The Big Shit

Raymond Chandler once wrote,

"I have lived my life on the edge of nothing."

Eerily approximate to his stiff dick private eyes the author is famous for, Chandler wrote this in a letter to a friend. Two years later Chandler was dead.

He spent the last part of his life miserable, lost in a bottle of depression and loneliness. His wife had passed in 1954, leaving him naked of any will to struggle on. A failed suicide attempt a year later probably pushed him further into the deep end...where he remained until he died of pneumonia in 1959.

I know little more about Raymond Chandler. I've never read any of his novels, but am quite fond of The Big Sleep, Howard Hawk's 1946 film adaptation of Chandler's first book.

In it, Humphrey Bogart plays Phillip Marlowe, the detective mired in a dangerous web of sleight of hand theatrics and loosed-lip dames. Double-entendres come fast and quick, piling higher than cigarette butts in an ashtray of noir. The opening scene contains the single most acerbic line of dialogue in all of the 40's detective yarns.

Summoned by the dying General Sternwood, Marlowe is hired to investigate a series of escalating problems that are troubling his family. Of primary concern is daughter, Carmen, whose promiscuity has led to a nasty case of blackmail. Asked by the general if he's had the pleasure of an introduction, Marlowe, in full Bogart cool, responds,

"She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up."

IMDB has a gold mind of the film's one-liners.