Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...found my first Dashiell Hammett book by accident. His writing comes in a form that most people don't expect to produce genius--the mystery. Books other than serious novels, it seems, don't "count" in people's minds; at least they aren't remembered and people, in their natural casual arrogance, think of the mystery as a second class literature...
...HUGH B. HAMMETT...
...looking back over his 19 "incredible months" with the Senator, he writes like a man who has remembered everything and learned nothing. Recalling his library-raiding tour of USIS offices in Europe with G. David Schine, he admits that it might have been unnecessary to remove Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, but he still implies that John K. Fairbank's commendable classic, The United States and China, is somehow subversive-and quotes a paragraph out of context to prove...
...films, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not, and he must rely heavily on a stylized comedy technique borrowed wholesale from vintage Cary Grant. Overpraised for his character acting in this and Huston's earlier Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, Bogart was greatest in the romantic Hawks-Hammett-Hemingway world of the individual pitting personal morality against an inherently corrupt society, the ultimate success being the maintenance of personal self-respect...
...accomplishments. Isolated, guilty, constantly compromised by the nature of his work and the demands of personal and professional survival, he labors not to change a world or any corner of it, but to preserve something of his own integrity and decency. Lew Archer is a natural successor to Hammett's jaded Continental Op and Chandler's cynical knight-errant, Philip Marlowe, but his problems and solutions are far closer to us and the business of living...