There's one bit of accommodation to language restrictions
that really clangs: in the scene in THE MALTESE FALCON where
Hammet confronts Wilmer the gunsel in the hotel lobby:
# -----
The boy put down his paper quickly and faced Spade, staring
at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. The boy's small hands
were spread flat over his belly. "Keep asking for it and
you're going to get it," he said,
"plenty." His voice was low and flat and menacing. "I told
you to shove off. Shove off."
Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and thin-legged
blonde girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and
said: "That would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But
you're not in Romeville now. You're in my burg." He inhaled
cigarette smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. "Well,
where is he?"
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the
second
"you."
"People lose teeth talking like that." Spade's voice was
still amiable though his face had become wooden. "If you want
to hang around you'll be polite."
The boy repeated his two words.
# -----
That's fourteen words to say "Fuck you." Hammett could have
written this so that the phrase never arose, but as it is, it
demands "Fuck you."
Notice the "bespectacled pudgy man and thin-legged blonde
girl," though. A visiting businessman and a prostitute? Nice
little bit of colour there.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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