"California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing."
"`I used to like this town,' I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. `A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. ... People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum, either."
"Time passed and I sat there hunched over the desk, my chin in a hand, staring at the mustard-yellow plaster of the end wall, seeing on it the vague figure of a dying man with a short ice pick in his hand, and feeling the sting of its point between my shoulder blades. Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody."
"She laughed. I guess it was a silvery tinkle where she was. It sounded like somebody putting away saucepans where I was."
All right, readers, what are your favorite expressions in crime fiction of disgust, disdain or distaste for a place?