Apart from the sensational story of this book, I was very much impressed by the readiness of wit the characters show. They utter witty dialogs apparently almost automatically. So much so that I wondered if Americans are always practicing about what to say and how to respond. For example, in the situation in which one is supposed to say “I don’t know.”, one of the characters says, “There are things I do not know. This is one of them.”
In the situation in which one is supposed to say, “You look terrible!”, another character says, “You look like Hamlet’s father!” In the situation in which one is supposed to say, “That’s none of your business.”, a third character says, “ You’re not God. You’re not even Jesus Christ.”
And also I was very much impressed by the striking similes Chandler uses. For example, “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”, or “The big man looked at me as if I had just hatched out.”
But needless to say, the object of a simile is to add force to a statement, not to distract the reader’s attention. A simile is so extremely striking that it has the danger of distracting the reader’s attention from the mood it is supposed to illustrate. From that point of view, there is only one occasion upon which I think Chandler slipped up. The following is that only occasion. “He was a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.”
I could not help putting down the book for a while to wonder what kind of waiter he was.