Benzadmiral
Call Me a Cab
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- The Swamp
Hammett's short stories about the Continental Op are quick, concentrated portions of hardboiled soup, and are often quite good. The longer things like Red Harvest and The Glass Key, well, I've read them and remember little about them. The Maltese Falcon is familiar to all of us from the John Huston movie with Bogart, since so much of its dialogue is used in the script, but reading it takes a little getting used to. (The entire story is told in 3rd person -- we are never shown anyone's thoughts, not even those of Sam Spade. Emotional effects are conveyed by physical movements of the characters.) And The Thin Man seems better as a film. It's not much like the lively funny romp that William Powell and Myrna Loy made it into.I definitely need to read a Hammett now to be fair to him as it's been several years, but my memory is that his descriptions and "mood" setting are very studied and, as a reader, they don't feel organic to me / they feel too obvious. With Chandler, I just get lost in the story.
But there probably would have been no Chandler as we know him without Hammett.