On 16 October 2002, Brian Thornton wrote:
: I have to agree, Bill. Of all of Hammett's creations, the
Op is my (and I
: believe his) favorite. "The Girl With The Silver Eyes",
"Fly Paper", "The
: House on Turk Street" are all fabulous, as is my favorite
Hammett short
: story, "The Scorched Face."
I just got to that in the collection, and then "Dead Yellow
Women." This is the stuff! "The Scorched Face" was one of my
favourites, but it had been a while since a I read it. It can
be nice to work through some middling entries in a fair Gold
Medal series, but man, this is the real thing, not just for
hardboiled writing but for all of twentieth century American
writing. Why doesn't Hammett get the "he's so good he's
actually literature--no, really!" essays?
Here's a bit I liked from "Dead Yellow Women" (the Chinatown
stuff from which must have made a lot of the background for
the movie HAMMETT):
| He got out of the taxicab and we crossed to a couple
of
| comfortable-looking boulders on the other side.
| "Where is Lil-Miss Shan?" he asked.
| "Ask the Whistler," I suggested.
| The blond kid wasn't so good. It took him a long time to
get
| his gun out. I let him go through with it.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 17 Oct 2002 EDT