The Big Sleep

I finished Raymond Chandler's 1939 hard-boiled mystery novel, The Big Sleep. It was a fantastic read. What surprised me most was the amazingly original language. Check out this paragraph from the very first page:

"The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying."

That's a remarkable mix of character and setting description--what Philip Marlowe notices about his surroundings, how he perceives what he sees. His eye for detail made me like him, even though he surrounds himself with weird dames (who he is pretty quick to slap if they get out of line) and ends up with a lot of guns in the end. That fabulous use of simile, metaphor, and very original show-don't-tells compelled me to read this book in a few hours, and every few pages I'd be rewarded with a sentence like, "The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting." That sort of eye for detail gives me chills. Good stuff.

Another author, Julia Buckley, had told me that if I like Chandler I'll love Ross Macdonald, so I'll have to check that out next. Anybody else have recommendations?