The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled detective genre, and he was actually a private investigator himself. But funnily enough the people and events in this story aren’t nearly as believable as say Raymond Chandler’s versions, and the writing, while good in parts, isn’t as lyrical or as literary.

Someone gets murdered. Nick, who has given up detecting, gets drawn into it because he knows some of the people involved. His curious wife gets involved, too. The people are the strangest bunch you can imagine, rich and crazy, a mother in a bigamous marriage beating her twenty-something daughter, the eighteen year old son obsessed with abnormal psychology. But it’s the weirdness of the detective having a wife and getting shot and beaten up in front of her that stands out for me.

There’s some funny and clever lines, and good descriptions; Hammett really relishes the dark and seamy side of things. And they’re always drinking as they are in these old fashioned novels. But the plot’s hard to follow, and you don’t really care about it, either, because all the characters are pretty unpleasant.

Hammett also wrote The Maltese Falcon and I think that was a better book. Better than both of these are Raymond Chandler’s books, though, because they’re not just clever, they’re works of art.