The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler EPUB & PDF

The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: Raymond Chandler
• Language: English
• Genre: United States Executive Government
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 12 MB
• Price: Free

IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, mid October,1 with the
sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the
foothills.2
I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt,
tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with
dark blue clocks on them.3
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.4
I was calling on four million dollars.5
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high.
Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian
elephants,6

there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight
in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have
any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight
had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was
fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and
not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the
house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him.
He didn’t seem to be really trying.7

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a
wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a
slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a
maroon Packard convertible.8 Beyond the garage were some
decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a
large greenhouse with a domed roof.

Then more trees and beyond
everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.9
On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a
gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass
romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were
backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn’t
look as if anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the west
wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four
hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at
the corners.

Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and
above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants
crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an
officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war.10 The
officer had a neat black imperial, black mustachios, hot hard coalblack eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get alongwith.

I thought this might be General Sternwood’s grandfather.11 It
could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was
pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the
dangerous twenties.

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