Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett by Gregory Sinda
1986; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1986.0029
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
Resumo76 Western American Literature Gregory, Sinda. Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1985. 205 pages, $19.95.) “It was a wandering daughter job.” I have always thought that this bland opening to Hammett’s story, “Fly Paper,” deserved as much attention as Raymond Chandler’s oft-quoted opening to “Red Wind,” the one about meek little wives and knives and husbands’necks. At last, Sinda Gregory’sbook gives due credit to the world view that informs Hammett’s sentence. Her study takes as its province Hammett’s five novels and as its thesis the proposition that all the novels are entropically developed, that they represent an irrational world, a thesis also implicit in Hammett’s sentence. Spoken by the Op, it dramatizes the deper sonalization of human beings. From that point Hammett moves, as Gregory shows, to an almost total “derationalizing” of the world. In contract, I believe that Chandler tends to affirm some form of rationality, that the meek little wives’ impulses, violent as they may be, still “make sense.” That perhaps is why Philip Marlowe is usually clearheaded and outraged and the Op befud dled and cynical. Gregory’sanalysesofthe novels are closelyargued, exact, and compelling, but a great deal of what she has to say will not be new to readers of Hammett criticism. Hammett’sbroad and curious reading, particularly in mathematics and philosophy, is not explored here, and as a result Gregory misses an opportunity to make an important contribution to our knowledge of the intel lectual roots of Hammett’s art. We would like to know more about that side of him, which is covered sketchily in the recent biographies of Layman, Nevins, and Johnson. Gregory’scase for Hammett as a pioneer in the genre is a little overstated. John Cawelti’s work and that of others have fairly well documented the extensive tradition lying behind hard-boiled fiction, its roots in the West, its transposition of a critique and a style to urban America. And if Hammett’s autograph note (quoted in David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough) about the composition of The Thin Man iscorrect, that it was begun earlier than has been thought, then I think Gregory’scase for a drastic shift in Hammett’s views between The Glass Key and The Thin Man is also somewhat overstated. Readers interested in Hammett and in the genre will benefit indeed from Gregory’s very closely developed book, but a more ambitious study still needs to be done on the philosophical roots of Hammett’s fiction and of the hardboiled tradition generally. R. H. MILLER University of Louisville ...
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