Word: hammett
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...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...
These are the essentials for obstinate individualism, a national trait elevated to a romance that not only endures but thrives. The literary descendants of Chandler and his contemporaries James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett have unleashed stalkers of the urban wildernesses across the country. Parker and George V. Higgins cover Boston; Elmore Leonard and Loren D. Estleman have a lock on Detroit; Stephen Greenleaf and Bill Pronzini have staked out San Francisco, and Washington is in the hands of Ross Thomas. In Cincinnati, the territory belongs to Jonathan Valin...
Tough investigators are concentrated mostly in New York and in California, the Olduvai Gorge of the chivalrous gumshoe. By far the best known are the West Coast trio of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent...
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...