More of Hammett's life

A few thoughts on Shadow Man, Richard Layman's 1981 biography of Dashiell Hammett:

• Chapter 13 ends with Hammett's assessment of The Thin Man. That novel is the last of the work for which most readers know Hammett today, yet the chapter comes barely halfway through Layman's book. Conclusion: Hammett led an an interesting life beyond his writing.

• Layman's judgment is sound on his rankings of Hammett's novels and short stories, and he's unafraid to call a story "very bad." But he sometimes fails to acknowledge the strengths of the weaker stories. Hammett may indeed be "too subtle in his characterization of Inez, the most dangerous criminal" in "The Whosis Kid," but the characterization of the kid in the stories opening segment is is superb. Layman calls the story one of Hammett's best attempts, but I'd have liked him to discuss, however briefly, what makes the story's opening so compulsively readable. I think I'll go back and reread some of the stories in light of Layman's assessment.

• One could compile an illustrious Who's Who of Hammett's drinking companions and visitors, William Faulkner and S.J. Perelman among them.

• Layman is efficient. The book checks in under 300 pages, including introductory material, index and appendices.

Now for Part 3, "Movies, Politics and the Army."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Biographies of crime writers: Who deserves to get a life?

I cross a new border this week, into literary biography, with Richard Layman's Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett.

What makes someone a fit subject for biography? Towering achievement, for one, and Hammett has that in spades. But he also appears to have been entertaining and elusive quarry. Here's the beginning of Layman's short preface:

"Dashiell Hammett seemed, for most of his life to crave privacy."

Standard celebrity stuff so far. But the paragraph goes on:

"Unlike many literary celebrities, he never took his fame seriously. He never relied on it, never expected it, and he was always contemptuous of those who treated him with deference because of his literary reputation. When he was in certain moods, he delighted in fooling interviewers, interested listeners, and sycophants with fabricated tales about his past and his future plans."

And here's the 1924 extract from Black Mask, in Hammett's own words, with which Layman heads the first chapter:

"I was born in Maryland, between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, on May 27, 1894, and was raised in Baltimore.

"After a fraction of a year in high school ... I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like. Usually I was fired."

One can tell Hammett had fun writing that — no surprise to readers who delight in the wit of his fiction.

***

In November I heard Joan M. Schenkar talk about her biography of Patricia Highsmith. And the British crime fiction and film critic Barry Forshaw has written a life of Stieg Larsson.

What other crime writers have been subjects of a biography? What crime writers should be? Whom would you like to read about — and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011