Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) created the character of hard-boiled L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe. His novels, among them The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Lady in the Lake (1943), are widely considered masterpieces of noir crime fiction. Marlowe knows the feel, the smell, the pulse, the dirty corners and the unconfessed sins […]
RAYMOND CHANDLER
GREATEST SIMILE OF ALL TIME

We have Robert Burns’ “My love is like a red, red, rose.” We have Wordsworth’s “Thy soul was like a Star.” But for my money the prize goes to noir novelist Raymond Chandler who, in Farewell, My Lovely, wrote: “He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”