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“... James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply that it does. Dashiell Hammett, he writes, ‘challenges the easy distinctions between popular and high art, and the critical language that normally sustains those distinctions’. Implicitly, perhaps he did – although the evidence suggests that he thought his thrillers ...”

“... Chesterton: a much more dangerous thing.) The person usually credited with finding a way out is Dashiell Hammett. Raymond Chandler, Hammett’s more sophisticated successor, made the claim most publicly in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944 in an essay that has come to be seen as his manifesto: ‘...”

“... Universally acclaimed as the pioneer of the modern detective-thriller, Hammett died in 1961, yet this is the first full-length account of his life to appear. In the context of the continuing vogue for biography, such a delay constitutes a small literary mystery, and in the preface to Shadow Man Richard Layman supplies a terse explanation ...”

“... in The Block Mask, the magazine which invented the hardboiled detective. Drink was finishing off Dashiell Hammett as the pre-eminent Block Mask author – Hammett wrote his last book, The Thin Man, the same year – and Chandler took his place. Since he wrote slowly and deliberately he barely made a living from his ...”

“... Hawks and Orson Welles? Their inclusion seems to me like bracketing Conrad with Edna Ferber or Dashiell Hammett – worthy enough artificers, but not engaged in mature art of the kind which deepens our lives. Uneasiness grows when Roud admits to his ‘blind spots’: Eisenstein, Murnau, Mizoguchi, Rossellini and Bergman. To be fair, he prints long ...”

“... As Dashiell Hammett once pointed out, murders, even in fiction, are not like mathematical problems. This hasn’t, however, prevented plenty of other crime writers from treating them as if they were. In the equation are a few constants – the corpse, perhaps the time and cause of death – and a few unknown quantities ...”

“... this ‘is not the same thing as being a great novelist’. The essays on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both admirably balanced appraisals, tell a similar story. It was Chandler’s strength, and his weakness, that he brought [a] basically sentimental aestheticism to the crime stories, so that they had increasingly to be about a romantic ...”

“... rather than being, as with Rahv, a steady and consistent and reassuring thing. Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett were with the Stalinist faction rather than the group which Laskin ignorantly (and annexing the Stalinist locution) terms ‘Trotskyites’. But an account of a highly strung weekend in their company, with the names left out, could be placed ...”

“... and woman of conscience, but these early years – of her Broadway success, her stormy life with Dashiell Hammett, her courage before the Un-American Activities Committee – are passed over quickly. This is not a biography of Hellman, but a memoir of decline and decay, on the one hand, self-satisfaction on the other. Feibleman’s prose is like the old ...”

“... has much fun with film historians’ confusion in this zone. Just who was it who put the alcoholic Dashiell Hammett on a plane in 1937, or perhaps 1938? Hamilton warms to the work of Preston Sturges (‘there is always a touch of film criticism in his films’); but his story sinks again with the Hollywood witch-hunts of the late Forties and early ...”

“... paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window.’ That is, until Dashiell Hammett: Hammett ‘gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons’. ‘Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street … He put these people down on paper as they were and he ...”

“... who have used the genre (notably Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy), the Western still awaits its Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, or even its Georgette Heyer: that is, the writer capable of lifting its clichés into art. Elmore Leonard might have done it, had he not decided to switch to crime ...”

“... each other to keep up what Treglown calls ‘the high gibberish quotient’ of their relationship. Dashiell Hammett was appalled to hear of Patricia Neal’s planned marriage to Dahl, while Leonard Bernstein told her she was making the biggest mistake of her life. Treglown met and interviewed Neal, divorced from Dahl after 30 years of a marriage during ...”

“... its ‘superspecific’ abundance of detail, is a direct descendant of the hardboiled prose of Dashiell Hammett. The opening paragraph of Virtual Light gives a flavour of this noir-ish, information-rich idiom: ‘The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle ...”

“... of movie stars we might have overlooked. More fundamentally, we have to thank Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who provided the mean-street-walking existential characters we willingly confused with the actors who played them. The new retro cool I wallowed in had Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as its source: the hard men with soft, democratic ...”