Dashiell Hammett

He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.

“I was afraid I’d read them and understand them,” I explained, “and then you’d have felt insulted.”

We poked around in the ashes for a few minutes⁠—not that we expected to find anything, but because it’s the nature of man to poke around in ruins.

It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.

“Where papa put him, and he’s where papa put him now.”

“I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”

That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.

“We believed your two hundred dollars.”

She’s money-mad, all right, but somehow you don’t mind it. She’s so thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there’s nothing disagreeable about it.

“Relieves congestion,” I said.

To be frank, if hating weren’t such an effort⁠—if it didn’t require so much energy⁠—I think I should hate the old devil.

“I’m not Christ,” he said irritably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin air.”

I laughed with her while I tried to keep my head above the gin I had guzzled.

The sour odor of Italian wine was thick enough to be seen.

I moved in a silence that was more complete than any silence I had ever known. I was a ghost fighting ghosts.

You could come in and say you’d pay me a million for a purple elephant, but what in hell would that mean?

“Uh-huh, people don’t like you.”

It was as if her face were not a face, but a mask that she had worn until it had almost become a face.

But detecting is a hard business, and you use whatever tools come to hand.