Dashiell Hammett, copy editor's friend, Part II
I've mentioned the little lesson in Spanish imperial history he weaves into The Maltese Falcon. Today he gets props for having Dinah Brand in Red Harvest use proper English even at her most baldly hard-boiled and greedy:
"Now how about what I was to get for showing you where you could turn up the dope on his killing Tim Noonan?"The man knew his fused participles, and that's one more reason Hammett was not just the greatest crime writer ever, but also a copy editor's friend.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014
Labels: copy editors, Dashiell Hammett, editing, Red Harvest
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 10:58 PM
4 Comments:
The problem is that the character would not speak with such precise syntax. . . She is not sophisticated enough for that kind of sentence ... but Hammett was still learning his way I'm his first novel . .
Damn the Kindle autocorrect for spelling . . . "I'm" should be "in" . . .
You anticipated my observation that Hammett was still finding his way when he wrote The Glass Key
But Jim Thompson, to name one, could write dialogue both tough and in line with literate syntax. (In the body of that post I like to a still earlier post whose comments demonstrate better than anything I could have written that rules of grammar are, to put it tolerantly, changing.)
I don't know if I can blame auto-correct, but the comment above should read that "I link to a still earlier post ... "
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