The Little Sister shows some features of some of the best Marlowe stories, but the fifth book in this series just doesn’t stand up to its predecessors.

In The Little Sister it starts simply enough when a bored Marlowe is hired by the little sister of a man who moved to LA from Manhattan, Kansas and has stopped writing.

As is usual, Marlowe plunges into a case that gets him into the midst of a shady underworld, of Hollywood, and of course puts him on the bad side of police.

The story is worth reading once and has some classic Marlowe moments. Towards the end of the book, a couple of cops who’ve had to put up with Marlowe playing fast and loose with murders and bodies tell Marlowe off and it’s a beautiful moment when the characters come to life.

It is a rare moment in this story. In 250 pages, I lost track of how many bodies were dropped and who killed them all. So many characters come and go, we really get no impression of them. There’s no character in this book I really connected with in the same way I did with characters in, “Lady in the Lake,” and “The Big Sleep.”

Another thing that hurts the book is the focus. In the first four novels, Marlowe’s scorn is directed at big city crime, crooked Los Angeles (and nearby communities) police forces. Marlowe’s bile is justified because he knows of what he speaks. In the Little Sister, he uses a combination of a dirty mind and experience with two kids from Manhattan, Kansas as the basis for all sorts of psychological deductions about what a small town is like. It feels less like Marlowe’s making street wise observations on life and more like he’s expressing poorly informed prejudices.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a bad book, but it doesn’t measure up to Chandler’s other works.

Rating: 3.0 out of 5.0

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