Word: hammetts
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...mother named her Nora after Ibsen's feminist in A Doll's House, and she certainly slammed the door noisily when leaving her first two marriages. But she and her current husband Nicholas Pileggi are more like Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora -- for one thing, they have been making much of their living off of crime...
...final days Thompson promised his wife that he would be "famous after I'm dead about 10 years." Now he is. His reputation as a hard-boiled novelist is within spitting distance of Hammett's and Chandler's. And finally, Hollywood has discovered the man who wanted desperately to be in the movies. Three Thompson novels have recently become films: James Foley's broody After Dark, My Sweet, Maggie Greenwald's incompetent The Kill-Off and Stephen Frears' The Grifters...
Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often...
Another homage to the era of The Maltese Falcon appears in Buried Caesars (Mysterious Press; 179 pages; $15.95), in which Stuart M. Kaminsky's sleuth Toby Peters is hired by General Douglas MacArthur on a matter of national security and gets a helping hand from Dashiell Hammett on a spree. The volume is one of the sprightliest in the series built around Peters but is overshadowed by A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's; 210 pages; $15.95), which features Kaminsky's other recurring detective, Soviet policeman Porfiry Rostnikov. That sly and assiduous investigator is dispatched to Siberia to look into...
There is also a true relic of the age of pulp: Dashiell Hammett's Woman in the Dark (Knopf; 96 pages; $15.95), overpriced and oversold as a "novel," but compelling on its terms as a sketchbook romance between two losers who share a fierce sense of their own integrity. Other notable reprints include Michael Gilbert's Young Petrella (Harper & Row; 222 pages; $15.95), a collection of magazine stories from the 1950s and '60s that display his trademark Scotland Yard detective with a deadpan precision of mood worthy of Simenon, and A Double Life (Little, Brown; 246 pages; $17.95), short gothic...