Word: hammett
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...Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett's tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred The Odyssey to the American south in the 1930s. But No Country for Old Men is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a prime American novel: Cormac McCarthy's 2005 rumination on the changing ways of crime in West Texas...
...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...
...Hammett, Chandler and James M. Cain all wrote novels that were turned into A pictures (respectively, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity) that still play well today. Spillane, who outsold them all, and I mean all together, should have got some sharp films made from his work, through his power or the law of averages. But the very elements that made him a hot property on the paperback market - the sex and violence - made him too hot for '50s Hollywood. If the studio bosses didn't exactly blacklist Spillane, they didn't rush to film his books...
...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...