Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another homage to the era of The Maltese Falcon appears in Buried Caesars (Mysterious Press; 179 pages; $15.95), in which Stuart M. Kaminsky's sleuth Toby Peters is hired by General Douglas MacArthur on a matter of national security and gets a helping hand from Dashiell Hammett on a spree. The volume is one of the sprightliest in the series built around Peters but is overshadowed by A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's; 210 pages; $15.95), which features Kaminsky's other recurring detective, Soviet policeman Porfiry Rostnikov. That sly and assiduous investigator is dispatched to Siberia to look into...
There is also a true relic of the age of pulp: Dashiell Hammett's Woman in the Dark (Knopf; 96 pages; $15.95), overpriced and oversold as a "novel," but compelling on its terms as a sketchbook romance between two losers who share a fierce sense of their own integrity. Other notable reprints include Michael Gilbert's Young Petrella (Harper & Row; 222 pages; $15.95), a collection of magazine stories from the 1950s and '60s that display his trademark Scotland Yard detective with a deadpan precision of mood worthy of Simenon, and A Double Life (Little, Brown; 246 pages; $17.95), short gothic...
...love-love thing." And now it's time for Hollywood's last moguls to love Bertolucci right back. Columbia might begin with a wider American release for the film and follow up the gesture by financing the director's dream project, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. Surely Bertolucci, among all recent Oscar winners, deserves to see that goldplate turned into box-office gold...
...Weinstein, soon to be better known as Nathanael West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts. The two men were close friends, then relatives when Perelman married West's sister Laura. It was not, Herrmann reports, a conventional union. Early on, the Perelmans went to Hollywood, where a fellow scenarist, Dashiell Hammett, once noted, "Last night I ran into Sid . . . and wound up by doing a little pimping for him." Soon afterward, Hammett and Laura had a brief fling. It was, Herrmann speculates, "perhaps her way of punishing Sid for his numerous infidelities...
Black Mask's early contributors rejected the class-conscious plots and genteel style of the British school of crime writing. "Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it," said Chandler, who found the details of British mysteries as unexciting as "spillikins in the parlor." Hammett's early hero, the Continental Op, is a nameless abstraction of the hard-boiled ethic: "I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can." His connection...