>Anders Engwall asked:
>Anyone knows when this homosexual connotation
disappeared?
>"Gunsel" is used in Huston's movie version, and I
find it
>hard to believe that anyone could be that explicit in
the
>movies in 1941.
My guess is that it never had common usage before Hammett put
it into print. After that, everyone, like Hammett's editor
and publisher, assumed it meant someone who toted a gun.
Certainly moviegoers made that assumption. I think it was
probably Ellery Queen, in his/their magazine, who identified
the original meaning in an entertaining essay about the games
Hammett played with obscure underworld argot (gooseberry lay,
etc.). On the subject of hardboiled music, there have been
several CDs worth noting. Rhino has released "Classic Film
Noir Themes and Scenes," soundtrack stuff from "The Maltese
Falcon," "Postman," "The Big Sleep,"
"Murder My Sweet," and two volumes of "Crime Jazz" covering a
lot of TV shows ("Richard Diamond," "Peter Gunn," "Mike
Hammer," "M Squad"). Varese Sarabande has "Sax and Violence"
with music from "Taxi Driver," "The Grifters," "Chinatown"
and "Point Blank." I did the line notes for
"Violence." Dick Lochte
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