The Little Sister
Cover of the first US edition
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| Author | Raymond Chandler |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Artzybasheff |
| Language | English |
| Series | Philip Marlowe |
| Genre | Detective fiction |
| Publisher |
Hamish Hamilton (UK) Houghton Mifflin (U.S.) |
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Publication date
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1949 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 256 pp |
| Preceded by | The Lady in the Lake |
| Followed by | The Long Goodbye |
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 centers 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.
The story opens when mousy Orfamay Quest phones and then visits Philip Marlowe's office in search of a detective. Orfamay is a "small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses" from Manhattan, Kansas, who has come to Los Angeles to search for her older brother Orrin. Orrin had recently come out to nearby Bay City (a fictional tough town that appears in many Chandler novels, modeled on Santa Monica) to work as an engineer for the Cal-Western Aircraft Company, but in recent months he had stopped writing to Orfamay and their mother. Orfamay describes her concern to Marlowe and asks that he find her brother. Although Orfamay seems to be an innocent, small-town girl, Chandler foreshadows that she is not what she seems by having Marlowe say, in his initial description of her, "and nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth."
Marlowe starts with Orrin's last known address, a seedy apartment building in Bay City. Receiving no response at the front door, he breaks in at the back and encounters a man counting money. The man thinks that Marlowe is there to rob him, and a fight breaks out in which Marlowe disarms him. The man flees, and Marlowe proceeds further into the building, finding the superintendent passed out in a drunken stupor. He wakes the man, who tries to call a Dr. Lagardie before passing out again.
Marlowe then finds a man who presents himself as a retired optometrist living in Orrin's old room. The man seems cagey for a retired optometrist, and he and Marlowe trade wisecracks as they both try to feel each other out for information. During the exchange, Marlowe notices that the "optometrist" wears a toupee and is carrying a gun.
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Wikipedia