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, from Gold Comes in Bricks (1940) by Erle Stanley Gardner. :
“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.”
I will never look at blonde hair again in quite the same way. I’m not sure that is a good thing.