Rayond Chandler: Hot Dames and Cool Metaphors

 

John P. McCann Channel

Top Ten Raymond Chandler Quotes from The High Window

 Hard-boiled Noir, huh?

librarything

I'd never read this particular Phillip Marlowe tale, but am enjoying it immensely. Absolutely loaded with fun descriptive Chandlerisms:

1. "She had eyes like strange sins."

2. "Below his eyes . . . there was a wide path of freckles, like a mine field on a war map."

3. The blonde sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting."

4. "We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen."

5. ". . . and a granite coffee pot that smelled like sacks in a hot barn."

6. " He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman."

7. "From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."

8. "My face was stiff with thought, or with something that made my face stiff."

9. "[Net curtains] puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping."

10. "Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them."

brainpickings.org

Story Du Jour #17

All Story Du Jour tales are available online and free! A small offering in these trying times.

Akin Bilgiç

Agni Online

"Night Beat" - by Lisa Chen

4489 words

Disappearing in Los Angeles is easier than you think.

Here's a sample of the writing:

"Lily read somewhere that the average Korean woman keeps seventeen different lotions and creams on her nightstand, like a sophisticated irrigation system. Sylvia has at least that many creams and ointments sprawled across her vanity, the bigger bottles for expansive surfaces like legs and arms, the smaller jars for trouble spots—elbows, the balls of the feet—and even smaller bottles for her face and neck.

Put Sammy on, will you?" Sylvia calls from the bathroom. Through the door Lily can see her leaning close to the mirror, engrossed in the fine-motor precision needed to apply her glue-on lashes. Lily slides Night Beat out of its paper sleeve, lowers the needle. A pop and hiss before the tom-tom of the bass. The music is like the clinking of bottom-weighted tumblers in a thickly carpeted room.

 Is there a word—German, compound and polysyllabic, probably—that describes the sensation of knowing, at the very moment you are listening to a piece of music, that hearing it again years later will instantly transport you back to this precise time and place? That’s the temporal vertigo Lily feels now, squatting in front of the record player in Sylvia’s low-ceilinged bungalow, Cooke’s voice drowning out the ambient sea-roar of freeway traffic in the distance."


A fine literary selection this week. Another genre soon.