More Highball than Hard-boiled

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, author and January Magazine contributor Tom Nolan reminds usthat it was 75 years ago this month that Dashiell Hammett saw his fifth and final novel, The Thin Man, published. Recalls Nolan:

Written in the wake of the same author’s hard-boiled 1930 private-detective classic, “The Maltese Falcon,” and his bleak 1931 thriller of civic corruption, “The Glass Key,” the amusing and flippant-seeming “The Thin Man” (in which almost all violence occurs offstage) took readers by surprise in 1934. Reviewers’ judgments at the time were mixed: The New York Herald Tribune thought it “a new hard-boiled opus worthy to stand beside the best of his other works,” but the New Republic found it “a less excitingly fresh performance.”

The author himself made no great claims for his creation. “Nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters,” he said of the book’s married protagonists, Nick and Nora Charles; and in 1957, four years before his death, he would claim that “‘The Thin Man’ always bored me.”

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Popular Culture Magazine.)