I wish I liked Dashiell Hammett’s work more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I see the clever plotting and the realistic characters. I like the dialog that sounds just clever enough that a wise guy would use it. I like the moral ambiguity of his world. I like the plots that are just twisty enough to be confounding without being unbelievable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I recognize that he’s part of a genuine sea change in detective and crime fiction. I read Murder on the Orient Express<\/em> after I read The Thin Man<\/em> and there are a couple times where Nora suggests Poirot’s techniques and Nick directly says “that doesn’t work.” You could say these are works in conversation, but Hammett’s giving a lecture. I respect that. And I take his point that many earlier mysteries are just candy crush before there were screens and he’s writing stories about characters in settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it doesn’t all gel for me somehow. I know this is a de gustibus thing for me. I think that if you like detective stories at all, you should check out Hammett. He’s an excellent writer and broke plenty of new ground in the genre. I really like the movies made from the books. But I don’t light up when I read him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wish I liked Dashiell Hammett’s work more. I see the clever plotting and the realistic characters. I like the dialog that sounds just clever enough that a wise guy would use it. I like the moral ambiguity of his world. I like the plots that are just twisty enough to be confounding without being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3317,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312\/revisions\/3317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}