Email us to request a printed copy of our catalog of Raymond Chandler Rare Books and First Editions or download it via the link as a 1. All she wanted was to kick a few high ones off the bar and have herself a party. The first edition of this novel was published in , and was written by Raymond Chandler. Orrin Quest is missing and his little sister asks Marlowe to find him. But all our hero finds is corpses. Due to his straitened financial circumstances during the Great Depression, Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by studying the Perry Mason story formula of Erle Stanley Gardner.
He was a little shaky and a little shy but polite as hell. By DeathBecomesHer. Here at Crime Fiction Lover we love a clever book title, and this one is a case in point. At first glance it seems all too obvious — after all, the main protagonist, LAPD Detective Renee Ballard, is on permanent night duty, working the graveyard…. Kindle Print Reviews. By Paul Burke. By crimefictionlover. American crime fiction is changing, and one of the people driving that is the Californian author, Steph Cha.
Of course, it always has been changing, but Steph is a writer who has brought a much needed fresh perspective on things. Social Facebook Twitter Instagram. Five Decembers by James Kestrel 22 November, Book Club. He'd never been away from Kansas before. You came out on your vacation.
Then what? Then I sent a wire to him from Salt Lake City but he didn't answer that either. So all I could do was go down where he lived. It's an awful long way. I went in a bus. It's in Bay City. She stopped again, then repeated the address, and I still didn't write it down. I just sat there looking at her glasses and her smooth brown hair and the silly little hat and the fingernails with no color and her mouth with no lipstick and the tip of the little tongue that came and went between the pale lips.
You want me to finish your story for you? And you're afraid he's living a life of sin in a penthouse on top of the Regency Towers with something in a long mink coat and an interesting perfume. Marlowe," she said at last, "I don't think anything of the sort about Orrin. And if Orrin heard you say that you'd be sorry. He can be awfully mean. But I know something has happened. It was just a cheap rooming house, and I didn't like the manager at all.
A horrid kind of man. He said Orrin had moved away a couple of weeks before and he didn't know where to and he didn't care, and all he wanted was a good slug of gin.
I don't know why Orrin would even live in a place like that. The Cal-Western Company, you know. And they said he'd been laid off like a lot of others and that was all they knew.
So then I went to the post office and asked if Orrin had put in a change of address to anywhere. And they said they couldn't give me any information. It was against the regulations. So I told them how it was and the man said, well if I was his sister he'd go look. So he went and looked and came back and said no. Orrin hadn't put in any change of address. So then I began to get a little frightened.
He might have had an accident or something. Orrin would never forgive me. He's difficult enough at the best of times. Our family-" She hesitated and there was something behind her eyes she tried not to have there. So she went on breathlessly: "Our family's not the kind of family-". I'm talking about him getting knocked down by a car and losing his memory or being too badly hurt to talk.
She gave me a level look which was not too admiring. Just what do you think might have happened? She put her slim forefinger to her lips and touched it very carefully with the tip of that tongue. How much would you charge to find him? I didn't answer for a long moment, then I said: "You mean alone, without telling anybody? She clasped her hands on the edge of the desk and squeezed them together hard. She had about the most meaningless set of gestures I had ever laid eyes on. I've got to buy my meals here and my hotel and the train going back and you know the hotel is so terribly expensive and the food on the train-".
I'm terribly afraid of Orrin's temper. And, well I can always call you up, can't I? Just what is it you're scared of, besides Orrin's temper, Miss Quest? I struck a match and held it to the bowl, watching her over it. And don't try to side-step my questions. Mother never let father smoke in the house, even the last two years after he had his stroke. He used to sit with that empty pipe in his mouth sometimes.
But she didn't like him to do that really. We owed a lot of money too and she said she couldn't afford to give him money for useless things like tobacco. The church needed it much more than he did. She stood up sharply and clasped the first-aid kit to her body. If you're insinuating that Orrin has done something wrong, well I can assure you that it's not Orrin who's the black sheep of our family. I didn't move an eyelash. She swung around and marched to the door and put her hand on the knob and then she swung around again and marched back and suddenly began to cry.
I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait. She got out her little handkerchief and tickled the corners of her eyes. Stop chipping at my emotions. Let's see a photo of him. She put the handkerchief away in a hurry and dug something else out of her bag. She passed it across the desk. An envelope. Thin, but there could be a couple of snapshots in it. I didn't look inside. She concentrated. That gave her a chance to do something with her eyebrows.
He has light brown hair, much lighter than mine, and lighter blue eyes, and he brushes his hair straight back. He's very tall, over six feet.
But he only weighs about a hundred and forty pounds. He's sort of bony. He used to wear a little blond mustache but mother made him cut it off. She said-". There's a lot of things about you I don't know. But you can stop pretending to be an Easter lily right now. Does Orrin have any distinguishing marks on him, like moles or scars, or a tattoo of the Twenty-Third Psalm on his chest? And don't bother to blush.
What does he do for fun- besides not smoking or drinking or going out with girls? She smiled. I was beginning to wonder if she had one in her. She had very white teeth and she didn't wave her gums. That was something. Sometimes it makes them mad.
But Orrin says people ought to see themselves as they really are. You can take snaps in almost any kind of light. A Leica. I opened the envelope and took out a couple of small prints, very clear. Philip took those, Philip Anderson. A boy I was going with for a while. Just because your name's Philip too. I just said: "Uh-huh," but I felt touched in some vague sort of way. I guess you know how it is.
