I'm currently reading "The Glass Key" by Hammett. I'm having
a great time with this book, I think I probably like it even
more than "Falcon" though I'll have to see how it ends.
a couple questions-
1. Where is the book supposed to be set? If it's mentioned, I
didn't notice. Are the street names from a real city or is it
supposed to be a fictional town? I thought some of the street
names sounded like Baltimore
(Charles and I think Thames are mentioned), which I know was
Hammett's hometown. I thought I had heard Albany mentioned in
conjunction with this book, but it doesn't really make sense
that a political boss in Albany would have so much clout in
whether a Senator got elected since most of the votes in New
York are in the City. Unless Henry is a state senator?
2. Until I got used to it, Hammett was driving me slightly
crazy with constant references to the protagonist as "Ned
Beaumont." The only other characters consistently referred to
by first and last name are Janet Henry and Opal Madvig -
which makes some sense as there are other Henrys and Madvigs
in the story. But what's with the "Ned Beaumont" thing - is
there some kind of stylistic or historical reason for this? I
wondered if it started out as a first person story and an
editor decided to change it at some point and just slipped
the full name in for every I. I noticed John Shannon tends to
call his protagonist "Jack Liffey" in almost every reference,
too, so maybe it's a style choice?
3. I notice several film versions in the IMDB - any critical
comments on either or both? My local video store has a pretty
good noir collection so I could probably find even the more
obscure version if it exists.
Carrie
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Jan 2002 EST