The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]
Like A Blonde Satan
I had read The Maltese Falcon years ago but remembered very little of it aside from it having a complicated plot. Since I read it the same year I started delving hard into crime fiction, it kind of got lost in the shuffle of other classics I read, especially compared to Hammett’s sensational Red Harvest, a pulp masterpiece that would get my vote for best crime novel of all-time. But as I have never seen the movie, and keep forgetting the thread of what many allege to be one […]
“How do you feel?” “Terrible. I must have gone to bed sober.” Few runs can compare with it: five novels in five years, lean and mean books that exited the ring with victory assured: no one afterward could say that hard-boiled novels couldn’t be great art, at least nobody worth taking seriously. Then, just forty years old and for reasons still speculated about and still unknown, he stopped writing. The Thin Man was final book. The protagonist is Nick Charles, a private detective remarkably perceptive […]
“I don’t believe in anything, but I’m too much of a gambler not to be affected by a lot of things.”
I saw “There Will Be Blood” in the theater when it came out, and when the lights came up I hated it. Over the next few days, certain scenes or lines would come back to me and I would think, Oh, that’s pretty good. The movie kept rising to the front of my mind, and after a week I thought it was great. The same thing happened to me with Hammett’s classic hard-boiled mystery, The Glass Key. I didn’t enjoy it much until the last few pages, […]