Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mickey Spillane is a direct literary descendant of Dashiell Hammett, although it would be imprecise to stress the word literary in reference to Spillane. Hammett, who died in 1961, created the tough-guy private eye, who has since taken up permanent residence in the ghetto world of detective fiction, but none of Hammett's many imitators ranks lower than Mickey Spillane. Anyone who bothers to measure Spillane's latest Tiger Mann mystery against this posthumous collection of Hammett's Continental Op stories, first published in the '20s in Black Mask magazine, will instantly...
...KNOCKOVER by Dashiell Hammett. 355 pages. Random House...
...brutal. The book opens with Mann gratuitously killing an enemy who is already moribund. It ends with Mann's equally unnecessary murder of a woman with whom, following inflexible habit, he has shacked up. Between bloodlettings, Mann saves the world from nuclear destruction. It is a parody of Hammett, though an unconscious one, and it might be funny if Spillane could write...
...Hammett could write. Into his bony prose went the conscientious effort of the craftsman whose best work escaped the literary basement where most mystery books belong. His Continental Op (for operative), based on the author's own experience as a Pinkerton detective, is authentically tough. All mystery stories are implausible, and so are Hammett's. But in his case the reader accepts their implausibility because the characters, particularly the Op himself-a fat, stubby, middle-aged man who never got a name and needed none, being an archetype-seem so real. "He put these people down on paper...
...president of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house and wife of Board Chairman Alfred A. Knopf, who worked tirelessly for 51 years to bring the firm to its current prestigious place, personally garnering such luminaries as Freud, Sartre and Camus, as well as mystery writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett; after a long illness; in Manhattan...