Rayond Chandler: Hot Dames and Cool Metaphors

 

John P. McCann Channel

Top Ten Raymond Chandler Quotes from The High Window

 Hard-boiled Noir, huh?

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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."

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