--- jean-pierre jacquet <
jacquet@optonline.net> wrote:
> In the mid-1920s, the magazine Black Mask turned
to
> stories favoring
> characters and atmosphere over intricate
> puzzle-plotting. Led by
> Dashiell Hammett, the monthly magazine inaugurated
a
> golden age of
> American crime fiction.
***************************************************** Just as
a point of order, while Hammett and the best of the Black
Mask boys added characterization and atmosphere to their
stories, they did not sacrifice intricate plots. I'd argue
Hammett's mysteries are far better plotted than those of
Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Reinhart, Ellery Queen, Earl
Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayer and the other
popular mystery writers they untimately displaced.
I read RED HARVEST a couple of weeks ago and not for the
first time. While I still don't think its anything like
Hammett's best work, I couldn't put it down. I followed it
with Gardener's THE CASE OF THE LUCKY LEGS, and Reinhart's
THE BAT. (I mean how can your screw up a novel called THE
BAT?) But she managed. A third of the way through these books
I'm asking myself, 'why am I reading this crap?'
Hammett was a fine story teller who brought atmosphere to his
stories and complexity to his characters. Most of the
hardboiled genre lost its plot complexity by the 1950s. By
the time Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane had added their
indelible marks, the mystery element had all but vanished
from hardboiled. But the originators of the form had the gift
of deception down to a science.
Patrick King
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