Raymond Chandler

Her hair was of the gold of old paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much. She had a full set of curves which nobody had been able to improve on.

I gave him a dollar bill. “Try that on your mind. And can I call you Big Tex from Houston?”
“Amarillo,” he said. “Not that it matters. And how do you like my Texas drawl? It makes me sick, but I find people go for it.”
“Stay with it,” I said. “It never lost anybody a dollar yet.”

His head with the hat off had the indecent look of heads that are seldom without hats.

I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down, and went out on to the main street.

I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really highclass seduction.

I filled a pipe and reached for the packet of paper matches. I lit the pipe carefully. She watched that with approval. Pipe smokers were solid men. She was going to be disappointed in me.

The coffee shop smell from next door came in at the windows with the soot but failed to make me hungry. So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.

A typewritten page listing similes and comparisons by Raymond Chandler; part of the Bodleian Libraries 'Write, Cut, Rewrite' exhibition

A typewritten page listing similes and comparisons by Raymond Chandler; part of the Bodleian Libraries 'Write, Cut, Rewrite' exhibition

A typewritten page listing similes and comparisons by Raymond Chandler; part of the Bodleian Libraries 'Write, Cut, Rewrite' exhibition

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) made detective fiction into a literary form.

He worked hard on his throwaway remarks, keeping lists of sharp comparisons, similes and gags.

Many of them never made into his works, but if they did, he marked them and added the title of the novel in which he used them.

She laughed suddenly and then she belched. It was a nice light belch, nothing showy, and performed with easy unconcern. “My asthma,” she said carelessly. “I drink this wine as medicine. That’s why I’m not offering you any.”
I swung a leg over my knee. I hoped that wouldn’t hurt her asthma.

“I bet you can’t even guess how I got in.”
I dug a cigarette out and looked at her with bleak eyes. “I bet I can. You came through the keyhole, just like Peter Pan.”
“Who’s he?”
“Oh, a fellow I used to know around the poolroom.”

The driver looked as if he was half asleep but he passed the fast boys in the convertible sedans as though they were being towed. They turned on all the green lights for him. Some drivers are like that. He never missed one.

You’ve been murdered. Who do you want on the case?

“Drink while waiting?”
“A dry martini will do.”
“A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.”
“Okay.”
“Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?”
“Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.”

A girl was singing. She had a rich deep down around the ankles contralto that was pleasant to listen to.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

It seemed a long time before the door opened again and Vivian came in. She was in oyster-white lounging pajamas trimmed with white fur, cut as flowingly as a summer sea frothing on the beach of some small and exclusive island.

“You are hired to find my wife, I gather.”
I made a snorting sound and grinned at him over the pipe bowl.
“Marlowe,” he said, even more earnestly, “I’ll try hard, but I don’t think I am going to like you.”
“I’m screaming,” I said. “With rage and pain.”

Her silver nails twitched at her side. There was an overtone of strain in her smile. It wasn’t a smile at all. It was a grimace. She just thought it was a smile.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, wherever you happened to be—she had it.

The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.

“You’re one of those dark deadly quiet men who have no more feelings than a butcher has for slaughtered meat. I knew it the first time I saw you.”
“You’ve got enough shady friends to know different.”
“They’re all soft compared to you.”
“Thanks, lady. You’re no English muffin yourself.”

Her face under my mouth was like ice. She put her hands up and took hold of my head and kissed me hard on the lips. Her lips were like ice, too.
I went out through the door and closed it behind me, without sound, and the rain blew in under the porch, not as cold as her lips.

The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can’t tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.

Breeze poked the cigar at me.
“Watch him sweat,” he said.
Spangler had to move his feet to turn far enough around to watch me sweat. If I was sweating, I didn’t know it.
“You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf balls,” I said. “How in the world do you do it?”

He stared at me and his left hand began to edge towards the gun. He belonged to the Wandering Hand Society. The girls would have had a time with him.

She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

Florian’s was closed up, of course. An obvious plainclothesman sat in front of it in a car, reading a paper with one eye. I didn’t know why they bothered.