“Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten.”
The Man Who Was Thursday / G.K. Chesterton
“‘A man’s brain is a bomb,’ he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. ‘My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.’”
The Man Who Was Thursday / G.K. Chesterton
“The smooth thickness of his arms, legs, and body, the sag of his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear’s. It was like a shaved bear’s: his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly soft and pink.”
The Maltese Falcon / Dashiell Hammett
Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up the right cheek and down in the left.
There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But … with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it.
The Man Who Was Thursday / G.K. Chesterton
By 1940 circulation had dropped farther, and the owners decided to sell Black Mask to their competition, Dime Detective. A new editor tried to make the magazine tough again and brought in new writers, but the problem was no longer the magazine. The technology of entertainment was changing. Readers had taken up comic books and mass-market paperbacks during the Depression, and by 1940 radio was also taking away audience. These media were, variously, either cheaper or more durable or resellable or more immediate. Its days numbered, Black Mask staggered on, using lurid covers of sex and violence, featuring espionage stories during World War II and finally cutting back to fortnightly publication. The magazine’s size was reduced, the price raised – nothing helped. The last issue appeared in July 1951. After thirty-one years of publication, Black Mask folded: it had printed over 2,500 stories by some 640 authors and been the dominant magazine in hard-boiled fiction.
“There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”—Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” —Dashiell Hammett
“His look scuttled over her like the feet of running insects. She shivered. ‘This is our night to dream dreams and see visions, baby. You and me together.’”
The Girls in 3-B / Valerie Taylor
“They arranged their faces into the expression of bored tolerance worn by fashion models, and got to their feet”
The Girls in 3-B / Valerie Taylor
“He was the wrong man to have played Samaritan, and he’d known it, known it there on the road and in every irreversible moment since.”
The Expendable Man / Dorothy B. Hughes
“If only the police would not arrive until after the last toast had been lifted.”
The Expendable Man / Dorothy B. Hughes
“There’d been traffic between here and Phoenix, but the closer he drew to Phoenix, the less he cared. Phoenix was a city. In a city, people were too busy with their own affairs to wonder about a strangely assorted couple.”
The Expendable Man / Dorothy B. Hughes
“You’ve told me plenty of things. You haven’t made me believe them.”
The Expendable Man / Dorothy B. Hughes
“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumedly educated, civilized man.”
The Expendable Man / Dorothy B. Hughes
“The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs.”
The Maltese Falcon / Dashiell Hammett
