I'm usually a plot-challenged person. It takes me awhile to be able to figure out what's going on when a movie or book plot gets too complicated, with the double-crosses and the lies and the reversals...the chess game is usually too much for me.

I don't usually hold that against the story I'm being told, I just figure it wasn't my cup of tea and let it go.

This one, though, I loved every minute of and will absolutely have to reread someday. Just to re-savor all the little crackling asides, poetic creases, iridescent visions, and sexy, manipulative, deeply, extravagantly subtly disturbed characters.

This is my second Chandler, (see 'Farewell, My Lovely') and I'm just going to have to tackle everything he ever wrote now...good thing there isn't too much of it.

Two marks of a great writer: they don't turn you off when the plot gets too hard to handle, and they instantly make you want to reread them when you're done.

Actually, I'll go ahead and add a third: they make you sort of quietly promise that you are going to tackle their collected works, as well.

He's worth reading for the sheer language of it all- the minute characterizations, the suspense, the banter and the antiquated slang which is still badder-assed than anything you hear nowadays....

Philip Marlowe: wiseguy, drinker, chain smoker, full of cunning and observation and wisdom and taste, ethical after his own severe fashion, despondent, cynical, world-weary, thoroughly masculine and yet actually a bit of dandy and an intellectual....consistently compelling and deeply enigmatic...