Dashiell Hammett gave me my first hard-boiled/noir experience with Red Harvest. For that reason, he’ll always be special to me, even if Raymond Chandler is my favorite. So, while on a work break at the library, I snagged The Thin Man, in large part due to the fun cover. Wisecracking couples soaked in whiskey and entendre? Oke. Thin Man is set in New York City in 1933. Nick Charles is an ex-cop and current private eye. He married up. His wife is Nora, a wealthy (I think?) […]
If Buffy the Vampire Slayer were written by Raymond Chandler….
My sister has been pressuring me to read this book for a couple of years. I think I put it off on principle. It took me a couple years to convince her to read The Lord of the Rings (when we were much younger), but it was the release of the movies that finally did it. She also rejected my suggestions of A Game of Thrones (too political), Harry Potter (not interested), Brandon Sanderson (she keeps forgetting about it) and John Scalzi (ditto). So I […]
Tough Guys, Tough Talk, and Treasure
I’m a fan of film noir. For my money, it doesn’t get much better than Fred MacMurray “Hey, Baby”-ing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Humphrey Bogart talking tough in The Maltese Falcon. But even though I’m a fan of the detective film and I love to read, I had yet to pick up anything by Dashiell Hammett, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Time to remedy that, I decided. The Maltese Falcon is the story of archetypal detective Sam Spade who, along with […]