The descriptions of people and places are amazing, but there are also random similes that come out of the blue to slap you with a rubber chicken, just to make sure you're paying attention, and one-liner summaries that tell you all you need to know. Like the photograph of "a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

Chandler's characters are so sharp you expect to start bleeding as you run your finger down the page, reading slowly to not miss anything, and repeating things out loud to decide if you could ever get away with saying things "I bet she snaps a mean garter" a scant few pages after "I'm a Tibetan monk in my spare time." Even in a plot so complex James Bond would need a slide rule and a flipchart to figure it out, they seem believable, and the dialog is exactly what you want the dialog to be. Again, it has to be viewed in light of being written over half a century ago, but even now the interplay between Marlowe and anybody, from a high society dame to a corner hot dog vendor, just... crackles. Few preceded Chandler in this game (Dashiel Hammet, for instance), but everyone who followed was following in his footsteps. If that doesn't qualify Chandler as literary hero material, then at least put up a statue for Marlowe, who gets internal dialog lines like: