Talk:The Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler (1939)

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Chapter 2, page 8 (Penguin: 2005)

'Do you like orchids?'

'Not particularly,' I said.

The General half closed his eyes. 'They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.'

Chapter 4, page 23

Her smile was now hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped.

Chapter 23, page 159

He had a washed-out blue smock, was thin on top as to hair, had fairly honest eyes and his chin would never hit a wall before he saw it.

Chapter 25, page 174

It was raining again the next morning, a slanting grey rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads.

Chapter 2, page 6

The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. [...] The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.