ejm duggan (ejmd@cwcom.net)
Sun, 05 Sep 1999 10:14:50 +0000
On Sat, 4 Sep 1999, William Denton <buff@pobox.com>
wrote:
[SNIP]
> one place it can be found is in Toronto's Globe and
Mail.
Good piece --- an interesting article.
A couple of things worthy of note:
RP suggests that a fault in Hammett's short fiction is that
characters are little more than plot devices ... rather than
see this as a 'fault', I think it's a pretty good analytical
definition of character!
RP finds another fault in the way Hammett wraps up his short
fiction--with the extended confession, or the detective's
explanation: fair comment. RP suggests this occurs because
Hammett writes short fiction at novel pace -- and so runs out
of space.
A final fault RP finds in Hammett is the 'pointlessness' of
some aspects
-- like aimless detection which leads nowhere, and details
such as names or physical attributes not being tied into the
plot. A valid enough point -- *but* it is only in a certain
sort of narrative fiction that one finds a neatly ordered
chain of cause-and-effect. Hammett, I think, was trying to
write something different.
ED
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