This was my intro to one of The Greats of the hardboiled genre. As with all older books, I read it with a contemporaneous mindset, but still I'd hardly call it a masterpiece.

Raymond Chandler certainly had a thing for eye colour. I do not.

And while I read it with a 1939 Brain, it was hard not to notice as he breaks every rule espoused by modern writers with more consistency than a five-dollar milkshake. But he's "the master" so please disregard that 90% of the text is adverbs and similes. This is not a swipe at Chandler. I like similes (but not adverbs).