A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. - Raymond Chandler

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.

Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes

You mean something happened to him?” Her voice faded off into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.