Word: hammett
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...Maltese omelette might be made out of the gems from Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon...
Although it begins with all the standard props of detective fiction, Thomas Berger's eighth novel is a spoof of whodunits only in the sense that Portnoy's Complaint was a redaction of Oedipus Rex. Berger's chief debt is not to the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but to the fiction of the '60s (including his own Little Big Man), written before black humor had been eclipsed by black studies. The convoluted and brazenly preposterous plot of Who Is Teddy Villanova? is simply Berger's excuse to practice verbal gunplay with...
Drawing freely from the classic characters of the whodunnit genre, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marples, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, and Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan are refurbished by Simon and his all-star cast, and introduced as Miss Marples (Elsa Lanchester), Milo Perrier (James Coco), Sam Diamond (Peter Falk), Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith) and Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers). These, "the world's greatest detectives" have been brought together under one roof at the invitation of Mr. Lionel Twain, a fiendishly eccentric, rich, and rather repulsive...
...Chandler's ability to separate the amateur from the prose. Modern Russian literature is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's overcoat; the American detective - from Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer to Gordon Parks' Shaft - enters in Philip Marlowe's trench coat. Even Dashiell Hammett's earlier fictions have not been so pervasive - largely, as Chandler noted, because "his writing has no echo and no tone." Chandler's does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding cake"), his metaphors ("the minutes went...
This approach seemed calculated not merely to ask for trouble but require it. If she agreed to talk about herself, Hellman waived Fifth Amendment protection and invited a contempt citation and jail because of her silence about others. Her lover Dashiell Hammett, who had just served a prison term for contempt, warned her that she was courting a martyrdom much worse than she imagined. He scolded, "Just remember there are rats in jail, and tough dykes, and people who will push you hard just because they like it, and guards who won't admire you, and food...