the thing that is *great* about chandler is that you can read the story on so many levels.
Just enjoy a good detective story. Breeze through it, listen to the wisecracking detectives.
Read a bit deeper. "Stuff a cushion"? You normally stuff a cushion with horsehair, so maybe the character is horselike. They are obviously dominated by their mother who is devoutly religious and would do anything the minister says.
I like a writer who leaves it up to me to build a mental picture of the characters. DB describes *everything* about the characters, forcing you to have his picture. Fine if you like that. Not my cup of tea.
Well I think it's the writer's job to tell ME what the characters are like, not mine to imagine it. I could just imagine the whole thing and not even bother with the book in the first place.
I'm not quite sure how much 'telling you what the characters are like' you think you need.
Fair enough, I'm looking at the text while you were listening to an audio book, but you picked a couple of lines that come at the end of three and a half A4 pages that have been creating a picture of Orfamay Quest, of her mother, of her brother Orrin and of Marlowe himself.
Sure, all the bits of description are mixed up together, allowing the picture to appear bit by bit, Rolf Harris style - can you see what it is yet? - but you've already had a huge number of elements.
Marlowe - detective, hard-bitten, untrusting, likes a drink, cynical about Orfamay, disbelieving of her story, and showing it by cracking cynical joke after cynical joke, yet flirting with Orfamay, calling her a 'cute little trick' and talking about the glasses she wears.
Orfamay - small-town girl trying to be brave in the big city, works for a doctor, deeply distrustful of anything city folk tell her, especially detectives, protective of her brother but afraid of his temper, a bit afraid of her mother, a bit afraid of Marlowe, small, brown hair, glasses, awkward-looking bag that betrays some of her country naivete, worried sick about what might have happened to her brother but not wanting to be told explicitly that he might be dead.
Mother - domineering, religious, very judgmental about anything that doesn't conform to her small-town morality.
Orrin - 28, six foot and skinny, bad-tempered at times, a small-town boy with a good job deciding to try his hand in the city, dominated by his mother until he moved away, used to be reliable at writing home but the letters stopped coming, now gone missing, was living somewhere that seems out of character.
To me, those are pretty good word-pictures of the characters. Not handed to me on a plate, sure, but I can make a pretty good meal out of a succession of tapas, rather than needing an enormous portion on a silver salver - and the smaller mouthfuls are easier to digest.
What's more, pretty much everything I've said about the characters above is given to us explicitly by Chandler - there's no riddle-solving needed.
I think the "wise crack" as you call it might well be that but if it was it's unrealistic imho. There's no way someone would come out with that to someone they've just met, to both have a pop at her brother's horselike-ness, her mother's religiousness all wrapped up in an attempt at flirting. I think if you are supposed to read that into it then it's a fantasy novel basically.
But the point is that Marlowe *does* come out with wisecracks like that to someone he's just met. The fact that he does that is part of his character.
I didn't read the horsish-ness into the crack, but having a go at the mother's religious fervour, and flirting, sure - both of these have been set up in the previous dialogue.
Still, if you don't like it, you don't like it. No problem with that: there's plenty of stuff I don't like.