Nightmare town : stories

(Original Review, 1999-12-10)

When one wants to elect the best of Dashiell Hammet, one invariably chooses “The Maltese Falcon”, Classic that it is, but instead I would go for Dashiell Hammett’s short novel, “Nightmare Town” as one of my favourites. The set up is brilliant and the wider

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issues - American criminality, capitalism, the mirage of consumption - is all combined with some brilliant intrigue, weird characters, and clean hard boiled prose. Unlike the Sam Spade novels, though, “Nightmare Town” has kind of palpable energy and ambition that gives it greater flavor as well as substance. Also don’t agree with what I read objecting to classifying “Lolita” [2018 EDIT: Link added in 2018] as Crime Fiction. Clare Quilty is nothing but a criminal, although he ends up pursuing and tormenting Humbert. And the way they both victimize Lolita, not to mention her mum - who Humbert cruelly delights in branding “the Haze woman”. It is a novel about America, and desire, and kitsch, and bourgeois depravity, and it comes suffused in a kind of blowsy desperation - but let’s not forget it is also about a serial paedophile who competes with another man for the attentions of an only just pubescent girl who ends up being sex trafficked to a porn studio/cult across the Mexican border. And if the Haze Woman hadn’t snuffed it by fluke, Humbert would almost certainly have murdered her. The fact that these 2 men are urbane sufficient to impress the drab suburbanites around them does not make their desires less violent or the lengths they go to satisfy them less monstrous - quite the reverse, in fact! Hammett, in a way, reminds me of the way Lee Child goes about his business by using the elaborateness of pushing a sharpened pin punch into somebody's head and what it does to their brain, just before he pushes a sharpened wire cutter into somebody's head and brain. In Reacher's case, it's all about the violence and I just wonder if that's what Hammett is trying to do here, seeing as he was writing with a commercial eye - trying to describe it so that the reader can imagine punching somebody like that themselves and how it would feel to crack someone's jaw and lay them out cold...Maybe that’s why I like Lee Child’s Reacher. Whenever there is a layer two under a person’s persona of what they present to society as being normal, it reminds me of how the clothes of people mask who they truly are. In this regard, Hammett beats Child easily.

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A collection of various Hammett short stories, including some Op stories, the only Sam Spade short stories, and the memorable title story: about a drunk who fights with a cane.

Good read. His detectives can solve cases quite well even without modern forensic science. The stories hold up well despite their age.

I found this book an improvement over the Continental Op, thw riting overall much stronger, and the stories were drawn from more diverse selection. This is a 3 and a half star book for me. Though like the Continental Op, when you read a large batch of stories in such a short period of time, the

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conventions really get hammered into your head. Consequently, this was a solid bathroom book for moi, but not something I would curl up with in bed and indulge with midnight hours. Overall, I think I much preferred Hammett's full length features more.

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Over all, I felt I liked this collection even better than The BIg Knockover, though I like them both. Ironically, the one tiry I don't much care for the the title story, which is not about the Continental Op but about an innocent man who finds himself trapped in a strange and hostile town; even

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though he ultimately survives, the early part is quite unpleasant. Many of the later stories are Continental Op stories, which are my favorites of Hammett's work.

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Short stories have always been my favorite form of fiction. There is something about a well-crafted story – the ability of the author, in a condensed format, to bring to life interesting characters, locations, and stories – that has always attracted me. I’m sure part of the reason is that my

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first serious reading (science fiction) was in short story form. But, even today, while I appreciate and greatly enjoy the novel form, I’ll take short stories any day.

However, that being said, I’m wondering if there is a genre-specific impact to that appreciation of short stories that I have not understood. As I noted, I cut my teeth on science fiction and, as I have broadened beyond that reading, primarily in the non-genre type fiction – short stories still hold up. However, as I have gotten into other genres, I am finding I am nowhere near as enthralled.

And this collection proves the point.

This is a collection of Dashiell Hammett’s short stories. First, let me say that I have read and greatly enjoyed some of his novels. I’m not sure how you can read The Maltese Falcon and not want to read more of his work. So, my displeasure is not a function of Hammett’s writing.

The second point I should make is that I am unclear on what the editors were trying to accomplish. I assumed this would be a “best of”. However, there is no indication of that in the introduction. In fact, while not specifically stated, it appears the editors were trying to provide a spectrum of his style and history.

So, with all that out of the way, I will say that these stories are perfectly fine. They contain the tight writing that is the Hammett trademark, and they tell stories with verisimilitude. However, after a while I got tired of an approach that I can only assume is inherent to the genre. (Again, I have not read many mystery or detective short stories, so I can only generalize.) Quite simply, story after story laid out a crime, then laid out the puzzle, and then, after some exploration, laid out the solution.

Again, good characterization, good description, good basic plots. But, in so short a time, Hammett was unable to really build suspense or mystery or much else than to tell the story.

Again, I cannot say if this is his fault or the fault of the genre, but I just couldn’t get excited about what was contained in this book.

And now to the fatal flaw with this book. The final entry in the collection is “The First Thin Man”, an uncompleted novel. Yes, you heard me write…an incomplete story. Again, what is the point of this collection. If it isn’t meant to be everything written, why is this included? If it was meant to be a “best of”, why include something that wasn’t finished?

I was particularly galled by this because I was truly enjoying the story. More proof that the genre works better in a larger format.

I can recommend Hammett’s writing. And, perhaps, a best of short story collection would be better. But this collection, because there seems to be no clear direction on what it is trying to achieve and because of that final entry, should be avoided.

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