Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...story writer of the hard-boiled Southern California school. The Goodbye Look is his 20th book, and it is on bestseller lists -a place where hard-cover mysteries are not often found. In the past few years, critical opinion has been massing behind Macdonald to push him past Dashiell Hammett and especially Raymond Chandler, whose style and settings have clearly influenced him. William Goldman calls Macdonald's mysteries "the finest ever written by an American." Other critics number him among the important novelists of our time, full of profound insights on the great themes of time and love...
...circle traced on a desk top with one finger indicates speechless fury). Wolfe's associates are brightly sketched, notably his slangy, hard-boiled legman Archie Goodwin, whose active role in and narration of Wolfe's Holmesian episodes ties them also to the U.S. tough-guy school of Hammett and Chandler. Even such quirks as Wolfe's penchant for recondite words like "gibbosity" and "usufructs" and for scrupulous vocabularies of all kinds are minutely documented...
Probably just because mysteries are what he writes, Dashiell Hammett is one of those people you have to discover. All I want to do is to pass on the word...
...Pinkerton detective, and then a soldier in World War I, Hammett started writing in hospitals, while recovering from lung ailments that plagued him to the very end. A quick success. Hammett joined the "Hollywood set" of the thirties, and later became actively involved in left wing politics...
...Hammett established a character type that dominated American mystery writing, and still reappears in one form or another in James Bond, Matt Helm, and the rest of the gang. But Hammett's characters, Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the others, were different from their modern apostles. Because they were more than detectives, smart, tough guys. They were people that you really wanted to meet, to talk to, to learn from, and later go with to the local bar and have a great time...