The Thin Man

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second Hammett novel and I really enjoyed it. I did find it impossible not to picture William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora, but that didn't detract as they were perfectly cast.
Nick Charles is a former private detective who gets pulled into the drama of the Wynant family when he and Nora visit NYC. They visit speakeasies, have drinks at the apartments of various friends, and entertain assorted visitors (with more drinks) at their hotel as they unravel the whereabouts of Clyde Wynant. In the middle of the novel Hammett inserts the story of A. G. Packer the "maneater," which several reviews I read thought was superfluous, but which seems to me to be an insight into the case at hand, not factually, but in terms of the behavior of the involved parties.
The novel was published in 1934, and I am counting it toward the Back to the Classics challenge in the category of "a classic detective novel."

H: Hard-boiled

Make Mine a Mystery: Reader's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction by Gary Warren Niebuhr (2003) defines a hard-boiled novel this way:

"In a hard-boiled novel the action is high on the description of violence, with sexual content and language of the streets. A hard-boiled world is a society where everything is suspect, including established institutions and the people who work for them--even the legal forces. The inclusion of a mystery in a hard-boiled world is inevitable. Most violent action takes place on-stage. The emphasis is on the perpetration of the crime, and characters are often driven to do what they do by circumstances that are often out of their control. Hard-boiled novels can feature protagonists who are not clearly defined as being on either the right of wrong side of the law. The administration of justice is not certain in a hard-boiled novel, and morality may have many definitions in a hard-boiled world"

Hard-boiled isn't a genre I have read a lot in, and separating it from "noir" was the topic of a recent discussion in the Crime Read-Along which I found quite interesting. I just finished The Maltese Falcon which is a classic hard-boiled crime story.


This post is part of the Crime Fiction Alphabet 2012 at Mysteries in Paradise.  

D: Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett is the next author on deck in the Crime Read Along at Soho Press, so I will be reading his Maltese Falcon this month. 

According to his profile at American Masters, Hammett published only 5 novels in his lifetime, but he established the hard-boiled detective genre. He was a detective before he went to fight in World War I and when he returned after the war he began writing stories based on his experiences as a detective. The Thin Man, the Continental Op, and Sam Spade were all his creations. There is an extensive article on Hammett's work in film at Mysterynet.com

This post is part of the Crime Fiction Alphabet 2012 at Mysteries in Paradise.