He was California from the tips of his port wine loafers to the buttoned and tieless brown and yellow checked shirt inside his rough cream sports jacket.
He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.
Got any good ideas, soldier? Lots of them. Somebody gunned Geiger. Somebody got gunned by Geiger, who ran away. Or it was two other fellows. Or Geiger was running a cult and made blood sacrifices in f...
California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
As for asking favors or handouts, no.'But you'll take them from a stranger.'He looked me straight in the eye. 'The stranger can keep going and pretend not to hear.
All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
Alcohol is like love, he said. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
A doorman opened the door for me and I went in. The lobby was not quite as big as the Yankee Stadium. It was floored with a pale blue carpet with sponge rubber underneath. It was so soft it made me wa...
You probably didn’t intend it, but you’ve done me a favor. With an assist from Detective Dayton. You’ve solved a problem for me. No man likes to betray a friend but I wouldn’t betray an enemy into you...
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.
There was a woman. She was rich. She thought she wanted to marry me. It wouldn’t have worked. I’ll probably never see her again. But I remember. Let’s go, she said quietly. And let’s leave the memory...
Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails...
Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smell...
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt...
I went out the kitchen to make coffee - yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.
I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of...
I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insu...
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I ke...
Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know. Raymond Chandler
Carta a James Sandoe, 14 de octubre de 1949.Ahora estoy leyendo So little time, de Marquand. Recuerdo, o creo recordar, que fue bastante maltratada cuando apareció, pero a mí me parece llena de ingeni...