(Since the beginning of 2008 I've been writing an ongoing series of essays here that I call the "CCLaP 100," whereby I read for the first time a hundred books considered by many to be classics, and then write reports here on whether or not I think they deserve this label. For the complete list of books, as well as an explanation behind how the list was compiled, you can click here.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the labelEssay #69: The Thin Man (1934), by Dashiell HammettThe story in a nutshell:Originally published in 1934 as what would turn out to be the last book of his career, Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man essentially takes the premise of his earlier "hardboiled" detective stories and turns it on its head; it's the story of former hardboiled detective Nick Charles, who four years previous had actually managed to get a feisty yet upper-class socialite to marry him, and who retired from the gumshoe business in order to be the financial manager of her large inherited portfolio of assets (including real estate, working mines and more). But on a rare vacation to New York (his former stomping grounds before moving to San Francisco after the wedding), Nick finds himself pulled into a new investigation against his will, as a scheming middle-aged former client and her manipulative daughter practically beg him to look into the disappearance of the alimony-late divorced former patron of the family (the "thin man" of the book's title), then proceed to tell the press, the police, and all the man's former enemies that Charles is officially on the case even though he's not, causing most of the darkly comedic messes that follow; and with his wife Nora never having gotten to see Nick in action before, she gleefully does everything she can to up the chaos even more, a bloodlusty gleam in her eye every time a gangster pulls a gun on them or during any other kind of life-threatening situation they seem to constantly find themselves in. As with most crime novels, the event-filled plot is best left as much a surprise as possible; but needless to say that many cocktails are imbibed, many bon mots are quipped, many punches are thrown and many complications are caused by the Charles' disobedient dog; and in the end it all works out okay for our newly famous heroes Nick and Nora, paving the way for the many movie and TV sequels to come.The argument for it being a classic:There are two main arguments for why this should be a classic, one more important among genre fans and one more often cited by academes; because to tackle the bigger and more famous argument first, crime fans say that Hammett essentially invented the hardboiled detective genre nearly singlehandedly, paving the way for what is now a billion-dollar industry and arguably the one most popular literary genre of them all here in the early 2000s. (Arguably!) Now, of course, there had already been lots of books before concerning the committing of crimes and the solving of them -- in fact, as we've seen earlier in this essay series, it was the early Victorians who invented the premise with their so-called "Newgate novels" (named for a famous London jail where many of these books were set), which after a public morals uproar morphed into "sensation novels" (in which the naughty fun of Newgate stories were mixed with the moodiness of Gothic literature, and moved into the realm of middle-class homes), which then eventually morphed into the noir and hardboiled genres we know today -- which brings us to the second, more academic argument for why this is a classic: that Hammett was one of the first crime writers to bring the clipped, slang-heavy, rat-a-tat writing style of Early Modernism to the genre, both inspiring and being inspired by such non-genre peers as Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Henry Miller, and basically bringing a kind of intellectual respect (if not the guilty-pleasure kind) to what had been the decidedly childish world of genre literature.The argument against:Only one major one, but one that you see argued a lot; that Hammett simply wasn't a good enough writer to be considered for the classics canon, a ham-fisted semi-amateur who just happened to get popular because of accidentally being the first person to write in this hackneyed style, but who was easily superseded in quality by people like Raymond Chandler not even one generation later. Plus there's a minor argument as well that you see over and over from online critics -- that Hammett was the originator of the overly complicated crime-novel plot, a bad addition to this genre that essentially drove away an entire chunk of its former audience, and that led to the ridiculously convoluted "whodunit" storylines of most modern murder novels.My verdict:So before anything else, let's just acknowledge that I should've actually reviewed Hammett's The Maltese Falcon if I had wanted a better look at what constituted the bulk of Hammett's career, in that The Thin Man is actually a lighthearted and comedic take on the overly serious, overly macho titles that make up most of his oeuvre; but it just so happens that I already read The Maltese Falcon when younger, and as regular readers remember, the entire original point of this CCLaP 100 series was to give me an excuse to read a hundred so-called classic novels that I never had before, simply so that I could become better informed as a book reviewer. And in fact, simply from a historical perspective, Hammett might be one of the most interesting writers I've come across yet in this essay series, because he tied together so many loose threads that existed in both the literary