Raymond Chandler was a master of the metaphor, the simile, and creating word pictures.
Writers can learn a thing or two reading his books, so ...
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye or The High Window or The Little Sister or The Lady in the Lake or Farewell, My Lovely and dive in.
Here are some lines from those books to inform and inspire your writing and to get you excited about reading (or rereading) one of Chandler's books.
“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”
“I went out the kitchen to make coffee - yards of coffee.
Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired
men.”
“I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets.”
“I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes
out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.”
“The next hour was three hours long.”
“She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her
face was too tired to be bothered.”
“All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in
it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing.”
“The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner
jacket.”
“Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a
bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great
weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners
badly bent.”
“The room was empty. It was full of silence and the memory
of a nice perfume.”
“There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in
those places you wouldn't be a cop.”
“The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and
peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said, partly because I was only
half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down.”
“She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect
her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.”
“A occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me.”
“She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false
hopes.”
“It was a nice walk, if you like grunting.”
“I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.”
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habit in."
"Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him
a domed brown forehead that might at careless glance seemed a dwelling place
for brains.”
"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10
feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away."
“He breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket.”
“The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their
lips.”
“Overhead the rain still pounded, with a remote sound, as if
it was somebody else's rain.”
“You mean something happened to him?” Her voice faded off
into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.”
"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."
"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on
a slice of angel food cake."
"If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat — just to
see what ran out of it."
"Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness."
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a
stained-glass window."
“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild
flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”
“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead."
"His office had the musty smell of years of routine.”
“Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The
tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that
they grow old and mean.”
_________________________
Addendum A
When thinking about Raymond Chandler and his protagonist Philip Marlowe, I'm reminded that, according to Roger Rosenblatt, all writers are mystery writers.
All writers are mystery writers.
We may not employ
detectives in our work, but as seekers of guilty parties, we can identify with
Nick Charles, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Miss Marple and the rest.
Like them, we
muck about in a world studded with clues, neck-deep in motives. Like them, we
falter in our investigations and follow wrong leads.
We are foolhardy,
preposterous, nosy, irritating. No one wants us around. We work alone, yet like
Sam Spade, we operate within a tradition of our own, of which we are
respectfully aware.
Write and you are in the company of all who have written
before you. Only when we have finished a piece of work do we know true shamus
loneliness, realizing that the chase is over and that no one has been watching
us but us.
Addendum B
Raymond Chandler's rules for writers:
The important thing is that there should be a space of time,
say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn’t do
anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it,
he shouldn’t try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on
the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write
letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing…. I find
it works.
Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do
anything else. The rest comes of itself.
