The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and follows Marlowe's investigation of a missing persons case and blackmail scheme centered around a Hollywood starlet.

Orfamay Quest asks Philip Marlowe to search for her older brother Orrin, who has recently come out to work in Bay City.

On leaving the building, Marlowe discovers the superintendent stabbed in the neck with an ice pick and reports the murder to the local police.

Dolores Gonzales calls Marlowe to say he must come to Steelgrave's home in the Hollywood Hills immediately, hinting that Mavis Weld's life is in danger.

Weld confesses to Marlowe that she killed Steelgrave and is ready to turn herself in, but he persuades her to leave the gangster's home and then calls the police to report finding yet another body.

District Attorney Sewell Endicott summons Marlowe to a meeting with Farrell, Weld and himself and admits that the police do not have a convincing case against anybody.

He confronts her with the truth that her real motive was to get money from Mavis Weld, who is her sister, and that it was she who told Steelgrave where to find Orrin.

Realising there is still one loose thread, Marlowe visits Dolores Gonzales at her apartment and she confesses to killing Steelgrave, her former lover.

Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, defined the hardboiled school of detective fiction, popularised in pulp magazines such as Black Mask.

The hardboiled school abandoned the genteel characters and elaborate intrigues found in the murder mysteries of authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

The Little Sister was the first novel Chandler wrote after working as a screenwriter for Paramount in Hollywood, and it reflects some of his experiences with and disdain for the film industry and particularly for Billy Wilder, his writing partner on Double Indemnity.

And one of the most memorable passages in the book is a long soliloquy by Marlowe where he waxes philosophical about the emptiness and shallowness of Los Angeles and its residents.

At the same time, one of the villains of the novel, the one "who never looked less like Lady Macbeth," is not the film star of the Quest family, but the little sister, a mousy small town girl who ultimately cares more for the money she could make from her brother's photographs and blackmail than she did for her siblings.