Little Sister

by Robert Martin, Bill Pronzini (Introduction)

LITTLE SISTERWhen Vivian Prosper tries to hire Brice to keep her younger sister from marrying young Arthur Spotiswood, he’s not sure he wants to take the case. After all, Linda is almost 18, and should be free to marry whomever she wants. But then Linda’s car appears at the Prosper door with a dead body in the trunk, and Brice reconsiders. Vivian’s stepfather tries to bluster him away, but there is too much at stake here for Brice to just walk. There’s Vivian, for one—a cool beauty with a fiery heart. And Linda, willing to throw herself at any man she meets. But who is the man in the trunk? Who were the men seen in the café with Linda the night before? And why is someone working so hard to scare him off the case?

204 pages, Paperback

Published August 5, 2020

About the author

Robert^^Martin
(1908-1976)

This is the page of Mystery author Robert Martin. Please be sure any book you add is by this author, not one of the many other Robert Martins.

Also published as Lee Roberts
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent taut and spicy little detective noir. Caught between two rich, beautiful sisters who are used to getting their way, straight shooting shamus Andy Brice is having a hell of a time finding answers following the discovery of a dead body in the trunk of younger sister Linda's car. Linda, wild unsatiable temptress though she is, is strictly jailbait, yet has apparently been leading around a small army of men by the nose, any one of which would have plenty of motive to eliminate the competition. Plus there's the little matter of Linda's soon to be realized inheritance. With the bodies piling up Brice has his hands full with both Linda and hot-one-minute-cold-the-next older sister Vivian, putting his will power to the ultimate test while tracking down the deranged killer. Martin's prose is refreshingly snappy and lean, and the plot tight as it takes some dark and twisty turns.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Little Sister,” a 1952 Gold Medal pulp, now re-released in 2020 by Stark House Press, is a terrific, well-written story. Like in Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” there’s a rich family with knockout sisters, one half out of her mind, that needs a private eye to get the younger sister out of a jam. Of course, in both cases, the older sister is Vivien. Rich folks problems were the bread and butter of pulp detectives.

Here, the problem is a dead man in a trunk and a fortune to inherit and a bevy of suitors to grab that inheritance. As explained in the book:

“That made us even. I liked her, too. A hell of a lot. Too much, too quick. But there it was. I liked everything about her. A man could search all his life and never find a more desirable chunk of female. And she was rich. Rich and wonderful—with a juvenile delinquent for a sister, who was now upstairs sleeping off a binge, a gay night. A gay night that had ended in the sunlit morning with a dead man huddled in her car.”

What sets this story apart is the quality of the writing. Martin, like the best of the pulp writers, doesn’t just write a mystery, leaving clues for the canny reader to follow like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. No, what Martin does is give his detective, Andy Brice, a pair of mortal dilemmas in the form of the two most beautiful sisters on earth (or at least in 1950’s Cleveland), the Prosper sisters, and he’s got to keep his head while they are both whipping it around like a spinning top.

Here’s Vivian pulling his strings: “She laughed deep in her throat and stepped into my arms once more. I was willing as long as she was, but no matter how willing she was, I wasn’t going to help her bury a dead man, or dump him in the lake for her. But she had different ideas. Just when I was beginning to forget about her problems and to concentrate on her, she pulled her lips away and twisted free of my arms.”

It doesn’t appear that this was turned into a movie, but it could have been and should have been.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I took a drink of the double Martini, and when I put the glass down it wasn’t a double anymore; it wasn’t even a respectable single Martini. It didn’t help. Nothing ever helps when you try to cope with the things that people can do when they’re driven by love, or the absence of love, or greed, or revenge, or hate, or any of the things that lead in one way or another to the final crime of murder.”

4.5 stars. Robert Martin is a mostly forgotten hard-boiled writer of the early 1950s who wrote at least one really excellent novel, Little Sister, and several other fairly good ones (by report). And fans of the genre will like this one, in particular. Quite a bit. The one problem is that it is an almost exact stylistic knock-off of the writing of Raymond Chandler, who himself wrote a book with an almost identical title.

https://mysteryfile.com/RMartin/Pronz...