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10 Dashiell Hammett’s Priceless Patter
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Published:May 2022
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Abstract
This chapter takes a look at the works of Dashiell Hammett, including The Thin Man (1934) as well as The Maltese Falcon. It contends that Hammett's strengths are that he does not waste words and does not editorialize, and his simple declarative sentences have a lot in common with Ernest Hemingway's. Hammett can, in short, slam a story shut. Furthermore, if a strength of the classic detective story as practiced by Agatha Christie and Nicholas Blake is the cleverness of the detective in bypassing the blind alleys to arrive at the true, if often outlandishly improbable, solution, in Hammett quite a different pleasure awaits the reader—that of his depiction of a criminal milieu. “Poisonville” is the default landscape of Hammett's imagination, a place lacking the central superego that was considered vital to civilization. Very few of Hammett's characters do the right thing except when it coincides with their own self-interest. Many more are as aloof from the concepts of right and wrong as from those of good and evil.
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