Status Updates From The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe)

"'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."

"The butler came along the red path with smooth light steps and his back as straight as an ironing board."

"...with sad eyes and a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard."

"The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lip slowly across the other with a funeral absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands."

"I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider"

"I lit the cigarette and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a rathole."

"The champagne as cold as Valley Forge"

The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show girl uses her last good pair of stockings."

"A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wildflowers fighting for life on a bare rock."