The High Window (Philip Marlowe, #3)

by Raymond Chandler

she wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn’t drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun.

She had a lot of face and chin.

“A grand old warhorse,” I said. “A heart of gold, and the gold buried good and deep.”

My mother hates to spend money. She thinks money is part of her skin.

His name’s Eddie Prue, he’s about six feet five inches tall and thin as an honest alibi.

A cigarette hung exhausted at the corner of his lower lip.

I threw my empty beer can at the waste basket and watched it bounce back and roll half way across the room.

They would have to lift her up on the pillows and drag the port bottle out of her hard gray paw and feed her the telephone.