“The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried
to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be
bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off
sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and
stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her
mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very,
very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They
made me sick…. Carmen [Sternwood] stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the
principal's office.”— Mystery novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Raymond
Chandler (1888–1959),
The Big Sleep (1939)
The image accompanying this post comes from the 1946
film adaptation of The Big Sleep, with Martha Vickers as “bad girl”
Carmen Sternwood and, of course, Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip
Marlowe.
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