You can cry if you want to. I won't hold it against you. I'm just a big soft slob myself. I looked at the two prints. One of them was looking down and was no good to me. The other was a fairly good shot of a tall angular bird with narrow-set eyes and a thin straight mouth and a pointed chin. He had the expression I expected to see. If you forgot to wipe the mud off your shoes, he was the boy who would tell you. I laid the photos aside and looked at Orfamay Quest, trying to find something in her face even remotely like his.
I couldn't. Not the slightest trace of family resemblance, which of course meant absolutely nothing. It never has. But you ought to be able to guess what's happened. He's in a strange city. He's making good money for a while. More than he's ever made in his life, perhaps.
He's meeting a kind of people he never met before. So he just broke training and he doesn't want his family to know about it.
He'll straighten out. She just stared at me for a moment in silence, then she shook her head. Orrin's not the type to do that, Mr. The small-town sanctimonious type of guy who's lived his entire life with his mother on his neck and the minister holding his hand. Out here he's lonely. He's got dough. He'd like to buy a little sweetness and light, and not the kind that comes through the east window of a church.
Not that I have anything against that. I mean he already had enough of that, didn't he? That takes experience too. He's got himself all jammed up with some floozy and a bottle of hootch and what he's done looks to him as if he'd stolen the bishop's pants. After all, the guy's going on twenty-nine years old and if he wants to roll in the gutter that's his business. He'll find somebody to blame it on after a while.
Marlowe," she said slowly. Just the regular police. That is, I don't think we do. She probed in the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn't seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across.
Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten. You won't give me your name and address, so I want something with your name on it. She didn't want to. After a moment reluctantly she took the hard pencil and wrote "Orfamay Quest" in a neat secretary's writing across the face of the duplicate. My home number is in the phone book too. Bristol Apartments, Apartment I might have something. And then again I might not. She stood up. You think I'm cute. And I think you're a fascinating little liar.
You don't think I'm doing this for any twenty bucks, do you? She gave me a level, suddenly cool stare. I didn't have the heart to tell her I was just plain bored with doing nothing. Perhaps it was the spring too. And something in her eyes that was much older than Manhattan, Kansas.
Then she turned quickly and almost ran out of the office. Her steps along the corridor outside made tiny, sharp pecky sounds, kind of like mother drumming on the edge of the dinner table when father tried to promote himself a second piece of pie. And him with no money any more. No nothing. Just sitting in a rocker on the front porch back there in Manhattan, Kansas, with his empty pipe in his mouth. Rocking on the front porch, slow and easy, because when you've had a stroke you have to take it slow and easy.
And wait for the next one. And the empty pipe in his mouth. No tobacco. Nothing to do but wait. I put Orfamay Quest's twenty hard-earned dollars in an envelope and wrote her name on it and dropped it in the desk drawer.
I didn't like the idea of running around loose with that much currency on me. You could know Bay City a long time without knowing Idaho Street. And you could know a lot of Idaho Street without knowing Number The block in front of it had a broken paving that had almost gone back to dirt. The warped fence of a lumberyard bordered the cracked sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
Halfway up the block the rusted rails of a spur track turned in to a pair of high, chained wooden gates that seem not to have been opened for twenty years. Little boys with chalk had been writing and drawing pictures on the gates and all along the fence. Number had a shallow, paintless front porch on which five wood and cane rockers loafed dissolutely, held together with wire and the moisture of the beach air. The green shades over the lower windows of the house were two thirds down and full of cracks.
Beside the front door there was a large printed sign "No Vacancies. It had got faded and flyspecked. The door opened on a long hall from which stairs went up a third of the way back. To the right there was a narrow shelf with a chained, indelible pencil hanging beside it. There was a push button and a yellow and black sign above which read "Manager," and was held up by three thumbtacks no two of which matched.
There was a pay phone on the opposite wall. I pushed the bell. It rang somewhere near by but nothing happened. I rang it again. The same nothing happened. I prowled along to a door with a black and white metal sign on it-"Manager. Then I kicked it. Nobody seemed to mind my kicking it. I went back out of the house and down around the side where a narrow concrete walk led to the service entrance. It looked as if it was in the right place to belong to the manager's apartment. The rest of the house would be just rooms.
There was a dirty garbage pail on the small porch and a wooden box full of liquor bottles. Behind the screen the back door of the house was open. It was gloomy inside. I put my face against the screen and peered in. Through the open inner door beyond the service porch I could see a straight chair with a man's coat hanging over it and in the chair a man in shirtsleeves with his hat on.
He was a small man. I couldn't see what he was doing, but he seemed to be sitting at the end of the built-in breakfast table in the breakfast nook. I banged on the screen door. The man paid no attention. I banged again, harder. This time he tilted his chair back and showed me a small pale face with a cigarette in it.
I made noise getting down off the porch and none whatever coming back up on it. I felt the screen door carefully. It was hooked. With the open blade of a penknife I lifted the hook and eased it out of the eye. It made a small tinkle but louder tinkling sounds were being made beyond, in the kitchen. You can write a book review and share your experiences. Other readers will always be interested in your opinion of the books you've read. Whether you've loved the book or not, if you give your honest and detailed thoughts then people will find new books that are right for them.
King , Stephen. Pocket Books of New York. Read Online Download. Wodehouse by P. Great book, The Little Sister pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:.
0コメント