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Loading... The Thin Manby Dashiell Hammett
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. doxtator | Jun 1, 2009 |  1   This was a horrible pick for One Book One Denver (as they all have been, IMHO). I got about 97 pages into it, but just couldn't go on. Anyone who has ever facilitated a book club knows not to pick a mystery -- what can you talk about? How can this be a meaningful book for community conversations? Well, I'm finished with it...there are too many good books to waste time on one that's just not grabbing my attention. (  )rfewell | Jan 27, 2009 | “The Thin Man” by Dashiell Hammett is a hard-boiled detective lovers’ dream. Filled with femme fatales, wise cracking hoodlums and quick witted violence Mr. Hammett never fails to serve up a dish of surprise. That he wrote this in the 1930’s and broached hereto taboo subjects such as addiction, incest and homosexuality truly shows off his esoteric panache. A bit against the grain here, I feel the novel is in actuality Nick Charles’ show and that their billed and spun as a modern day sleuthing team is a bit of an over exaggeration, but that’s marketing. (  )BruderBane | Jan 23, 2009 | sorsha | Oct 8, 2008 | A husband and wife detective team solve murder mysteries between martinis. (  )seanj | Jul 8, 2008 | 0.057 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679722637, Paperback)The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett's classic tale of murder in Manhattan, became the popular movie series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, and both the movies and the novel continue to captivate new generations of fans.Nick and Nora Charles, accompanied by their schnauzer, Asta, are lounging in their suite at the Normandie in New York City for the Christmas holiday, enjoying the prerogatives of wealth: meals delivered at any hour, theater openings, taxi rides at dawn, rubbing elbows with the gangster element in speakeasies. They should be annoyingly affected, but they charm. Mad about each other, sardonic, observant, kind to those in need, and cool in a fight, Nick and Nora are graceful together, and their home life provides a sanctuary from the rough world of gangsters, hoodlums, and police investigations into which Nick is immediately plunged. A lawyer-friend asks Nick to help find a killer and reintroduces him to the family of Richard Wynant, a more-than-eccentric inventor who disappeared from society 10 years before. His former wife, the lush and manipulative Mimi, has remarried a European fortune hunter who turns out to be a vindictive former associate of her first husband and is bent on the ruin of Wynant's family fortune. Wynant's children, Dorothy and Gilbert, seem to have inherited the family aversion to straight talk. Dorothy, who has matured into a beautiful young woman, has a crush on Nick, and so, in a hero-worshipping way, does mama's boy Gilbert. Nick and Nora respond kindly to their neediness as Nick tries to make sense of misinformation, false identities, far-fetched alibis, and, at the center of the confusion, the mystery of The Thin Man, Richard Wynant. Is he mad? Is he a killer? Or is he really an eccentric inventor protecting his discovery from intellectual theft? The dialogue is spare, the locales lively, and Nick, the narrator, shows us the players as they are, while giving away little of his own thoughts. No one is telling the whole truth, but Nick remains mostly patient as he doggedly tries to backtrack the lies. Hammett's New York is a cross between Damon Runyon and Scott Fitzgerald--more glamorous than real, but compelling when visited in the company of these two charmers. The lives of the rich and famous don't get any better than this! --Barbara Schlieper (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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A somewhat complicated murder that takes a lot of talking to get to the heart of it, the reader follows Nick Charles around as he deals with all sorts of types. Nick knows when to clam up and when to spill the beans, and his wife Nora is a woman unto herself. As he says, she's alright. She's even better than that.
The narrator does a fine job. He sounds best being Nick, and he does a good job with all the other characters. Really spectacular is how he portrays Dorothy, because he makes her as truly annoying and pouty as she was written.
The language of the day is sometimes a bit vulgar and some of it is no longer acceptable in today's world, but it is an interesting hark back to a different time. The social mores of the time certainly don't mesh with what is acceptable today and there are times where unacceptable language is used, and also a lot of scummy behavior even on the part of what should be the good guys. (