Raymond Chandler

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

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

...crazy as two waltzing mice.

"You know what Canino will do---beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling."

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”

“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”

“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

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

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from.Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on 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. I was calling on four million dollars.