Jim,
> > Golly, the town-tamer plot as you call it has
to have been around
> since the
> > Greeks.
>
> Maybe, but so what? Hammett still gets full credit
for making it one
> of the standard plots for PI fiction.
>
> You might as well say that the "quest object" plot
goes back to
> Malory's stories of King Arthur, or that the hero
falling in love
> with someone who turns out to be the villainess goes
back to Samson
> in the Old Testament. Does that make THE MALTESE
FALCON any less
> influential?
>In the first place, Jim, the fact that a writer uses
a plot, an old one at
that, and it seems to be "borrowed" by subsequent writers,
doesn't make him influential. The plot could have come from
many more recent sources---Westerns, for example---as well as
ancient ones. The plot is not what makes a writer
influential, the variations he does on it, the ambience of
the book, and the style do. Any influence comes from how the
writer goes about telling this plot. Hammett's influence came
from HOW he wrote, not what he wrote.
A note on that: Slavish recreating of Hammett's world, plots,
society, and even dialogue and slang, by later writers is
pure imitation not influence.
> However, just to show that I'm not always in
disagreement with you, I
> quite concur that Kane Jackson is one of your best
characters. In
> fact, except for Dan Fortune himself, Jackson is my
favorite of all
> your PI characters, probably because he's the most
Continental Op-
> like of them (though the relentlessly objective
third person
> narration you use in the Jackson series is more
reminiscent of Sam
> Spade and FALCON). And you're also right about A
DARK POWER being
> one of your best books.
Thank you much for the kind words about the Jackson series by
Willian Arden, and about A DARK POWER, and while I would like
to accept the comparison to Hammetts distant third in FALCON,
my third is nowhere near as rigorous as Hammett's---there
isn't one moment when we are privy to what Sam is thinking
except through actions and dialogue. That is a tour de force
of writing, and I never came close. (Didn't really want to,
I'm not Hammett.)
Best again,
Dennis-Michael etc.
>
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