Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There’s some. That’s why they have a name for it.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

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I more and more realize that I don’t really like Dashiell Hammett novels very much. I say this having liked this one, because of the three previous novels of his I’ve read, this is the only one that feels like it a) makes any real sense, and b) has captured something charming and wonderful. And the mystery here isn’t even all that good. Instead, he’s really figured out the right tone and tenor for this novel. Nick and Norah are a married, upper crust couple, […]

Bogart made it better

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

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The Maltese Falcon is a mystery novel classic- a 1929 knot on the detective fiction string that extends from Wilkie Collins through to Jo Nesbo and Ian Rankin.  It features all the things we’ve come to expect from the ‘hard-boiled’ sub-genre: a hard-drinking loner detective, a handful of quirky criminal thugs, some pushy cops, a beautiful but possibly duplicitous femme fatale.  Sam Spade is that detective, and he is trying to solve a mystery that builds around him with minimal clues but increasingly plentiful bodies. […]

You might as well take your punishment and get it over with.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammet

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I hate to say it but maybe I just generally don’t particularly like Dashiell Hammet novels. This is my third one this year or second plus one last year, and for whatever reason, I don’t tend to follow them very easily, want to be reading them very much, or enjoy them during or after the process. But this book is about local politics in the most violent of ways. The son of a senator is found dead and the lead in the novel, Ned Beaumont, […]

I haven’t laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

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I tried reading this novel a few years ago because of the pedigree and because I had access to it via Overdrive, but I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t really know much about it at the time, but I decided to give it another go because it was mentioned in Patton Oswalt’s memoir Silver Screen Fiend as the source material for Yojimbo and Sanjuro and of course Last Man Standing by Bruce Willis. It’s also the basis of a whole quest line in Red […]

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

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The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]

Like A Blonde Satan

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I had read The Maltese Falcon years ago but remembered very little of it aside from it having a complicated plot. Since I read it the same year I started delving hard into crime fiction, it kind of got lost in the shuffle of other classics I read, especially compared to Hammett’s sensational Red Harvest, a pulp masterpiece that would get my vote for best crime novel of all-time. But as I have never seen the movie, and keep forgetting the thread of what many allege to be one […]



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