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Loading... Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The…by Dashiell Hammett
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Each of these stories is engaging and well-written. I wasn't sure if The Thin Man would be as witty as the movie - it was. The Glass Key and Red Harvest are glimpses into towns filled with corruption and vice. No one is innocent and no one is really a "good guy". The Maltese Falcon introduces us to Sam Spade - quite a shady character. The weakest offering is The Dain Curse. It's interesting but a bit too convoluted and challenging to follow. Despite that, I love this compilation and recommend it for all fans of hard boiled detective fiction. (  )drlake66 | Jan 20, 2009 |   At first, I couldn't get into Hammett as I could Raymond Chandler. Chandler writes so beautifully, you just sink into it, even if the plot makes no sense. Hammett, on the other hand, can't be pinned down so easy. He goes from the Maltese Falcon, which is somewhat like a Chandler book, to the Thin Man, which is very different in tone, and in between, you have the Glass Key, which seems to float in some sort of borderland between waking and dreams. When you read these books in order and you come to that one, you expect the story to become more normal at some point, but it never does. Chandler wrote the same novel (to a large extent) each time--Hammett never wrote the same one twice. Strange then that he gave up on writing so early - or maybe that is the reason. He wasn't content to do the same thing over and over. (Please don't think I'm knocking Chandler - I give him five star reviews also. He is a superior stylist to Hammett -- indeed, he is one of the great writers in the English language. But he wasn't as creative when it came to plots and settings. He used the same character in each of his novels, unlike Hammett, whose protagonists may share some traits, but are hardly the same.) ( )datrappert | Nov 26, 2008 | Spent something like a month reading this. Even though the individual novels are somewhat short, getting through 700+ pages wasn’t easy for me. (Full review at my blog) (  )KingRat | Jun 16, 2008 | Six novels in six years! Has there ever been their like. True, there are patterns: the mysterious, often unnamed protagonist (Just the :Operative" in the red Harvest; Sam Spade, of course, in The Maltese Falcon) with power and influence whose source is never explained; uneven portraits of the police, but uniformly tough, sometimes cruel, never there first; sexy women, albeit never graphic sexual descriptions, except a minor one in The Thin Man. Occasionally made fusty by age, they nevertheless hold up – for the tight dialogue, for the cynicism about municipal corruption (esp. Red Harvest), and unrelenting noir quality (except for The Thin Man), a comedy of sort albeit bordering on fantasy. (  )dcnorm1 | Apr 7, 2007 | My dad sent me this multiple-novel edition when I was living in Ecuador and would get pretty hungry for books written in English. I had never really heard of Dashiell Hammett, but once I had his books in my hand, I pretty much read all five novels in one sitting. My roommate probably thought I was in a coma, I sat still so long. Whenever I read a little Hammett, I start wanting to talk about "dames" and drink mixed drinks. I love all of his books, but if you can only read ONE, I suggest /The Thin Man/, first because it has a married couple as the PI, and second because the characters guzzle alcohol at the rate of about 2 mixed drinks per paragraph, a ratio I have never before seen, even in memoirs about serious alcoholism. It's fantastic. If these were real people, none of them would have livers by the time they were forty pages in. ( )nefernika | Jan 24, 2007 | 0.042 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0517338416, Hardcover)Complete in one volume, the five books that created the modern American crime novelIn a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel. In the words of Raymond Chandler, "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes." The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules and characteristic tone for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing. Drawing on his own experiences as a Pinkerton detective, Hammett gave a harshly realistic edge to novels that were at the same time infused with a spirit of romantic adventure. His lean and deliberately simplified prose won admiration from such contemporaries as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Each novel is distinct in mood and structure. Red Harvest (1929) epitomizes the violence and momentum of his Black Mask stories about the anonymous detective the Continental Op, in a raucous and nightmarish evocation of political corruption and gang warfare in a western mining town. In The Dain Curse (1929) the Op returns in a more melodramatic tale involving jewel theft, drugs, and a religious cult. With The Maltese Falcon (1930) and its protagonist Sam Spade, Hammett achieved his most enduring popular success, a tightly constructed quest story shot through with a sense of disillusionment and the arbitrariness of personal destiny. The Glass Key (1931) is a further exploration of city politics at their most scurrilous. His last novel was The Thin Man (1934), a ruefully comic tale paying homage to the traditional mystery form and featuring Nick and Nora Charles, the sophisticated inebriates who would enjoy a long afterlife in the movies. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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