My review of this very useful book for Swets and Zeitlinger's
_Annotated Bibliography for English Studies_ (available
online for a fee at www.swets.nl) is below. It's rather
tailored to the needs of the database, but I should add that
if you want the key essays on Hammett over the last fifty
years, this is your place to start. There's a similar volume
on Raymond Chandler edited by JK Van Dover.
Cheers Chris
Mettress, Christopher The Critical Response to Dashiell
Hammett Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1994
This book is the first collection of critical writing
dedicated to Dashiell Hammett. It contains critical essays
and reviews covering sixty-five years of Hammett criticism,
and is divided up into sections on the novels 'Red Harvest',
'The Dain Curse', 'The Maltese Falcon', 'The Glass Key', and
'The Thin Man', as well as a final section containing more
general writing on Hammett and his work. It contains a
chronology, and an extensive bibliography of additional
reading.
As a
resource, the book will appeal to students of Hammett at all
levels, but particularly to university students and beginning
researchers. It contains reviews from newspaper sources
contemporary with each novel, extracts from the key critical
and biographical works on the writer, as well as some of the
more theoretical academic articles on his work. The effect of
the variety of material contained in the book is to reveal
agreements and divergences between academic and newspaper
critics, and so present a well-balanced overview of Hammett's
changing critical fortunes and status.
Several of
the essays and extracts in the book are reviewed elsewhere in
this database. They include 'Jameson, Genre and Gumshoes' by
Jasmine Jong Hall, 'The Simple Art of Murder', by Raymond
Chandler and 'Adventure, Mystery, and Romance', by John G.
Cawelti. (chrout)
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