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1369202

The Little Sister

Annotation:
Orfamay Quest of Manhattan, Kansas, is a "small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses." She approaches the detective Marlowe to help her find her missing brother, but she can only afford to pay him $20. What Orfamay Quest doesn't tell Marlowe is that her half-sister is a movie starlet with mob connections. This is the first Chandler novel concerned with the movie industry, a business he knew all too well. He is primarily interested in how the Hollywood mentality can affect people, even small-town folk from Kansas.

Praise

(unknown)
"It's the only book of mind I have actively disliked. It was written in a bad mood and I think that comes through." - Raymond Chandler

Author Bio

Raymond Chandler

Chandler was raised by his mother after his father disappeared. At the age of 8, he moved to London, where he later attended Dulwich College and excelled in his studies. After graduating, Chandler traveled, returned to London for a civil service job, and left that job to become a writer. He moved to California, but served with the Canadian army during World War I. After being injured in the war, Chandler returned to California and became an executive with the Dabney Oil Syndicate and got married. He drank excessively and was fired from his job, but in 1933 he published his first story in the pulp magazine "Black Mask", and wrote fiction for the next 10 years. He then signed on with Paramount as a screenwriter. In 1946, after an enormously successful career in Hollywood, Chandler retired from the movies. His wife died in 1954, and Chandler sank into an alcoholic depression for the next five years. In 1959, he died of pneumonia, one month after being elected president of Mystery Writers of America. Along with Dashiell Hammett, Chandler is arguably the greatest mystery/detection writer of the 20th century. He, Hammett, and James M. Cain set the standard for the so-called "hard-boiled" or "noir" fiction, and strongly influenced Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker, among others. Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, was an updated variation on the questing knight of medieval legend, with a strong ethical code and a tortured, alienated soul.