Word: hammett
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Remember that even Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, though they were published by the most reputable house (Knopf) and wrote popular books that became hit movies, weren't considered the equals of "serious" novelists. They wrote genre fiction. The New Yorker critic (and novelist) Edmund Wilson could find "the boys in the back room" lacking. Then came another irony. Later generations of critics threw off their pretensions and mined the gritty glories of pulp fiction; they cogently argued that Hammett and Chandler, and Thompson and David Goodis and others, were worth cherishing (and that writers like Wilson, who's forgotten...
...Mike pulls the guy's guts through his nose. In Spillane, nearly every charged conversation between males escalates pronto into a fight. Hammer hits first. And, as J. Kenneth Van Dover notes in his astute, fairly critical Murder in the Millions (about Gardner, Hammett and Fleming), Hammer's pugilistic repertoire relies as much on his knees and his feet as on his fists. That's sensible, since the hand is more vulnerable to breaking. But it's also, in the Marquis of Queensberry sense that defined detective-story fights before Spillane, dirty dealing...
...addition to pumping up the detective figure, Thomas’ main innovation is combining the classical detective fiction of Conan Doyle with the hardboiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The two subgenres meet in Llewelyn, the only character with any sort of depth, who narrates his boss’s exploits à la Watson while participating in them with the laconic wit of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade...
...medical school, and then The Andromeda Strain, of course, were big influences. I think anybody who is writing in the genre owes a lot to Robin Cook and especially to Coma. Actually, before I started writing Isolation Ward, I was reading a lot of Chandler and Hammett and tried to bring sort of a noir sense to Isolation Ward. I kind of wanted to craft a noir architecture on to a medical thriller, so they were big influences. In terms of voice, Nelson DeMille, especially a book called The Gold Coast. I think he's a great craftsman and especially...
This Debonair, martini-swilling socialite wasn't "the thin man." (That guy was a victim in the original Dashiell Hammett novel.) But Nick was the cool socialite, solving homicides as if they were Times crosswords. Nick and his wife Nora (and their terrier Asta) were a dream family to a Depression audience in need of blithe fantasy. In six movies from 1934 to '47 (out on DVD next month), William Powell was a kind of F.D.R. of crime fiction and Myrna Loy was the suavest, most gracious wife ever...