big sleep

I am doing The Big Sleep with my book club this month. I'm not sure I read it before, but what a delight to go back to Chandler, the acknowledged standard of the hard-boiled novel. His use of metaphors describing the steamy streets of 1930's Los Angeles is amazing. There are guns, naked women, mobsters, pornography, gambling- the whole shadowy population all awash with corruption.

But his word-mating stops you in your tracks.

"I was forced to make a left turn and a lot of enemies."

"She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house."

"She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her."

"Under the thinning fog, the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness."

But despite all slap of chatter, Philip Marlowe aims for the knighthood of decency - "as honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style."

Hey, Marlowe, you're still needed.