[FairfieldLife] Re: More cool Raymond Chandler quotes
This shit is as bad as Robin's shit. Dude post it in some other forum and not here. --- turquoiseb no_reply@... wrote: Even more: The man in the powder-blue suit which wasn't powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar was tall, with wide- set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory. He's doing his next week's drinking too soon. I don't like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don't like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place, I don't like them in the first place. The dark guy took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor with his face. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the fuss he made. The drunk slid down off the stool and scooped his dimes into a pocket and slid towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn't have a gun. I hadn't thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The door swung shut. I started to rush it from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn't matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the sidewalk it was flicking a red smear of tail-light around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million. He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair he looked worse with it combed and put his hat back on. She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it. We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint. I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn't solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her. So you're a chess player, she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had. Her eyes were set like rivets now and had the same amount of expression. I sipped my drink. I like an effect as well as the next guy. Her eyes ate me. He's really dead? she whispered, Really? He's dead, I said. Dead, dead, dead. Lady, he's dead. Her face fell apart like a bride's piecrust. Her mouth wasn't large, but I could have got my fist into it at that moment. In the silence the elevator stopped at my floor. Scream, I rapped, and I'll give you two black eyes. It didn't sound nice, but it worked. It jarred her out of it. Her mouth shut like a trap. He came close to me and breathed in my face. No mistakes, pal about this story of ours. His breath was bad. It would be. When I left the party across the street was still doing all that a party can do. I noticed the walls of the house were still standing. That seemed a pity. The hammer clicked back on Copernik's gun and I watched his big bony finger slide in farther around the trigger. The back of my neck was as wet as a dog's nose. Back and forth in front of them, strutting, trucking, preening herself like a magpie, arching her arms and her eyebrows, bending her fingers back until the carmine nails almost touched her arms, a metallic blonde swayed and went to town on the music. Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked like it would listen to reason. A swarthy iron-gray Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of the curtained door of the red brick funeral home, smoking a cigar and waiting for someone to die. She had a mud-colored face, stringy hair, gray cotton stockings everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish. The cigar was burning unevenly and it smelled as if someone had set fire to the doormat. In a moment the door opened again and Ellen Macintosh came in. Maybe you don't like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first strawberry peach the grocer sneaks out of the box for himself. If you don't, I feel sorry for you. Ellen lowered her long silky eyelashes at me and when she does that I go limp as a scrubwoman's back hair. The hotel was upstairs, the steps being
[FairfieldLife] Re: More cool Raymond Chandler quotes
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Jason jedi_spock@... wrote: This shit is as bad as Robin's shit. Dude post it in some other forum and not here. Chandler, in three words, 'pulp fiction writer'. Robin in one, 'enigma'. --- turquoiseb no_reply@ wrote: Even more: The man in the powder-blue suit which wasn't powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar was tall, with wide- set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory. He's doing his next week's drinking too soon. I don't like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don't like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place, I don't like them in the first place. The dark guy took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor with his face. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the fuss he made. The drunk slid down off the stool and scooped his dimes into a pocket and slid towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn't have a gun. I hadn't thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The door swung shut. I started to rush it from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn't matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the sidewalk it was flicking a red smear of tail-light around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million. He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair he looked worse with it combed and put his hat back on. She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it. We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint. I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn't solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her. So you're a chess player, she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had. Her eyes were set like rivets now and had the same amount of expression. I sipped my drink. I like an effect as well as the next guy. Her eyes ate me. He's really dead? she whispered, Really? He's dead, I said. Dead, dead, dead. Lady, he's dead. Her face fell apart like a bride's piecrust. Her mouth wasn't large, but I could have got my fist into it at that moment. In the silence the elevator stopped at my floor. Scream, I rapped, and I'll give you two black eyes. It didn't sound nice, but it worked. It jarred her out of it. Her mouth shut like a trap. He came close to me and breathed in my face. No mistakes, pal about this story of ours. His breath was bad. It would be. When I left the party across the street was still doing all that a party can do. I noticed the walls of the house were still standing. That seemed a pity. The hammer clicked back on Copernik's gun and I watched his big bony finger slide in farther around the trigger. The back of my neck was as wet as a dog's nose. Back and forth in front of them, strutting, trucking, preening herself like a magpie, arching her arms and her eyebrows, bending her fingers back until the carmine nails almost touched her arms, a metallic blonde swayed and went to town on the music. Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked like it would listen to reason. A swarthy iron-gray Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of the curtained door of the red brick funeral home, smoking a cigar and waiting for someone to die. She had a mud-colored face, stringy hair, gray cotton stockings everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish. The cigar was burning unevenly and it smelled as if someone had set fire to the doormat. In a moment the door opened again and Ellen Macintosh came in. Maybe you don't like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first
[FairfieldLife] Re: More cool Raymond Chandler quotes
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, oxcart49 no_reply@... wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Jason jedi_spock@ wrote: This shit is as bad as Robin's shit. Dude post it in some other forum and not here. Chandler, in three words, 'pulp fiction writer'. Robin in one, 'enigma'. With all due respect, for Robin it takes two words: bad writer. :-) For Chandler, it takes a few more (from Wikipedia). Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery Critics and writers from W. H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming greatly admired Chandler's prose.[6] In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today. Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence. Ross Macdonald Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since. Paul Auster The prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision The reader is captivated by Chandler's seductive prose. Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books Chandler is one of my favorite writers. His books bear rereading every few years. The novels are a perfect snapshot of an American past, and yet the ruined romanticism of the voice is as fresh as if they were written yesterday. Jonathan Lethem Chandler seems to have invented our post-war dream livesthe tough but tender hero, the dangerous blonde, the rain-washed sidewalks, and the roar of the traffic (and the ocean) in the distance Chandler is the classic lonely romantic outsider for our times, and American literature, as well as English, would be the poorer for his absence. Pico Iyer --- turquoiseb no_reply@ wrote: Even more: The man in the powder-blue suit which wasn't powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar was tall, with wide- set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory. He's doing his next week's drinking too soon. I don't like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don't like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place, I don't like them in the first place. The dark guy took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor with his face. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the fuss he made. The drunk slid down off the stool and scooped his dimes into a pocket and slid towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn't have a gun. I hadn't thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The door swung shut. I started to rush it from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn't matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the sidewalk it was flicking a red smear of tail-light around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million. He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair he looked worse with it combed and put his hat back on. She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it. We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint. I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn't solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her. So you're a chess player, she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.
