One of the many things I enjoy about Hammett is that he did
not repeat himself. He never wrote the same novel
twice.
Each of his six novels (if you count the two linked
novelettes "The Big Knockover"/"$106,000 Blood Money" as one
of his novels, and I do) differs greatly from his others.
Because of this, when someone tells me they love Hammett or
hate Hammett, I ask, "Which Hammett novels have you read?"
For each of the six, someone has named it and told me it was
great or it was Hammett's best novel, but someone else said
the same book was Hammett's worst.
In fact, when I was on a panel about Hammett a couple of
years ago, an audience member asked us jointly, "What is your
favorite Hammett novel, and why?" and between us we named 4
different favorite Hammett novels. And our reasons why were
completely distinct.
Which leads me to one of the other things I enjoy about
Hammett. His work says different things to different readers.
When I look at what people write about his work or what they
say about it, their comments often tell me more about them
than about Hammett.
Vince Emery Specialist in marketing communications Author,
public speaker, teacher, and consultant Box 460279, San
Francisco, CA 94146 USA
vince@emery.com Phone 1.415.337.6000
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # 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 : 04 Dec 2003 EST