Word: hammett
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...DASHIELL HAMMETT: A LIFE...
...were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster ... I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could." It could have been the stuff of hard-boiled detective literature; instead it was the stuff of hard-boiled detective life: the life lived by Dashiell Hammett, creator of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. A voracious reader of Henry James, before he switched to the school of hard knocks, Hammett wrote four novels in a single burst of creativity from 1927 to 1930. He found himself hailed by André Gide and André Malraux...
...spur him to write nor, according to this intriguing and detailed account by Novelist Diane Johnson (Lying Low), did it change his habits. Despite his proclaimed affection for Hellman, he continued to patronize ladies of the evening and once asked her to join in a threesome (she declined). Hammett admired Marxism more than the U.S. Communist Party but joined a celebrity cell where he indulged in what Budd Schulberg called "dialectical materialism by the pool." In 1951, long after most film radicals had fled the cause, he spent six months in prison for refusing to divulge names in a Communist...
...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...