Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy. “Ever kill a man, Marlowe?” “Yes.” “Nasty feeling, isn’t it?” “Some people like it.” His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they looked vague. “How could they?
His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.
The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
The pursuit of knowledge, brother, is the askin’ of many questions.
The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on. I went back to my desk, dropped the bottle of whiskey back into the drawer, shut the drawer and sat down again.
I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog.
Tsk, tsk,” I said, not moving at all. “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail. Put it down and don’t be silly, Joe.
I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn’t know about it yet. It’s so hard for women – even nice women – to realise that their bodies are not irresistible.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.
No trial, no sensational headlines, no mud-slinging just to sell newspapers without the slightest regard for truth or fair play or for the feelings of innocent people.
Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He must be the best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world.” from Raymond Chandler’s, “The Simple Act of Murder.
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.
One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?” Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?” “Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.” Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.
She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.
They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.
I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass where cows grazed. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But yesterday was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber.
Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.
Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.