Handwrought Dueling Pistols, Curare, and Tropical Fish

Among the guilty pleasures I'll admit to, one of them is liking pulps.  Specifically, I prefer the weird tale (Lovecraft, Smith, &c.), but other things will do as well.  The more prominent among the "other things" being hard-boiled detective tales (the type of stuff that wouldn't have been out of place in Black Mask during the 30s and 40s).

To get this story moving to its pointless conclusion: I went and rolled all my pennies the other day, and found I had a few dollars worth.  What to do with them?  Why, head on down to Owl's Nest and buy me some "quality" used books, of course.

Specifically, I bought The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (because, let's face it, it doesn't get much pulpier than Sax Rohmer), and Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (since I didn't have a copy, and the local Chapters tends to limit their classic hard-boiled stuff to the occasional copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon).  Anyways, I've been reading that since yesterday night, and I just realised something which amused me immensely: I internally dramatise the dialog in these novels using actors from Humphrey Bogart movies.

Now, normally I probably wouldn't have noticed.  After all, Bogey played Marlowe, the protagonist of all of Chandler's novels, in The Big Sleep, so he's not completely out of place.  However, I seem to be drawing most of my actors from a different Bogey film — the aforementioned Maltese Falcon.  It gave me a bit of a start and a chuckle to realise this after a "slim, dark-eyed man […] lighting a cigarette" appears in the story, and I suddenly noticed that I was reading all his lines as if it was none-other than Joel Cairo.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) no one answering to the description of the other half of Sidney and Pete has shown up yet.