Mystery Monday: Dashiell Hammett's Thin Man

Mystery Monday: Dashiell Hammett Thin Man

Thanks to novelist Dashiell Hammett (whose 125^th birthday past last month), hard-boiled detective fiction came into its own during the 1930s. Devised a decade earlier by Carroll John Daly, the genre typically features an anti-hero protagonist, such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, and Mike Hammer, organized crime, prohibition, a corrupt legal system, and inept police departments.

Hammett’s last fiction book was The Thin Man and featured Nick Charles, reluctant detective. First published in Redbook Magazine in 1933, the story came out in book-form the following year. The difference about Nick Charles is his “soft, gooey inside.” He may be a serious, yet cynical PI, but when it comes to his wife Nora, he’s solicitous, loving, and overly affectionate. At the time, their witty banter was a new twist in the genre not seen in Chandler, Greene, or prior Hammett novels.

Hollywood knew a hit when they saw one, and they eagerly offered the author $40,000 for the rights to the characters that scholars posit were based on Hammett himself and his mistress Lillian Hellman. Two sequels followed the first, but the remaining three movies were not made until after WWII (when Myrna Loy returned to Hollywood after leaving to serve with the Red Cross).

Initially serving on the “Keep America Out of War Committee,” Hammett attempted to re-enlist after the attack on Pearl Harbor. According to one source, he was “a WWI veteran, a victim of tuberculosis, and a Communist, but he pulled strings and managed to be admitted.” However he managed to get in, he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands where he edited an Army newspaper The Adakian. Later, he co-authored a book The Battle of the Aleutians with Cpl. Robert Colodny.

Hammett lived another twenty-five years after writing The Thin Man, but he never published another story.

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May 1942: Geneva Alexander flees Philadelphia and joins the USO to escape the engagement her parents have arranged for her, only to wind up as the number one suspect in her betrothed’s murder investigation. Diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease, she must find the real killer before she loses her sight…or is convicted for a crime she didn’t commit.

Set in the early days of America’s entry into WWII and featuring cameo appearances from Hollywood stars, Murder of Convenience is a tribute to individuals who served on the home front, especially those who did so in spite of personal difficulties, reminding us that service always comes as a result of sacrifice. Betrayal, blackmail, and a barrage of unanswered questions… Murder of Convenience is the first in Linda Shenton Matchett’s exciting “Women of Courage” series.

Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/2MBfA6S

Mystery Monday: The Thin Man

Mystery Monday: The Thin Man

I was introduced to The Thin Man series during my teen years. My father and I spent many a Saturday night watching classics on the television. The on-screen chemistry of William Powell and Myrna Loy was so natural, I often forgot I was watching a scripted movie. Hollywood producers and directors must have agreed, because Powell and Loy were paired in fourteen films, most of which were highly successful.

Before The Thin Man was a movie, it was a book by Dashiell Hammett. Originally published in the December 1933 issue of Redbook magazine, it came out in book form the following month.  Hammett never published sequels to the story, although he did help with the screenplays for two of the movies based on his beloved Nick and Nora Charles.

Dashiell Hammett is considered one of the greatest writers of the Golden Age of Detective fiction, and in fact, many would call him the finest mystery writers of all-time. He authored dozens of novels and short stories, and his characters Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man) are some of the most well-known characters in the mystery world.

Shadow of the Thin Man came out in 1941, two weeks prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor. It had been two years since Another Thin Man had been released, and audiences were anxious for the next installment. Despite the film’s success, The Thin Man Goes Home would not come out until after the war. In January 1942, Myrna Loy left Hollywood to volunteer with the Red Cross.

Mystery Monday: Author Helen Eustis

At a time when mystery books seemed to be split into two schools – the hard-boiled detective story (think Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) or the cozy whodunit (Agatha Christie), author Helen Eustis burst on the scene with a new type of mystery fiction – psychological suspense. Her books featured innovative plots and commentary on gender and class issues of the 1940s and 1950s.

Born in Cincinnati, OH on January 31, 1916, Ms. Eustis passed away in January of this year. After a stint in business school, she graduated from Smith College in 1938. She then pursued a doctorate in English at Columbia University before giving up her studies in favor of a writing career.

She was not a prolific fiction writer – only publishing seven novels during her career. But when she did write fiction, her work did well. Nineteen forty seven was a good year for her. The Horizontal Man won the Edgar for best first novel, and her short story An American Home received an O'Henry Prize. Her novel The Fool Killer was adapted into a 1965 film starring Anthony Perkins and Edward Albert.

When asked about her motivation in creating her characters in The Horizontal Man, a story in which a philandering English professor is murdered at a small college replete with psychologically unstable students and professors, she said she wrote it “because she knew so many people in college she would like to murder.”

In addition to her mystery novels, Ms. Eustis wrote for Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker and other magazines. In later years she translated books written in French by authors including Christiane Rochefort and Georges Simenon.

Consider picking up one of these fascinating reads.

Traveling Tuesdays: Dashiell Hammett and The Battle of the Aleutians

Nearly fifty years old and already famous for his hard-boiled detective stories, Dashiell Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. He was a disabled veteran of WWII and suffered from tuberculosis, but chose to serve anyway. Due to his membership in the Communist Party, it took some “string pulling” to get admitted. A sergeant, he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands where he edited an Army newspaper, The Adakian. 

The Aleutian Islands, a chain of fourteen large and fifty five small volcanic islands, are a mere 1,750 miles from Tokyo. Owned by both the U.S. and Russian, they are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire where the weather is extreme and the wildlife diverse. According to Hammett “There was a gauge to measure the wind, but it only measured up to 110 miles an hour, and that was not always enough.”

In June 1942, the Japanese attacked a U.S. military base in Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island and went on to occupy two far western islands in the chain. The U.S. responded to the attack, and the battle raged for over a year-in the air and on land and sea. Conditions were brutal and the fighting was fierce, and the Japanese were finally defeated in July 1943.

Hammett’s assignment was to keep the troops informed of current events, and his articles sometimes read like one of his novels as seen in the following passage:

“And then trouble came, a williwaw, the sudden wild wind of the Aleutians. Nobody knows how hard the wind can blow along these islands where the Bering meets the Pacific…the first morning the wind stopped landing operations with only a portion of our force ashore and by noon, had piled many of the landing boats on the beach. The men ashore had no tents, no shelters of any kind. They dug holes in the ground and crawled into them for protection against wind and rain and cold. When the wind had quieted enough to let the others come ashore, they too dug holes and lived like that while the cold, wet and backbreaking work of unloading ships by means of small boats went on. And they did what they had to do. They built an airfield. They built and airfield in twelve days.”

While in Alaska, Hammett co-authored The Battle of the Aleutians and composed myriad letters to his girlfriend, Lillian Hellman, in which he wrote detailed descriptions of life and living conditions on the island. Fresh food was scarce, and the conditions harsh, but he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to live among the troops. In addition to his newspaper work, he worked at the radio station and delivered evening lectures.

He remained stationed in Adak until the summer of 1945 when he was discharged. He never wrote another novel again.