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.
She’d make for a jazzy week-end, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet.
She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man's tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice brea...
She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon's tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella.
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
She sighed. All men are the same. So are all women—after the first nine.
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.
She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch
Parecía más muerto que muchos cadáveres
On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you.
Mr. Cobb was my escort, she said. Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could...
Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his te...
Lucille has a dull life, Mr. Marlowe. She's stuck here with me and a PBX. And an itty-bitty diamond ring - so small I was ashamed to give it to her. But what can a man do? If he loves a girl, he'd lik...
Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly. I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us— This here young man don’t seem to have no...
It was twenty-five minutes past nine when he got to the corner of Seventh and Spring, where the Metropole was. It was an old hotel that had once been exclusive and was now steering a shaky course betw...
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 t...
If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it.