Well, a bunch of stuff was in the mail, today – but for some reason I’ve never actually read The Thin Man before. And yes, I think that that’s a little weird, too. I mean, I read hard-boiled detective novels – but I think that I mostly read Raymond Chandler instead of Dashell Hammett. Go figure, huh?
I’ll tell you how it goes, but I figure that I’ll like it: this book and the movie series it inspired was widely loved by mid-20th Century America. I assume that there’s a valid reason for that.
This book is a great book. I have read it several times. And his style is amazing to me. Very much readable and fast-paced. NOTHING like the movies, really. The movies make much less sense than the books.
Chandler is the king of tone; his first-person narrations in the Marlowe books set the template for the voiceover narrators in the movies. When I read his books, I find myself constantly going “Heh!” to all the lovely, lovely snark.
Hammett is stripped down, telling an A to B to C tale as economically as possible (which is not a bad thing). His dialogue, though, is a hardboiled delight, and often got lifted, wholesale, directly into the scripts of his movies (certainly that’s true of Maltese Falcon).
My own reaction to The Thin Man book was that the general outlines were carried over into the movie, but that the Nick Charles of the book was a bit more overtly venal, more openly admitting to his having originally married Nora for her money. It’s totally enjoyable, just not with the same lighthearted tone that we find in the movie (and sequels).