Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These are the essentials for obstinate individualism, a national trait elevated to a romance that not only endures but thrives. The literary descendants of Chandler and his contemporaries James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett have unleashed stalkers of the urban wildernesses across the country. Parker and George V. Higgins cover Boston; Elmore Leonard and Loren D. Estleman have a lock on Detroit; Stephen Greenleaf and Bill Pronzini have staked out San Francisco, and Washington is in the hands of Ross Thomas. In Cincinnati, the territory belongs to Jonathan Valin...
Tough investigators are concentrated mostly in New York and in California, the Olduvai Gorge of the chivalrous gumshoe. By far the best known are the West Coast trio of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent...
...Gores, a three-time winner of the Edgar award, is best known for his hard- boiled thrillers. His semibiographical novel Hammett became a film produced by Francis Coppola and helped shift his career toward scriptwriting, notably for such TV series as Kojak and Magnum, P.I. Gores' novel Come Morning, his first in eight years, displays a heightened visual awareness: it blends precise research into prison life, the gem market and rock climbing with outlandishly risky escapades, including a scene in which the hero circumvents a security system by mounting an elevator cable and skittering along a momentarily inactive high-tension...
...something in a novel. Bradbury calls it Death Is a Lone- ly Business, and he dedicates the work to such masters of the form as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are about as close to this beachfront vaudeville as Mars and Saturn are to Pluto (the Disney dog, not the planet). It hardly matters. All of the productions, from Something Wicked This Way Comes to The Martian Chronicles, are portions sawed from a long plank called Bradbury. Brief or full length, they bear the characteristic fine grain, knots, splinters and warps...
...this time. Blood Simple (the title comes from Dashiell Hammett) works terse, elegant variations on a theme as old as the Fall; it subverts the film noir genre in order to revitalize it; it offers the satisfactions and surprises of a conniving visual style. Most important, it displays the whirligig wit of two young men--Joel Coen, 30, a graduate of New York University film school, and his brother Ethan, 27--in a debut film as scarifyingly assured as any since Orson Welles was just this wide...