underworld of glitter capital, trying to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother; a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret. Her name is Orfamay Quest and she’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or leastways that’s what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe’s feeling charitable - though it’s not long before he wishes he wasn’t so sweet. You see, Orrin’s trail leads Marlowe to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops, and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks. When trouble comes calling, sometimes it’s best to pretend to be out…

Philip Marlowe heads to Hollywood exploring the underworld of glitter capital, trying to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother; a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret. Her name is Orfamay Quest and she’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or leastways that’s what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe’s feeling charitable - though it’s not long before he wishes he wasn’t so sweet. You see, Orrin’s trail leads Marlowe to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops, and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks. When trouble comes calling, sometimes it’s best to pretend to be out…

The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, his fifth featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. The novel centres on the younger sister of a Hollywood starlet and has several scenes involving the film industry. It was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949; it was released in the United States three months later.Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, defined the hardboiled school of detective fiction, popularised in pulp magazines such as Black Mask. The hardboiled school was an alternative to the traditional murder mysteries of people like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Unlike the mannered, complex plots typical of these authors, the hardboiled stories moved "murder out of the Venetian vase and into the alley" and "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish."[2]One thing that distinguished Chandler's hero Philip Marlowe even from his other hardboiled peers is that Marlowe often doesn't apprehend the criminal or explain every plot point at the end of the novel. Marlowe is a witness to events and, at most, is able to manipulate them in subtle ways to balance the scales of justice a bit.[3] Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Little Sister. Marlowe is always arriving too late to prevent a murder or catch the criminal. Even at the very end, when he has finally solved the complex riddle of the case, his last act is simply to notify the police too late and let events take their course.The Little Sister was the first novel Chandler wrote after working as a screenwriter for Paramount in Hollywood, and it reflects some of his experiences with and disdain for the film industry.Although Chandler's name and fiction are almost synonymous with Los Angeles, he spent most of his adolescence in England, and he retained a preference for manners and formality that he learned in the English public school system. This put him at odds with the informal atmosphere in Hollywood.[4]For example, Chandler took an instant dislike to Billy Wilder, his writing partner on Double Indemnity. According to Wilder's recollection, "[Chandler] was a very peculiar, a sort of rather acid man, like so many former alcoholics are... he didn't really like me ever."[5]Chandler was not the kind of person to directly confront someone. The partnership with Wilder seemed to be going well on the surface. Then one day Chandler did not show up for work, but instead delivered a typed list of complaints to Paramount officials, demanding that they be resolved before he would return to working on the script. John Houseman, one of Chandler's few Hollywood friends, remembers one item in particular:"Mr Wilder was at no time to swish under Mr Chandler's nose or to point in his direction the thin, leather-handled malacca cane which Mr Wilder was in the habit of waving around while they worked."[6]Chandler used this experience in the novel. When Marlowe visits the office of Mavis Weld's agent (Chapter 18), he describes the agent in a manner reminiscent of his complaint against Wilder:He walked away from me to a tall cylindrical jar in the corner. From this he took one of a number of short thin malacca canes. He began to walk up and down the carpet, swinging the cane deftly past his shoe.I sat down again and killed my cigarette and took a deep breath. "It could only happen in Hollywood," I grunted.He made a neat turn and glanced at me. "I beg your pardon.""That an apparently sane man could walk up and down inside the house with a Picadilly stroll and a monkey stick in his hand."As in all of Chandler's novels, one of the major themes in The Little Sister.

Philip Marlowe heads to Hollywood exploring the underworld of glitter capital, trying to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother; a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret. Her name is Orfamay Quest and she’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or leastways that’s what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe’s feeling charitable - though it’s not long before he wishes he wasn’t so sweet. You see, Orrin’s trail leads Marlowe to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops, and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks. When trouble comes calling, sometimes it’s best to pretend to be out…

The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, his fifth featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. The novel centres on the younger sister of a Hollywood starlet and has several scenes involving the film industry. It was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949; it was released in the United States three months later.As in all of Chandler's novels, one of the major themes in The Little Sister is the love/hate relationship that Chandler had with Los Angeles and Hollywood.[7] Much of the novel is devoted to mockery of the phoniness and self-importance of people in the film industry. And one of the most memorable passages in the book is a long soliloquy by Marlowe where he waxes philosophically about the emptiness and shallowness of Los Angeles and its residents. That section is punctuated by Marlowe saying to himself "You're not human tonight, Marlowe."At the same time, one of the main villains of the novel, the one "who never looked less like Lady Macbeth," is not the film star of the Quest family, but the little sister: the mousy small town girl who ultimately cares more for a few dollars than for her siblings. Meanwhile, the heroine who is willing to sacrifice herself, and whom Marlowe ultimately rescues, is the jaded Hollywood starlet, Mavis Weld.This story was updated for the 1969 film Marlowe, starring James Garner as detective Philip Marlowe.The novel was adapted for radio by Bill Morrison, directed by John Tydeman, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 5 December 1977, starring Ed Bishop as Marlowe.Another adaptation by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Claire Grove, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 15 October 2011, starring Toby Stephens as Marlowe.Mousy Orfamay Quest from Manhattan, Kansas asks Philip Marlowe to search for her older brother Orrin, who had recently come out to work in nearby Bay City (a fictional town modelled on Santa Monica).[1] Marlowe starts with Orrin's last known address, a seedy apartment building. The superintendent there has passed out in a drunken stupor and when awoken tries to call a Dr. Lagardie before passing out again. Marlowe then finds a man who claims to be a retired optometrist living in Orrin's old room. As Marlowe leaves the building, he finds the superintendent is dead, having been stabbed in the neck with an ice pick. Marlowe phones the Bay City police to report the murder, but doesn't leave his name.One thing that distinguished Chandler's hero Philip Marlowe even from his other hardboiled peers is that Marlowe often doesn't apprehend the criminal or explain every plot point at the end of the novel. Marlowe is a witness to events and, at most, is able to manipulate them in subtle ways to balance the scales of justice a bit.[3] Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Little Sister. Marlowe is always arriving too late to prevent a murder or catch the criminal. Even at the very end, when he has finally solved the complex riddle of the case, his last act is simply to notify the police too late and let events take their course.The Little Sister was the first novel Chandler wrote after working as a screenwriter for Paramount in Hollywood, and it reflects some of his experiences with and disdain for the film industry.Bayley, John (2002). "Introduction". Raymond Chandler Collected Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. (xi). ISBN 0-375-41500-9.^ Chandler, Raymond (1950). The Simple Art of Murder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0394757653.^ Davies, Russell (1978). "Chapter 3: Omnes Me Impune Lacessunt". In Gross, Miriam. The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W Publishers. p. (33). ISBN 978-0-89479-016-4.^ Houseman, John (1978). "Chapter 5: Lost Fortnight". In Gross, Miriam. The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W Publishers. pp. (55).