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.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

I don't know if there's been a debate over which is the better detective writer. But between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, my money is on Chandler. I tried to get into crime noir as a kid and while I liked it, I wasn't mature enough for it. I tried to get into Hammett's work but I found him too wordy. I probably would have stayed by that assessment without needing to review my position. But I found a copy of The Maltese Falcon for a really good price and decided to give Hammett another try.

The story is where the world was introduced to Sam Spade. He'd appeared in a short story a year prior. But it didn't really move the needle. It was until the popularity of this story broken into 5 parts in the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1929, that the world really got a good look at the celebrated private investigator who only ever appeared in 5 works by Hammett and one of those was left unpublished! 

When The Maltese Falcon were collected into a single novel in 1930, it became a smash hit. It also laid the foundation for hard boiled crime fiction. Humphrey Bogart made the character of Spade a household name in 1941's black and white film adaptation, directed by John Huston; which is considered one of the greatest films ever made. You might be wondering why it took over a decade for Bogie to play Sam Spade.  Actually, a film version was made in 1931. But it's content was so salacious, with nudity, sex and homosexual overtones, that film standards adopted shortly after it's release, prevented it from ever being re-released to the viewing public. Hence, a toned down remake was necessitated to be made for the viewing public of a pre-WW2 America.

In the story, Sam Spade is accused of murdering his detective agency partner, with whom he is having an affair with the man's wife. To clear his name, Spade must figure out how the client his partner was hired to protect got tangled up with a trio of criminals who all accuse the woman of stealing something valuable from them: a one of a kind golden statue covered in black resin called the Maltese Falcon. Lost from the annals of history, the Falcon was supposed to be a tribute to the King of Spain, during the time of the Crusades. If the bird can be recovered, it would be a priceless relic that could net Sam Spade and his client a hefty pay day.

As the murder count grows, so does distrust among the group. Sam and his client get rather intimate with each other. And the police threaten to send Spade away on a murder charge for a very long time. What results is a trio of chapters that crosses and double-crosseds everyone on the suspect list a good 3 or 4 times a piece and becomes some 40 or so pages of the most well written crime drama even written. I just wish the other 175-odd so pages were just as good. 

Okay, that last statement might not be quite so fair. Before the last 3 chapters, there is a span of 3-4 chapters that I also thought were very good. But I just couldn't get into this book until I reached chapter 11. At that point, something just clicked. It felt like the writer had finally gotten into the zone, or whatever similar mode of excellence that writers get into when they get cooking. But that first half of the book was rather difficult for me to get engaged with. I was averaging 2 chapters a night at first. That was how much I could take. With the adventures of Philip Marlowe, I was finishing entire 80 page short stories in just an hour worth of read time. 

I will say that I no longer consider Dashiell Hammett to be 'wordy'. But I feel like he was too focused on the mundane. For instance, he can spend an entire 200 word paragraph, exploring the contents of a dead man's pocket. Not plural. For each searched pocket, Hammer devotes another paragraph to it and I am just not sure it was all that necessary. But Hammett's dialogue is brilliant. So good, that I am willing to give Nick and Nora Charles with their witty repartee and frequent downing of martinis a try with Hammett's The Thin Man. 

It wasn't Raymond Chandler. But it wasn't terrible as I had thought it was 30 years ago either. My tastes grew up and so did my appreciation. 

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars.