Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was the creator of Philip Marlowe, the iconic private detective. His work was a masterful display of hard-boiled fiction, set in a sleazy and seductive Los Angeles of the 1930s to 1950s. Often imitated, never bettered. Because I am a huge fan of Chandler’s work, I’d like to present some of his finest quotes:
Short Stories
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana’s that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. Red Wind (opening paragraph)
His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish. The Man Who Liked Dogs
I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard. The King in Yellow
She looked tall and her hair was the colour of a brush fire seen through a cloud dust. The King in Yellow
A swarthy iron-grey Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of the curtained door of the red brick building, smoking a cigar and waiting for somebody to die. The King in Yellow
“Call me Sunset. I’m always moving west.” Goldfish
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor. Pearls are a Nuisance
“Mrs Penruddock’s pearl necklace has been stolen, Walter.”
“You told me that over the telephone. My temperature is still normal.”
“If you will excuse a professional guess,” she said, “it is probably subnormal – permanently.”
Pearls are a Nuisance
She was dressed in a blouse and plaid skirt with a loose coat over them, and a close-fitting hat that was far enough out of style to suggest a run of bad luck. Finger Man
I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest. Trouble Is My Business
The Big Sleep (1939)
I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch.
I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
“Two coffees,” I said. “Black, strong, and made this year.”
“Do you like orchids?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
The General half closed his eyes, “They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”
“You know what Canino will do – beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling.”
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.
A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
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. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.
“Shake your business up and pour it. I don’t have all day.”
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
“As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where it’s going out of style.”
“Do I have to be polite?” I asked. “Or can I just be natural?”
“He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.”
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did.
I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.
He had a battered face that looked as if had been hit by everything but the bucket of a drag-line. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, chequered and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.
I was still swearing when there was a sharp tap at the door, the kind of bossy knock that makes you want to open the door two inches, emit the succulent raspberry and slam it again.
I walked back through the arch and started up the steps. It was a nice walk if you liked grunting. There were two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street. They were drifted over with windblown sand and the handrail was as cold and wet as a toad’s belly.
The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. I sneaked over to the side entrance and pressed a bell and somewhere a set of chimes made a deep mellow sound like church bells. A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day.
“I understand you are a private detective?”
“Yes.”
“I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.”
The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances.
The voice got as cool as a cafeteria dinner.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
“Most men are just lousy animals,” she said. “In fact it’s a pretty lousy world, if you ask me.”
The High Window (1942)
We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.
Her hair was as artificial as a night club lobby.
Class is a thing that has a way of dissolving rapidly in alcohol.
He had the sort of face that can turn from a polite simper to cold-blooded fury almost without moving a muscle.
Her smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.
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.
Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.
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.
“I don’t amuse easy,” he said.
“Just like Queen Victoria,” I said.
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t expect miracles.”
The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it.
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
“I’m all done with hating you. It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”
Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.
The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.
There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those moustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.
Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.
“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.”
The Little Sister (1949)
I hung up. It was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.
“Do you drink Mr Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it –“
“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve.
Her voice faded off into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.
The small man turned very suddenly. For a moment he smiled and said nothing. It was the smile of a man whose mind is not smiling.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.
To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.
The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives.
The Long Goodbye (1953)
They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops’ eyes. They get them at the passing-out parade at the police school.
At three A.M. I was walking the floor listening to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.
“From now on I wouldn’t tell you the time by the clock on your own wall.”
I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
“Mostly I just kill time,” he said, “and it dies hard.”
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
“See you around,” the bodyguard told me coolly. “The name’s Chick Agostino. I guess you’ll know me.”
“Like a dirty newspaper,” I said. “Remind me not to step on your face.”
I never saw any of them again – except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.
Playback (1958)
“Let’s try again,” he said evenly. “From the beginning. Like as if we didn’t hate each other and were just trying to understand. Could we?”
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.
On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.
Back on Yucca Avenue I stuck the Olds in the garage and poked at the mailbox. Nothing, as usual. I climbed the long flight of redwood steps and unlocked my door. Everything was the same. The room was stuffy and dull and impersonal as it always was. I opened a couple of windows and mixed a drink in the kitchen. I sat down on the couch and stared at the wall. Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.
“One of the interesting things about police work is that you never hear the last of anything. There are always too many loose ends.”
