Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Southern California through false fronts and cracked surfaces to unearth his clients' dark familial sins and secrets that almost always led to murder. Born Kenneth Millar, he adopted his pseudonym after his wife Margaret became a successful mystery novelist. Though his early work echoed Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, his only peers among modern American mystery authors, Macdonald developed a wise, melancholy voice of his own, writing not only about violence and retribution but, as he put it, about "people with enough feeling to be hurt and enough complexity to do wrong...
...times, this novel reads like one of Dashiel Hammett's hard-boiled detective novels, with violent action, illicit sex and a tender-hearted toughie for its hero. But Dunne's treatment of these people remains too sensitive and perceptive for this book to be classified in that genre. As the voice shifts from omniscient narration to eavesdrop on Shea's thoughts and colorful dialogue. Dunne makes us painfully aware of his hero's growing depression as he begins to believe that he is trapped--by what his girlfriend labels the self-fulfilling prophecies of despair and his priest would call...
...past year has not been kind to Coppola and Zoetrope. Three movies the studio was to have released in 1981-not only One From the Heart but also Hammett, German Director Wim Wenders' moody detective drama, and Escape Artist, Caleb Deschanel's saga of a runaway boy-have yet to be seen. The Chase Manhattan Bank, which had lent millions to Coppola, cut off the funding. Staff salaries were met with the help of Paramount Pictures, which bought one of Zoetrope's scripts and offered Coppola a low-interest loan. Paramount also secured the distribution rights...
...reveals a Perelman considerably less impulsive and a bit more socially adept than his fictional alter ego. Beyond this however, The Hindsight Saga offers little. Perelman relates his experiences with a number of the celebrities of the day, but, with the exception of a terrific anecdote about Dashiell Hammett, these are lackluster. Most of the characters don't even have the fresh madness of Perelman's fictional figures...
...sometimes cloys: "He really wasn't so much a fool as he was giddy about still being alive." Lengthy erotic descriptions tend to become postcoital arias. But Har rison scores well on the firing range: his humor usually strikes in the killing zone. Dashiell Hammett's low-rent realism made the mystery novel fun to read. War lock demonstrates that it is equally enjoy able to spoof...