Mark Sullivan:
> Craft doesn't change? I beg to differ. Written in a
different time,
> Hemingway's or Hammett's stripped-down writing might
very well have been
> considered bad craft.
Noted critic and author Edmund Wilson(To the Finland Station,
Memoirs of Hecate County) in a 1944 essay wrote, "Mr
Hammett...infused the old formula of Sherlock Holmeswith a
certain underworld brutality which gave readers a new shudder
in the days when it was fashionable to be interested in
gangsters; but beyond this, he lacked the ability to bring
the story to imaginite life.As a writer he is surely almost
as far below the rank of Rex Stout as as Rex Stout is below
that of James Cain. The Maltese Falcon today seems not much
above those newspaper picture-strips in which you follow from
day to day the ups and downs of a stron-jaed hero(Dick
Tracy?) and a hard boiled adventuress.
Of course he was not a fan of the detective story
as the title of another of his essays,' Who care who killed
Roger Ackroyd?', would suggest. As Mark suggests a book or
piece of art may be ignored or attacked when it is first
released, but be looked on as a classic thirty years later.
Similarly many books that are extensively praised when new
may be later forgotten. Mark .
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