I'm still early in the novel: an elegantly crafted first
chapter, with the
name Velma repeated like an incantation. But many of the old
slang terms
for blacks must go right by today's readers, making it hard
to understand
Moose's questions, until he confronts the bouncer in Chapter
Two.
The bouncer gets one of the best tag lines in Chandler, for
my money:
"It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been
done to it
that anybody could think of."
A minor character tagged with a line like that deserves to
survive, and so
he does. Knocked out twice by Moose, he disappears, with the
testimony of
that face.
Now, a question: When Marlowe tries to get the clerk at a
hotel to talk to
him, he says, "Call your play...I'll read you a chapter of
the Bible or buy
you a drink. Say which." (Vintage edit., 23) Course the clerk
goes for
the drink, a whole bottle, but what's the Bible
alternative?
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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