Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...rarely is. It has served its purpose in making it possible for a number of conspicuously intelligent folk to perform conspicuously idiotic but wholly enthralling feats through 250 pages or more. One's enjoyment of the recent tale of murder and psychoanalysis, from the pen of Mr. Ben Hecht, is neither augmented nor impaired by the eventual disentanglement of its complexities. It is the quaint, initial assassination itself, the atmosphere of brooding horror, the haunted eyes of De Medici, that fling the reader of The Florentine Dagger (TIME, Sept. 3) into a bewildered Nirvana of goose flesh and insomnia...
...remember seeing Hecht in his own house, a figure of some domesticity, with his wife and children; relating rapidly anecdotes gleaned from a rather grotesque variety of facts which he has gathered from years of constant, voracious, exotic reading. He was really a person of much charm. I looked forward to his first novel. Erik Dorn was a disappointment to me. It had passages of power; but its vulgarity and carelessness overbalanced them. Gargoyles I liked even less. Hecht is a brilliant, flaunting, ironic and not yet so very stable figure. What he does in the future seems...
...Hecht...
...Hecht is always about to embark upon a new enterprise. His dark eyes, nervous movements, ejaculatory speech, bitter mind, all suddenly are brought to bear upon the impossible and it is accomplished. He does too much. His plays just miss being brilliant. His novels suffer from a lack of taste which would undoubtedly be ironed out in a second writing. When he started to write a Rabelaisian fantasy in Fantazius Mallare he was only adolescent in his pornography and was consequently affected. His last book, a detective story, The Florentine Dagger, he claims to have written in ten hours...
...Chicago Literary Times is edited by Ben Hecht with assistance from Maxwell Boderiheirn. The current issue of this periodical speaks of The New Republic and The Nation (pink politico-literary weeklies published in New York) as " two waltzing poodles bombinating humorlessly...