I am late coming to this discussion, but I must say that I
have
never found a lot of resemblence between Chandler and
Hammett. Chandler was
in large part responsible for my early infatuation with the
"genre" and I
will always love his books. But having said that I must
acknowledge that, by
almost any standard, Hammett is the superior writer.
The streak of self-pity that Ellroy (and me, sometimes, too)
remarks
on in PI books is pretty absent in Hammett....about the
closest you get is
Spade's shudder of revulsion at the approach of Archer's wife
at the end of
_Falcon_. Compared to this Hemingway is a sentimmental putz
in all but his
best stories.
The only real similarity between Hammett's detectives and
gangsters
and Marlowe would seem to be the willingness to sacrifice
their personal
happiness and comfort for their own peculiar ideas of
honor.
James
James Michael Rogers
jetan@ionet.net
Mundus Vult Decipi
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.