Dashiell Hammett launched a new style of detection fiction in America: bitter, tough and unsentimental, reflecting the violence of the time.
Does his prose have the polish, (albeit streetwise) and meat of an essay by Bacon or a poem by Donne, both of whom also lived in an age of violence and transition?
Comparing Hammett to those two is like comparing ....
hot dogs to oranges .... If you want to compare the Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man, or Red Harvest to anything, set them against Chandler's The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell My Lovely. It is somewhat ironic that Bogart played the protagonist in the best of both authors, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in the Big Sleep. Trying to pit Sam Spade against John Donne is an untenable reach. And you'll find that Raymond Chandler's writing has more polish than Hammett's.
Last edited by dfloyd; 03-08-2010 at 09:49 AM.
Actually I agree with the observations you make. Chandler acknowledged quite openly his appreciation of Hammett & the trail blazing he undertook. No longer the corpse contrived as a pre-requisite to a detective novel based in an English country house where one dressed in tweeds & ate wafer thin cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed. Chandler said something along the lines that Hammett "took murder out from the Venetian vase & dropped it into the alley." Mind you Hammett had been many years with the Pinkerton Agency & thus had a good grounding in the basics of authenticity.
I think that Hammett ha more subtlety than most essayists. Essayists lay out their thoughts directly, while Hammett revealed the facts as they need to be revealed.
Hammett was a very good writer, and i happened to have read "The Simple Art of Murder" last week, so I understand Chandler's thoughts on the matter, and I agree with him. Detective stories are a special sub-genre, and not many people have done a good job in it. Hammett was one who did.
I particularly like Chandlers point in "The Simple Art of Murder" where he writes:
"There are no "classics" of crime and detection. Within its frame of reference which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principle reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel"
That was written in 1950. Does it still stand? I don't know. Sometimes I think the Ed McBain series came close but still lacked the consummate ability of Chandler.
I've listened to a lot of McBain's stories on cd .....
and while he is enjoyable, he's not in the same class as Chandler. But hardly anybody is. Chandler admired Hammett, and he followed his precepts. However, Hammett couldn't write dialog as well as Chandler. And Chandler's similes, which have become known as Chandlerisms, standout like a tarantuala on a piece of angel food, to borrow from Chandler.
Don't get me wrong, I love Hammett, especially The Maltese Falcon. I have probably seen the movie twenty times. Even the characters names are classic: Bridgette O'Shaugnessy, Joel Cairo, Gutman, the Gunsel (Elisha Cook Jr just passed away a short time ago). In fact I think Bogart and Mary Astor were better than Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep.
Get both on DVD and watch them as a double feature. Life doesn't get any better.
That definition of a classic is somewhat over the top.
Thanks dfloyd. I will get those DVD's & put them right up there with my worn out "Casablanca".
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