|
Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Response to: |
Which detective are you?,
Posted by: UT |
| Date: |
22-Jun-2007-06:35:46 |
| Subject: |
Quotes from the sat-guru of detective stories |
Continuing with what, for me, is a really fun game,
a *different* metaphor for viewing the self discovery
process, here are a few quotes from one of the sat-
gurus of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler.
They're just for fun or, for the writers here, examples
of why mainstream literary critics referred to Chandler
as "a slumming angel." The man could *write*. If you
only come to Ramalila to read "spiritual things," think
of them as having been written by a guru with a smart
mouth. I do.
from Blackmailers Don't Shoot:
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.
from Red Wind:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. I was one of those hot
dry Santa Anas 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 husband's necks.
Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer in a
cocktail lounge.
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.
(while telling a story)
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.
from The King In Yellow:
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.
from Pearls Are A Nuisance:
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 covered in places with
strips of decayed rubber matting to which were screwed irregular
fragments of unpolished brass. The smell of the Chinese laundry
ceased about halfway up the stairs and was replaced by a smell of
kerosene, cigar butts, slept-in air and greasy paper bags.
I rang the bell and waited. Presently a door opened down the hall and
feet shuffled towards me without haste. A man appeared wearing frayed
leather slippers and trousers of a nameless color, which had the two
top buttons unlatched to permit more freedom to the suburbs of his
extensive stomach He also wore red suspenders, his shirt was darkened
under the arms, and elsewhere, and his face badly needed a thorough
laundering and trimming.
"I am the fiancι of Miss Ellen Macintosh," I told him coldly. "I am
informed that you tried to kiss her."
He took another step towards me and I another towards him, "Whaddya
mean tried?" he sneered.
I led sharply with my right and it landed flush on his chin. It
seemed to me a good solid punch, but it scarcely moved him. I then
put two hard left jabs into his neck and landed a second right at the
side of his rather wide nose. 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. This made me lose my balance
temporarily and while I was thinking about how to regain it a wet
towel began to slap at my face and I opened my eyes.
The man who sat alone at the table was shaped like two eggs, a robin's
egg, which was his head, on top of a hen's egg, which was his body.
"You seem a right guy," Henry said. "What makes you always talk so
funny?"
"I cannot seem to change my speech, Henry. My father and mother were
both severe purists in the New England tradition and the vernacular
has never come naturally to my lips, even when I was in college."
Henry made an attempt to digest this remark, but I could see that it
lay somewhat heavily on his stomach.
Henry put his empty glass down on the floor. It was the first time I
had seen him put an empty glass down and leave it empty.
from Trouble Is My Business:
Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged
putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny
black shoe-buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same
color. She was sitting behind a black desk that looked like
Napolean's tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that
was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said, "I need a man."
The Arbogast I wanted was John D. Arbogast and he had an office on
Sunset near Ivar. I called him up 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.
I leaned down and buried my fingers in the bottomless fat of his neck.
He had an artery in there someplace, probably, but I couldn't find it
and he didn't need it anymore anyway.
A doorman opened the door for me and I went in. The lobby was not
quite as big as the Yankee Stadium. It was floored with a pale blue
carpet with sponge rubber underneath. It was so soft it made me want
to lie down and roll. I walked over to the desk and put an elbow on
it and was stared at by a pale thin clerk with one of those mustaches
that get stuck under your fingernail. He toyed with it and looked
past my shoulder at an Ali Baba oil jar big enough to keep a tiger in.
The elevator had a carpeted floor and mirrors and indirect lighting.
It rose as softly as the mercury in a thermometer.
She wore a street dress of pale green wool and a small cockeyed hat
that hung on the side of her ear like a butterfly. Her eyes were
wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was
lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire
under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She
wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was
poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She
didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers
and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.
I remembered the half-bottle of Scotch I had left and went into
executive session with it.
The jarring of the telephone bell woke me. I had dozed off in the
chair, which was a bad mistake, because I woke up with two flannel
blankets in my mouth, a splitting headache, a bruise on the back of my
head and another on my jaw, neither of them larger than a Yakima
apple, but sore for all that. I felt terrible. I felt like an
amputated leg.
He opened the door, went out, shut it, and I sat there still holding
the telephone, with my mouth open and nothing in it but my tongue and
a bad taste on that.
"Show the company in, Beef." I liked this voice. It was smooth,
quiet, and you could have cut your name in it with a thirty-pound
sledge and a cold chisel.
from I'll Be Waiting:
At one o'clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the
last of the three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windemere
Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew
back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In
the corners were memories like cobwebs.
He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving
his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning
back relaxed and the next he was standing balanced on his feet,
perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing
imperfectly perceived, an error of vision.
He walked with small, polished shoes directly across the blue carpet
and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid
blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too
loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the
fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band
with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back.
She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed
to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among
them carefully, like a corsage in the florist's tissue paper.
He walked slowly, like a man walking in a room where somebody is very
sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself
into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that
curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats.
|
|
Responses |
- No responses have been posted -
|
The messages posted hear are those of the specific individual and may not represent the policies of Lila Publishing, the ideas of any other member of this bulletin board community or the teachings of Dr. Frederick Lenz. All copyrights are maintained by respective contributors and may not be reused without permission. By posting on this board you grant Lila Publishing a non-exclusive royalty free license under your copyright to use, store, display and reproduce your messages in whole or in part. All site assets, including these Perl scripts copyright © 1999-2002 Lila Publishing. These Perl scripts may not be directly linked to.
|
Communication Center - Version 3.50
© 2000-2002 Lila Publishing
|
