People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. … Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent.

'When I got home,' Chandler writes in 'The Long Goodbye,' 'I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. This is a lonely town.' It's a pleasant pastiche, although it doesn't earn its closing line - but it can't compare to the depth, the nuance, of the real thing.

Nice little face, shy smile the kind of girl who lives with her mother and cooks meat loaf for Sunday lunch.

I had passed her in the street a few times. In an office across the street, a secretary in a tartan blouse and wearing earphones from a Dictaphone machine was bent over her typewriter, tapping away. That becomes most glaring when Black turns to the city: 'I got up from my desk and took my pipe to the window and stood looking out at nothing in particular.

The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black