The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe #1)

by Raymond Chandler

them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.

Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.

Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.

"What would I be to Eddie Mars?" Brody asked coldly. But he lowered the gun to his knee. "Not even a memory," I said.

He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men.

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

I said harshly: "Cute as a Filipino on Saturday night."

Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

It's so hard for women — even nice women — to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.

It seemed a little too pat. It bad the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.