Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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About the fourth book I came to was Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. The blurb on the back cover listed other books by the author, among them The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I guess it is sort of odd that I hadn't gotten into mysteries before, and here was the man that wrote two of the best. Here was a guy who not only understood the plots, but actually wrote them...
...that summer I had read four of the five novels Hammett had written. They were certainly easy to come by. Every bookstore or newspaper stand in Europe seemed to sell them, and in addition to the English editions, I noticed that there were always translations available...
...decided to read the one Hammett novel I had been saving, holding in reserve for some emergency. I went to the Coop to buy it, and although they had a whole wall of mysteries, they had no Hammett. Running from bookstore to bookstore, I quickly discovered that there was simply no place in Cambridge that sold Hammett...
...still not sure why Hammett is so much more popular in Europe than in his own country. Perhaps it is that Hammett, like rock and roll and juke boxes, Ford Galaxies and Johnnie Guitar, is something we assume but never really stop to appreciate...
There is a lean, wry quality to Hammett's writing that is unique. There is nothing superfluous. In The Thin Man. Hammett describes the hosts of a dinner party that Nick Charles reluctantly goes...