world and the popular culture in general, right at a time when these threads most needed tying together so to turn into something brand new for a "modern" time.See, for those who don't know, even the concept itself of a "city police department" wasn't thought of for the first time until the 1830s; and until the 20th century, such police forces remained basically exercises in amateur buffoonery, leaving it to such cash-flush, discipline-heavy, forensics-obsessed private groups as the Pinkerton detective agency whenever a person actually needed a major crime solved. And Hammett just happened to have been a Pinkerton agent for years and years in his youth; so right at the beginning of the 20th century when these city police departments did finally start getting actually competent at their jobs, and all these former Pinkerton and other agents started going into business for themselves, shifting their focus to more domestic situations like philandering spouses and purloined jewelry, Hammett just happened to be in the exact right position and have the exact right experiences to start penning a series of stories romanticizing this new freelance activity, and it was his five novels and dozens of short stories that pretty much almost single-handedly established most of the "private eye" tropes we even think of anymore when we think of the genre.I mean, yes, technically his critics are right, that Hammett's writing is overly pulpy and with overly complicated plots; but in many ways that's the entire point, that even the professor-loved Pulitzer winners of these years were adding such dramatic stylistic rebellions against Victorianism to their work, leading to the first time in the novel's history where the lowbrow and highbrow mixed so complexly that it was hard to tell them apart, which itself led both to the academic recognition of genre literature for the first time, and to the general shift in global literary dominance in those years to the United States (where this highbrow/lowbrow mixing largely took place, and became a source of endless fascination for culturally hamstrung European artists). It's the witty, fast-paced aspect of Hammett's work that is the very reason it should most be admired; and when combined with its profound effect on popular culture in general (like I said, Nick and Nora Charles eventually became the subjects of six extremely successful Hollywood movies and a 1950s television series, which then profoundly influenced nearly every other detective novel that came out in those years), plus Hammett's own tragically romantic real life (he lived for another 25 years after writing this, but medical problems exacerbated by his runaway alcoholism stopped him from finishing a single other book), is what leads me today to enthusiastically declare The Thin Man an undeniable classic that all of you should read at least once before you die.Is it a classic? Yes(And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)
Somehow I never saw this movie or read this book during my six-month crime noir kick in ninth grade (though I did read Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key aroud that time). But, boy, I'm glad that I've read it now. The Thin Man is the last novel Hammett completed (though he started or pretended to start a half-dozen others) and it has the feel of being a parady of his other novellas and the 1930s crime genre in general. It is fabulously funny - as in, I couldn't go two pages without trying to read something outloud to Ben. As in the protagonists, Nick and Nora Charles, have the most wonderful, fun, and loving time ever while they solve murders together. I'm talking about more drinking, more intrigue, more mysertious dames, and more witty dialogue than all of his other works put together. Of course, these were my thoughts before reading the detailed chronology/short biography of Hammett in the back of the book. Surely, I thought while reading the novel, much of the humor comes from the ABSURD number of martinis, affairs, suspects, and drama that clutters every page. But after reading about Dashiell Hammett's life, it seems like this might have been his most realistic novel. His chronology includes, in between novel releases and movie adaptations, such phrases as "1931: drinks heavily and has many affairs." "1920: serves as Pinkerton Operative." "1947: moves in with daughter Mary Jane; both drink heavily." "1953: Questioned by Senator McCarthy about donating royalties to the Communist Party." "1932: Found guilty of battery and rape of actress Elise De Vianne." "1934: Signs contract with MGM in october for a second movie in the Thin Man series. Drinks heavily." This chronology goes on for TEN PAGES and includes more affairs, benders, posh apartments, debt collectors, trials, political intrigue, and detective work than in an entire season of Law & Order. It made me see the book a bit differently - to appreciate it even more, really. For Hammett to treat these subjects lightly - subjects that were at the very time tearing his life and career apart - give the book the feeling of a fantasy - a sort of fairy tale noir. As if Nick and Nora Charles live in a parallel universe where "cutting the phlegm" with a few whiskys in the morning is okay, where smooth talking can get you out of trouble with creditors and the law, and where bullets always only manage to graze and annoy you. I like to imagine Hammett - with all of the drama of his life swirling around him - smiling and laughing as he wrote his novel. Just really having a good time. I don't know if that's true or not, but I had a good time reading it.
What do You think about The Thin Man (1989)?
