US "short-story writer, novelist".
"He was considered master of "hard-boiled" crime stories, e.g., "The Big Sleep," 1939 and "Playback," 1958."
The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce an artistic job of writing.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
"The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication."
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof he's fresh out of ideas.
"What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?"
