I recently finished reading Dashiell Hammett, The Complete Novels.
(#'s 13-17)
Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man
I ended up reading this book because I saw the Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon because it was on the list 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. First, I've realized since starting the 1001 Movies project that Humphrey Bogart is amazing in everything (I've seen anyway). Now about the books...Hammett is credited with being the first hardboiled detective writer and had real world experience working for the Pinkerton detective agency before he started writing. I liked The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man the best of the five.
If you've seen The Maltese Falcon, the book reads almost exactly like the movie-I'd be surprised if they made too many dialogue adjustments for the screenplay. The famous line at the end "The stuff that dreams are made of" was added though. The film version of The Thin Man was also made more humorous than the book as well-and lots more Asta was added (who can blame them?).
Now really about the books...In the notes of the version I have the editor points out that several of Hammett's novels started as a series of stories in magazines that were then modified to fit together as a novel. This is most obvious in The Dain Curse, but I didn't find it troublesome. Hammett was once quoted as saying that the Continental Op detective in the first two books was based on his partner at Pinkerton who taught him to be a detective and that Sam Spade was the kind of detective that all the detectives he worked with would've like to think they were. In contrast to the prevalent English literary detectives of his time, Hammett's detectives are all flawed and involved in the crimes they are trying to solve to the point of being suspected by the police at least once per novel, if not once per chapter. They aren't unreliable narrators though. The real reason to read Hammett however, other than being the first of his genre, are for his descriptions and the style of prose. For example, his description of Sam Spade:
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.
Or this description of Sam Spade's apartment:
Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn's dull moaning. A tinny alarm-clock, inseburely mounted on a corner of Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America--face down on the table--held its hands at five minutes past two.
These aren't challenging reads, each novel runs about 180 pages in my edition, which I think is the only in print edition of his novels right now--and would make good "beach reading" though I'm not sure I would take this out by the water since it's a nice hardback novel with very thin 'dictionary' paper for the pages.