I wasn't aware of this previously, but apparently you just gotta slap a dame when they get hysterical. The things you learn when you read hard-boiled fiction."The Thin Man" was read as an attempt to get into the mindset of noir, since a friend of mine is asking me to write him a script in the style. It's one of my first encounters with crime fiction from that era, and I came away generally amused.Nick Charles is on vacation with his wife Nora. He doesn't want to solve a mystery. He wants to drink, and have fun, and quite specifically not get answers. The trouble is that people he's acquainted with keep showing up, because apparently he's the right man for the job when a woman shows up dead.Dashiel Hammet is a good man to read if you want to study fun dialogue. Nick and Nora engage in the sort of banter that we normal people wish we were having. His stalwart refusal to tell anyone exactly what he may or may not know leads to lots of enjoyable circuitous dialogue in which people keep pressing him for information.There are some real hallmarks of the era in this book. For starters, the aforementioned sexism, which fortunately is counter-balanced by Nora, who's actually a surprisingly progressive character. She tags along through most of the investigation providing sass and observations, and it made me wish more detectives had such classy accompaniment.What really took me by surprise was the odd sophistication of it. Most of the story is about conversations, and it really is a study of manners and class as Charles goes between well-off families in nice rooms to thugs and goons in run down apartments and speakeasies. It's a well rounded perspective on the city life of the area.The drinking is also amusing. By any normal standard most of the characters would be drunk through most of the story. I think it may have been fantasy at the time, since the book was released not long before prohibition was ended, and people wanted to read about rich people getting plastered in nice hotel rooms.Here's a game you can play at home while reading: Take a shot every time a character in the book takes a drink. See how long it takes you before you experience alcohol poisoning.
—Nicholas Karpuk
I invented a new drinking game based on The Thin Man and tried to give it a test run when I re-read it. The rules were simple, every time that main character Nick Charles took a drink, I’d take one, too. However, I had to be taken to the hospital for treatment of extreme alcohol poisoning by the second chapter. So don’t try that.Nick used to be a private detective in New York, but he left that behind when he married Nora and moved to California to take over the management of the various businesses her father left her. Why couldn’t Nora run them herself? Because this was 1933 so in addition to casual alcoholism being an accepted part of everyday life, the lady folks weren’t going to be left in charge of something as important as business. Ah, the good ole days…Nick and Nora are on a Christmas vacation trip back to New York when Nick bumps into the daughter of an old client of his, Clyde Wynatt. Wynatt has gone missing and a woman associated him was murdered so everyone from the family to Wynatt’s lawyer to the cops think that Nick is working the case. Nick would prefer to just do some more drinking, but Nora is intrigued by the idea of watching her husband play detective and other events transpire to pull Nick into reluctantly investigating in between glasses of whiskey.Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest are two of my favorite detective novels as well as being considered classics of the genre. This one shows off a bit of his versatility in that it reads as a witty comedy with a dash of murder rather than a hard boiled mystery. The banter between Nick and Nora is fun, and his casual remarks about needing a drink with breakfast just to “cut the phlegm” make for their own kind of anachronistic amusement. The mystery is kind of a convoluted mess, but Hammett managed to tie it all together with a resolution that makes sense. It’s not my favorite book of his, but it’s got a dated charm that makes it a fun read. 3.65 stars.
—Kemper
Audiobook performed by William DufrisNick and Nora Charles are spending the Christmas and New Year’s holidays in New York. Having cocktails one evening they run across a young woman whose father once employed Nick as a detective. The girl hasn’t seen her father in quite a while and hopes that Nick can help, but he’s no longer in the detective business, so refers her to her father’s lawyer. The next day the lawyer, Herbert Macauley, calls on Nick and asks him if he’s working for the Wynant family. Seems that “screwy inventor” Clyde Wynant has gone missing and his wife and children are trying to find him. Nick assures him he’s not working ANY case, let alone this one. But a day later the newspapers report that Wynant’s secretary was found shot to death in her apartment. Wynant is the chief suspect … or is it his ex-wife Mimi … or his son Gil … or the thin man? No matter how hard he tries to stay out of it, Nick is embroiled in the case.This is a delightful mystery and a sophisticated comedy of manners all in one. Nick and Nora are wonderful characters – calm and cool, rich and glamorous, full of wisecracks and martinis. I loved their witty banter and unflappable natures. The story is convoluted and full of red herrings. Hammett has the reader chasing just about every character as a suspect. The final reveal was a complete surprise to me, and only after Nick laid out the case did I understand all the clues. William Dufris is marvelous performing the audio version. He has a gift for voices and really brings this large cast to life. He even does a good job of the young Dorothy Wynant (though her whiny voice irritated me that was the character as Hammett wrote her, not Dufris’ interpretation).
—Book Concierge
