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BOTB: The Big Sleep (Napster) v Money (Rusty S)

Versus


  • Total voters
    12
  • Poll closed .
“It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

The Big Sleep is a bonafide hardboiled classic. Marlowe is the Ur-James Bond. He's honest, hard as nails, doesn't care about hurting your feelings, likes chess, likes a drink, likes the ladies...In this novel, there's complex plotting, great characterisation, and some of the best lines around.

“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”

“You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.”

“She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.”

Marlowe would knock seven bells out of the poseur Amis.
 
Tricky call as I've read both and neither floated my proverbial boat enough to prefer one from the other I'm afraid. For that reason I'm out.
 
"In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.

So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF--BOOZE--NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive."

Amis at his merciless and brilliant best. A tale of debauchery, excess and complete moral bankruptcy, 'Money' is without doubt the funniest, sharpest and most tragic novel I have ever read.
 
Love both of these but in my heart it has to be TBS, I guess its the Marlow that lurks deep inside of me and the appreciation of Chandlers works.

Another great little line is 'Do I have to be polite, or can I just be natural'
 
"Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
 
Chandler for me all day long.

Didn't really get that Money was a satire until that excellent BBC dramatisation a few years ago.

Even so Amis is not in Chandler's league.
 
“He could take one look at me - at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure I ran on heavy fuel.”
 
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