My guilty pleasure: I love hard-boiled pulp fiction. Every once in a while, I come across a passage that is just so — so hard-boiled, that I have to read it twice to make sure it really says what I thought it said. Like this one:
I kissed her.
“To hell with that stuff,” she said. “Really kiss me.”
Fifteen minutes later, the kid came up with the half case of Scotch.
I showed up at Ashbury’s place about two o’clock in the morning. I still couldn’t get the girl’s hair out of my mind. I thought of that strand of the hangman’s rope every time I thought of the way the light glinted along those blonde tresses.
Gold Comes in Bricks, 1940, Erle Stanley Gardner.
I will never look at blonde hair again in quite the same way. I’m not sure that is a good thing.