Here are selected bits that I liked from Raymond Chandler’s The High Window:

“His smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.”

“… as thin as an honest alibi.”

“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

“I’d plug you as soon as I’d strike a match.”

“He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.”

“I stroked the bill with my fingertips, as if it was a kitten.”

“… a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness.”

“… old men with faces like lost battles.”

“… a voice that even whiskey had failed to improve.”

“We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used-car salesman.”

“That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all.”

“… as loud as a ton of coal going down a chute.”

“His face was as empty as my brain.”

“Breeze looked at me steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.”

“The limousine went past me making a noise like dead leaves falling.”

“… a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail.”

“She had eyes like strange sins.”

“His voice cut through the muted rhumba music like a shovel through snow.”

“In my business tough boys come a dime a dozen. And would-be tough boys come a nickel a gross.”

“Class is a thing that has a way of dissolving rapidly in alcohol.”

“His face was like a vacant lot.”

“I could use a five-dollar bill so rough Abe Lincoln’s whiskers would be all lathered up with sweat.”

“You wouldn’t notice the colour of a hummingbird’s eye at fifty feet.”

“Except for her face she would have looked all right.”

“… as flat as a flounder.”

“I don’t give one little flash in hell about you any more.”

“… a hand as steady as a stone pier in a light breeze.”

“She’d have made a perfect nun. The religious dream, with its narrowness, its stylized emotions and its grim purity, would have been a perfect release for her.”

“It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you.”

“… the quietly strained voice of a stage manager at a bad rehearsal.”