Victoria Esposito-Shea (vmes@northnet.org)
Thu, 28 Oct 1999 22:10:22 -0400
: What makes "The Thin Man" a better novel than "The Dain
Curse"? As far
: as I'm concerned, "The Thin Man" is almost unreadable -
there's no
: coherence at all and it wasn't a serial like the Dain
book. Without
: the charming Nick and Nora films I'd like to forget
that "The Thin Man"
: even exists.
Honestly? When I read The Dain Curse--and I've probably
re-read it twenty-some times over seventeen (or so) years--I
always get the feeling that Hammett was stretching the book
too thin. Just look at the locales--he's going from
mainstream San Fransisco to the interior of a cult to rural
California--and the characters: escaped convicts, fake
preachers, insane writers, a seriously dysfunctional family,
magicians' stage hands. .
.
Certainly Red Harvest is a model of chaotic plotting, but
it's all in one place, with a fairly consistent set of people
(up till they get killed off, anyway) and one final
destination. The Dain Curse doesn't even have a final
destination or, as James said, a convincing denouement--it
was all Alice's fault! Whoops, now it was all Joseph's fault!
Whoops, maybe it really was Gabrielle all along! Sometimes it
feels like one of those really bad monster movies, where you
think the creature's dead and then it rises again and kills
some more people, and then someone else doesn't quite finish
it off, and you sit there going, "Come on already, let's get
this thing over with!"
I think that the consistent characters & locale in Thin
Man are what keep it together also. You've got one set of
people and one setting, and that helps keep the reader
reasonably together & focused, no matter how odd it all
gets. The Dain Curse just doesn't have that kind of
grounding. It's fun--the Op is my favorite Hammett
protagonist--but that's about it.
Vicky
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