The Thin Man by Dashiell Hamett

Who would have thought that Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man was a Christmas novel? Okay, maybe it's more of a Christmas story like Die Hard is, in that the first half of the book takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and the remainder occurs up to just about New Year's Eve. The holidays are responsible for getting San Francisco socialites Nick and Nora Charles to spend Christmas in Nick's hometown of Manhattan. It's also what gets the former private investigator involved in the life of the Wynant family as daughter Dorothy is desperate to find her estranged family, Clyde.

On Boxing Day, it's revealed that dear old dad's mistress was murdered. The prime suspects are the missing Clyde or his ex-wife Mimi, who was present when the other woman passed on to her eternal reward. Nick just wants a quiet holiday in the Big Apple. Nora is enthralled by her husband's previous career and the chance at playing amateur sleuth. The police need all the help they can get. So it seems no matter how much he tries to distance himself from the case, it appears that Nick Charles, P.I. is back in business.

The Thin Man is very much a Dashiell Hammett work and it's also very different. I've always thought that Hammett was more wordy than Raymond Chandler. The Maltese Falcon wasn't so bad with the unnecessary dialogue. But Hammett's in rarer form here. Three whole pages were devoted to an account about a cannibal in the Old West. A whole paragraph is about a book sent to Nick as a Christmas card for testing your urine at home. Neither item has anything to do with the murder of Clyde Wynant's mistress and neither were some sort of foreshadowing of plot developments to come. And no matter how much I have tried, I cannot find a definitive answer as to why Hammett put these accounts in this book. Plus, I probably would have finished this book several days earlier than I did going back and trying to figure out who this person was or is pretending to be; not to mention those other rabbit holes... And if they're red herrings- I HATE red herrings.

I did find myself liking this book a lot more than The Maltese Falcon. It was rapid fire with Nick and Nora's one-shots at each other. I liked how the plot played out like an Agatha Christie novel with so many other secrets and deceptions coming to life. Plus, I like the fact that I solved who the murderer was! (I always like when I do that.) I  also like to think it's a sign of a good story when you want to read more adventures starring the main characters. To my regret, Hammett never wrote another Thin Man story as a novel. But he did write several of the screenplays that followed up the live action film starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. I'm excited to say that I managed to get one of them recorded on my DVR to watch over my holiday break!

You might think that this novel being from 1934 and a condensed version first appearing a year earlier in Redbook, that The Thin Man is a fairly innocuous little story. With the impropriety, boozing, murder, assaults on women, dirty cops and at least 1 erection, I can't believe this made it into a women's fashion magazine. Something like GQ or Playboy, sure I could see The Thin Man making an appearance in the pages of those. Maybe the 1930s was a different time for women's mags. 

This was an interesting read that makes me want more. Yeah, it had some flaws. But it wasn't enough to keep me from visiting the works of Dashiell Hammett some time in the near future.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.