ABSTRACT
Furniture, landscapes, and characters' features all delay the narrative, as Raymond Chandler extends Dashiell Hammett's initial ploy with ever more elaborate deviations. Most notably, he does so through style itself, in his notorious penchant for similes that draw untoward attention to themselves. Hammett's focus on physical anomalies and ambiguous details expresses Sam Spade's own signature style, his "hard-boiled" attitude of cool nonchalance that drains predictable emotions from realistic detail. The penchant for similes is recognizable from Chandler, though Ross Macdonald seems less interested in turning them into exaggerated ploys to entertain the reader and more inclined to give them a historical, even a psychological, cast—as if the present physical world were repeatedly discovered to form a resurrection of the past. Macdonald's narrative vision is thus at once an extension of Hammett's and Chandler's and a turn back to a more conventional, more thematically coherent vision, since the parallelism between objects and characters is precisely what Hammett and Chandler denied.
