Chandler

Like a good whiskey, every now and then, I pamper myself with a Chandler. I have already gone through the Big Sleep over four times and into my third reading of The Long Goodbye.

No one wrote similes like him. No one.

Sample these from the Long Goodbye -

'XXX', she said in a voice like the stuff they use to line summer clouds with.

He looked at me like i was a cigarette stub, or an empty chair. just something in his line of vision, without any interest to him.

His hair was as smooth as a bird's breast.

Nobody, [...], looked at me as if my face meant as much as the hands of a clock.

The commericals would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

Not one of them could hit hard enough to wake up his grandmother from a light doze.

She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

All these picked randomly from the first forty pages I have savored. Like a chilled beer in the summer heat.

One that I gleaned from the net: The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.

Read Chandler.