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The Spirit of Style: The Big Sleep
Still from The Big Sleep.
“The purring voice was now as false as an usherette’s eyelashes and as slippery as a watermelon seed.”
Raymond Chandler isn’t known as a stylish writer in the fashion-savvy sense. His renown comes from his mastery of perfect similes like the one above, and for gifting the world Philip Marlowe, the private detective whose job description is usually preceded by the adjective “hard-boiled.” Chandler’s rep is that he writes about dames and gangsters, cops and criminals—he’s more visceral than visual.
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