Raymond Chandler Quotes
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. Houghton Mifflin, 1950, Introduction.
La Guardia was a very short man and he had gone up to the much larger “poll watcher” and ripped his official button off his coat. The Tammany Hall political machine would appoint thugs as poll watchers to intimidate the voters. If the poll watcher was an "official" voters thought that they might have access to the ballot information and know whether or not they voted for the machine candidates. Their presense was often sufficient intimidation to assure party line voting by most people.
He controlled a Shiite political party with its own armed militia.
Holland was officially Napoleon’s ally, but he and the French military leaders were not satisfied with the military or logistical support they were getting from the Dutch. Field Marshal Marmont was sent to Holland to “improve” the situation. When one of his demands seemed excessive a delegation of leading Dutch politicians met with him and reminded him that Holland was a sovereign country and France military officers could not issue orders in Holland. This was his famous response.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
