Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...browsers, still slavering over Mickey Spillane's sleuthing satyrs, consider him a sissy. But the TV Eye often has more taste than his critics. At his best, he is a healthy step backward toward the hardboiled heroes who swaggered onto the American scene in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler...
...Dine, Ellery Queen or H C Bailey were writing the rules, the mari who found the answer was a citizen of superior intellect. Whatever he collected for the job, he actually worked for intellectual satisfaction. It was not until 1929 that a slim, sardonic operator named Samuel Dashiell Hammett published Red Harvest and gave murder-to say nothing of lesser crimes-back to the people who are ordinarily involved...
Private Lives. Hammett had been a Private Eye himself. He knew that "house burglary is probably the poorest-paid trade in the world." He had been mistaken for a Prohibition agent, hired by a woman to fire her housekeeper, was friendly with a man who stole a Ferris wheel. And he had stumbled upon a young woman who did not tell him that she thought his work was interesting. Unlike...
...Holmes, Hammett's Eyes were driven by no moral obligation; they had a job, and they tried to do it competently. With an irreverent sneer at their proper predecessors, they succeeded and survived because they were tough, not because they were notably intelligent. Things happened to them: they faced pistols, boredom, and bad stomachs from too many foul meals eaten on the run. Hammett's Sam Spade soon found an acceptable running mate in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who would tell the girls: "The first time we met, I told you I was a detective...
...tested literary tranquilizers: some volumes of poetry, selected detective stories, classics such as Crime and Punishment. As he wound up his third U.S. tour last week on the West Coast, nobody thought to ask him whether he was stoking his emotional fires on Donne or Dostoevsky or Dashiell Hammett. What mattered was that he was in top vocal form, and that meant that he was giving his audiences the most moving performances of German lieder to be heard in the world today...