If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat — just to see what ran out of it.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. I...
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees.
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guy...
It is not a fragrant world.
The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.(, 1949)
Leave the gun out of it. I can always hear the sound of money.
I went to the door and looked out. The cool night breeze was blowing peacefully down the hall. No excited neighbors hung out of doorways. A small gun had gone off and broken a pane of glass, but noise...
The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
It was raining again the next morning, a slanting gray rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads. I got up feeling sluggish and tired and stood looking out of the windows, with a dark, harsh taste of...
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn'...
She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked...
I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasur...
The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don't play at it.