Raymond Chandler

Without television to distract me I am reading more. Yesterday I finished re-reading The Midnight Raymond Chandler, a collection of stories and novels. Some of the short stories and all of the novels have private-eye Philip Marlowe as the main character. I don't like Philip Marlowe that much. He is a bigoted, masochistic, alcoholic, misogynistic prude. And, if you read too many of the stories in too short a time, you can get sick of him very quickly. But I love Raymond Chandler. I love him for the way he sprinkles similes and metaphors throughout his stories. It's the literary equivalent of sprinkling M&M's in a box of popcorn. Some examples:

On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.
(Playback)

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
(The Big Sleep)

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

Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
(Farewell, My Lovely)

The voice got as cool as a cafeteria dinner.
(Farewell, My Lovely)

There were two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street. They were drifted over with windblown sand and the handrail was as cold and wet as a toad's belly.
(Farewell, My Lovely)

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
(The Little Sister)

I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn't want to eat. I didn't even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday's calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket.
(The Little Sister)

He wore an oyster-white raincoat and gloves and no hat and his white hair was as smooth as a bird's breast.
(The Long Goodbye)

His surprise was as thin as the gold on a weekend wedding ring.
(The Long Goodbye)

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.
(The Long Goodbye)

All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk.
(The Long Goodbye)

Inside my head thoughts stuck together like files on flypaper.
(The Long Goodbye)

He had short red hair and a face like a collapsed lung.
(The Long Goodbye)

"They'd put you in the psycho ward, and believe me, the people who run that place are about as sympathetic as Georgia chain-gang guard."
(The Long Goodbye)

"What I'd tell him you could fold into a blade of grass."
(The Long Goodbye)

I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.
(Trouble Is My Business)

Fun stuff. I love Chandler's writing so much I crave this and this for Christmas.