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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In the best tradition of Hammett and Chandler,
By TLW (Chicago) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Hammett (Crime Masterworks S.) (Paperback)
A wonderfully suspenseful novel that would make the real Dashiell Hammett proud. Gores did his homework well and it shows. I'm pleased to find that someone is carrying the torch for Hammett, and Chandler too. I've read all of their novels and this one rates right up there with the best. I look forward to the movie being released on DVD.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This One's The Real Deal,
By Bill Pieper, author of the novel WHAT YOU WIS... (Sacramento, CA United States) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Hammett (Paperback)
In my feckless twenties, long before seeing any of my own work published, I lived for a summer in an isolated cabin at Tahoe. My rent was that I would paint the place inside and out so it could be sold prior to ski season. Stashing items in the attic to keep them from getting splattered on, I found lost between the rafters a yellowed, 1940s paperback I'd never heard of: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Thus began a long infatuation with classic American crime novels. And of course, after haunting used bookstores and reading my way through Chandler the rest of that year, Dashiell Hammett was next up. Soon, I'd read my way through all those too.
I never really liked Dash as much as I liked Ray, but with books by both having given rise to wonderful Bogart movies, I had more ways to keep my infatuation alive. Joe Gores is yet another way, particularly in this book, which assigns well-plotted fictional events to a well-researched and only slightly fictional Dashiell Hammett. In other words, pure fun. Even some of Hammett's prose tics that account for my not preferring him to Chandler are reproduced with a flawless ear. Still, Dash was the only crime writer of his era who actually made his living as a detective before he started writing, though a generation later Gores himself managed the same trick. Moreover, it's a trick that shows in all of Gores' work, and certainly to good advantage here. Adding to my enjoyment was that I didn't have to deal with Sam Spade and the extra effort it takes to not picture Bogart in action regardless of what's on the page. Hammett, the character, isn't Spade, doesn't act all that much like him, and from Gores' descriptions and the available photographic evidence, could better have been played by Burt Lancaster anyway. So if you've ever been curious to take a realistic time warp back to mid-1920s San Francisco and experience prohibition from the inside, snap up a copy of Joe Gores' Hammett and start smiling. You might also want try a copy of Gores' Spade & Archer, about which I've posted another Amazon review.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First-Rate Detective Novel,
This review is from: Hammett (Crime Masterworks S.) (Paperback)
No gimmick here. Gores has written, first and formost, the best hard-boiled detective novel I've read in a long time. The historical portrait of Hammett only makes it that much more endearing.
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