Status Updates From The Big Sleep (Vintage Crim...

"She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl."

"Under the rhinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness."

Hey, I like this one!

"...a cold-eyed hatchet-faced man, as lean as a rake and as hard as the manager of a loan office."

"The boy stood glaring at him with sharp black eyes in a face as hard and white as cold mutton fat."

"Ohls looked at him silently, his pale eyebrows bristling and stiff and round like the little vegetable brushes the FUller Brush man gives away."

"He would be as cold as ice and as stiff as a board."

"'Don't kid me, son. The fag gave you one. You've got a nice clean manly little room in there. [...] He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men. Think I can't figure people like him and you out?'
[...] I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like."

Wow. Absolutely abhorrent.

"She was as limp as a fresh-killed rabbit."

"Her eyes became narrow and and almost as black and as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray."

Not a simile, just a nasty segment I want to save for later:

"The giggles stopped dead, but she didn't mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boy friends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might."

Yay domestic abuse!

"The giggle got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting."

"The smile would wash off like water off sand"

"The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamps, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum—all this had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party." Big yikes, damn

"Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust." ?????

"She was as sore as an alderman with the mumps."