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Marlowe is sent to Hawaii to facilitate the sale of an all-feather cloak to find someone bordered his plane under Marlowe’s name.
Original Air Date: April 23, 1949
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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Marlowe is hired the identity of a burlesque dancer by a woman who think she’s her sister.
Original Air Date: April 16, 1949
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Marlowe is hired to find out the identity of a man with a t-shirt who has been stalking his client. The client is found dead and he’s not the only one.
Original Air Date: April 9, 1949
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Marlowe attends the reading of a willing only to find the testator very much alive–but not for long.
Original Air Date: April 2, 1949
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Marlowe has to find a dead columnist got a story that landed his magazine in court for libel.
Original Air Date: March 26, 1949
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Philip Marlowe is hired by a twin sister in a piano sister act to investigate a man.
Original Air Date: March 19, 1949
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Marlowe is lured to a party as a human item in a scavenger hunt. Things take a serious turn when he finds the woman who called him was murdered.
Original Air Date: March 12, 1949
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Marlowe is awakened in the middle of the night by a call from a man who runs a lunch counter, begging Marlowe’s help to find his missing wife. Marlowe’s investigations leads him smack into the middle of a murder investigation.
Original Air Date: March 5, 1949
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Marlowe goes to Phoenix to carry simple papers but finds himself in the midst of robbers fighting and kill over the proceeds of an old robbery.
Original Air Date: February 12, 1949
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Marlowe is hired by an elderly man to transport a string of pearls to Chicago but arrives to find the man who hired him dead and the pearls missing.
Original Air Date: February 5, 1949
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Marlowe to help a woman’s husband whose in trouble with blackmailers and finds a backwards case. Why would blackmailer attack their mark?
Original Air Date: January 29, 1949
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Marlowe stars out looking for a woman’s missing sister and instead finds himself in Chinatown on the trail of the orange dog of Fo.
Original Air Date: January 22, 1949
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Marlowe looks for a woman who works for a major perfume company.
Original Air Date: January 15, 1949
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Marlowe’s hopes of a day off are spoiled when a man who was assumed dead by accident shows up asking Marlowe to find out who tried to kill him.
Original Air Date: January 8, 1949
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