The streets were dark with something more than night.

"Looking back on his stories in 1950 he identified their main characteristic as the 'smell of fear' they managed to generate. In this, they echoed his own experience, for they were about 'a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and characters, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.' "

- The Life of Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane