Word: hammetts
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...Gores, a three-time winner of the Edgar award, is best known for his hard- boiled thrillers. His semibiographical novel Hammett became a film produced by Francis Coppola and helped shift his career toward scriptwriting, notably for such TV series as Kojak and Magnum, P.I. Gores' novel Come Morning, his first in eight years, displays a heightened visual awareness: it blends precise research into prison life, the gem market and rock climbing with outlandishly risky escapades, including a scene in which the hero circumvents a security system by mounting an elevator cable and skittering along a momentarily inactive high-tension...
...something in a novel. Bradbury calls it Death Is a Lone- ly Business, and he dedicates the work to such masters of the form as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are about as close to this beachfront vaudeville as Mars and Saturn are to Pluto (the Disney dog, not the planet). It hardly matters. All of the productions, from Something Wicked This Way Comes to The Martian Chronicles, are portions sawed from a long plank called Bradbury. Brief or full length, they bear the characteristic fine grain, knots, splinters and warps...
...this time. Blood Simple (the title comes from Dashiell Hammett) works terse, elegant variations on a theme as old as the Fall; it subverts the film noir genre in order to revitalize it; it offers the satisfactions and surprises of a conniving visual style. Most important, it displays the whirligig wit of two young men--Joel Coen, 30, a graduate of New York University film school, and his brother Ethan, 27--in a debut film as scarifyingly assured as any since Orson Welles was just this wide...
...dismissal of Moby Dick. Stephen Crane finished The Red Badge of Courage in his place on 23rd Street. Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locust worked as night manager in the Kenmore Hotel near by. He used to sneak pals of his into the hotel, including Dashiell Hammett, who was working on The Maltese Falcon at the time...
...honor was another manifestation of the literary silence, posing as bravery, that lasted until his death of lung cancer in 1961. The act convinced no one, least of all his biographer. Johnson regards her subject without illusion. She knows that inspiration can arrive and vanish without cause and that Hammett's chief tragedy was in holding himself accountable for something beyond his gifts or character. Even so, as she sees it, he showed a streak of heroism, not in his work so much as in "the long blank years that prove the spirit." That kind of exit line...