Technical Difficulties

Dashiell Hammett: Five Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett




I'm gonna be honest right up front and say that my favorite of these novels is The Thin Man. I read the others with interest, but I'm unlikely to read them again. The Thin Man may get added to my stack of comfort reading. (I think it's not a coincidence that nobody made more Sam Spade movies, but Nick and Nora had a very long life in Hollywood, even if in warped form.)

So. Dashiell Hammett, generally considered the founder of the hard-boiled mystery genre. Having read his novels, my feeling is that all hard-boiled mysteries should be set during Prohibition, because there's a way in which the use of alcohol conveys the setting perfectly. Alcohol is illegal, but you can find it everywhere; the police are just as bad as anyone else. And that expresses the layer of corruption, like smog, that permeates--and saturates--every godforsaken inch of the territory Hammett covers.

Hammett also prefers a particularly opaque style of narration, whether he's writing in third person or first, in that you never see any character's thoughts, including the protagonists. I think it is a sign of what an excellent writer he was that this does not make his characters surface-y. They all clearly have interiority--everybody has their own agenda--we just can't see it. In third person, this tends to make everyone look like a sociopath (and honestly, it may just be that everyone in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key IS a sociopath except Effie Perrine), and it makes it difficult bordering on impossible to invest in the main character. Although I did not like Sam Spade at all, I ended up feeling compassion for him, but Ned Beaumont, the protagonist of The Glass Key (and Hammett always uses his name that way, "Ned Beaumont," throughout the entire damn novel, possibly to really whack the hammer down on the ALIENATION key), was just kind of loathsome. I am fully prepared to argue that that was Hammett's intent, and that he did a bang-up job of it, but I'm certainly never going to put myself through reading that novel again just to watch loathsome people doing loathsome things in an endlessly repetitive chain of betrayals. It's rather Huis Close (No Exit) in that at the end Ned Beaumont and Janet Henry are stuck with each other, but the thing that makes Huis Close dramatically as well as philosophically interesting is the slow teasing out of secrets, the presentation of the mask each character wears and then the long slow reveal of what is staring out from behind it. Ned Beaumont remains opaque and dull, both in the sense of boring and in the sense of failing to reflect light.

(Full disclosure: I may also have disliked The Glass Key because it's a novel about corruption and politics with a murder in it rather than a mystery set against a backdrop of politics and corruption. I'm a hardcore genre reader, and I hate novels about politics.)

(Yes, I know. Shut up.)

The Continental Op is a little different. He's an effective narrator; I dislike him, but I invested in him--more in The Dain Curse than in Red Harvest (Red Harvest is another novel about politics and corruption; it just has a lot more murders in it.) I also have him cast irreversibly in my head as Danny DeVito circa Romancing the Stone, but that's something I did to myself. The mysteries are awkward and sprawling (and really, you should never end up with the narrator explaining the murders to the murderer) and The Dain Curse is wildly, goofily improbable. I don't like the Continental Op, but he's real enough and complex enough that I'm willing to spend time with him. I might reread The Dain Curse. Not so much Red Harvest.

What I particularly like about The Thin Man is that, if you'll pardon the cart-before-the-horse anachronism, it's like The Big Sleep meets The Great Gatsby. Nick is clearly a functioning alcoholic, and clearly was very much like the Continental Op when he was a P.I. The characters surrounding him are straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald: aimless and narcissistic and hungry to drag other people down with them. But Nick's also a forty-year-old retired detective in love with his extremely wealthy twenty-six-year-old wife, and he's someone who's trying to do the right thing--or, maybe, someone trying to find the right thing so that he can take a run at it. I like Nick Charles in a way I don't like any of Hammett's other protagonists. And I know that's because Hammett was trying hard to make me not like them, but still.

Also? Asta. Full stop.

(Asta, aside from being female, is a Schnauzer. She's probably a standard Schnauzer (w/handler for scale), but I have somewhat wistfully cast her as a giant Schnauzer (w/kid for scale) (and here again w/Great Dane for scale), to give some real emphasis to Nick's repeated line, "Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet." The wire haired fox terrier (w/kid for scale) who played Asta in the movies is cute as a button, but he isn't Asta.)

The Thin Man is probably not what a purist would call hard-boiled. It stays too much on the top side of society. It is neither "gritty" nor "raw." But it is definitely my favorite of Dashiell Hammett's novels, possibly because the characteristic it shares with Raymond Chandler's novels is that the protagonist is trying to do the right thing, even when he doesn't know what that is.







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