"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
"She shook her head slowly, lowering it, so that now her dark eyes looked up at me under the thin arcs of her brows.© Peter Rozovsky 2011
"`You speak only of money,' she said. `I said you may have whatever you ask.'
"That was out. I don't know where these women get their ideas."— "The Gutting of Couffignal"
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 11:40 PM
This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly. Click here to find an independent bookstore near you.
4 Comments:
This amusing exchange (Dames! Who can figure 'em?!) comes to an abrupt halt, of course, with the next paragraph, one of the more famous of Hammett's observations on what it means to be a detective and has lead readers to capsulize Hammett's Op and Sam Spade as hunters, Chandler's Marlowe as a knight, and Macdonald's Archer as a social worker. Fairly accurate generalizations, I think.
The Hunter is the title of one of Hammett's unpublished early short stories in the Harry Ransom Ctr, U TX/Austin. It features a detective named Vitt and, from what I've read about the ss, Hammett was developing the emotional distance that would be intrinsic to the Op and Spade.
The Hunter is also the first of Donald Westlake's novels about an emotionally distant thief named Parker -- also a name Hammett has the Op use as an alias in I forget which story. The Parker novels are about elaborately planned capers that go wrong and about how Parker gets through them -- a bit like "The Gutting of Couffignal" from the other side of the law.
And did Hammett know that whippersnapper Orson Welles? The paragraph from "The Gutting ... " to which you refer reminds of the scorpion story from Mr. Arkadin.
Unless it was Rush in "The Assistant Murderer."
Nope, I think it was "The Golden Horseshoe."
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