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RARA-AVIS: Introduction
Hello! I should introduce myself -- my name's Matt Stevens. My main
interests are in the hard-boiled fiction of the pulp era -- Hammett and
Chandler (of course), but also Paul Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Robert
Leslie Bellem, and a few
others. (I'm also partial to Ross MacDonald and Jim Thompson, among
other, later authors.) If asked to choose, I prefer Hammett to Chandler,
although I'm quite fond of both authors. (What do people think of Joyce
Carol Oates' screed against Chandler in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, a
year or two ago?)
Oh, I have a modest pulp page at http://www.columbia.edu/~mfs10/pulp.html,
and I've made a few modest contributions to William Denton's Glossary of
Hard-Boiled Slang (all lifted from a single Dan Turner story).
I have a few questions about Hammett for anyone who wants to answer them
...
1) Peter Haining's book, THE FANTASTIC PULPS, includes a story called
"The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody." It's attributed to Dashiell Hammett;
Haining says it was published in BLACK MASK magazine in 1924, but I can't
find an entry for it in any other list of Hammett's works. Was this story
written by Hammett, or by somebody else?
2) When I saw the film "MILLER'S CROSSING," by the Coen brothers (a
damn fine film, by the way), the similarities between the story and THE
GLASS KEY were glaringly obvious to me. Have the Coen brothers ever
acknowledged their debt to Hammett? Or are the similarities purely
coincidental?
3) One pulp dealer I know insisted that the Bruce Willis subplot in
PULP FICTION was taken from a Hammett story. Is there any truth to this?
(I'm skeptical, myself.)
Matt
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