Dashiell Hammett's Advice To Detective Writers

I’ve been a Dashiell Hammett aficionado since I was a teenager. 

I’ve read nearly all of his published work, including The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and his other classic crime fiction. And I’ve covered collections of his novels and short stories in my On Crime column for the Washington Times. 

The Library of America, the publisher of a double set of his work, offers a piece on the advice Hammett gave detective story writers. 

You can read the piece via the below link:  

Story of the Week: Suggestions to Detective Story Writers (loa.org)

You can also read my Washington Times On Crime column on The Big Book of the Continental Op via the below link: 

Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At The Late, Great Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett 

Mark Twain's 'The Christmas Fireside (For Good Little Boys And Girls)'

The Library of America offers a Mark Twain Christmas story that, as the Library of America notes, only he could write - about the wicked boy who got everything.

When Twain arrived in San Francisco in 1864, he quickly landed a job writing for a newly launched literary weekly called The Californian, which was co-edited by Bret Harte (future author of “The Outcast of Poker Flat”) and Charles Henry Webb. With their encouragement and guidance, he honed his skills as a satirist and within a few months he was paid $50 a month to write one piece per issue—a respectable amount at the time, although never enough for the young Samuel Clemens, whose financial woes were a recurrent theme in his journals and letters. The newspaper was a success, but turnover among owners and editors led to its eventual demise. Before the periodical ceased publication in 1868, it had also introduced Ambrose Bierce to its readers.

Published two days before Christmas in the newspaper’s first year, “The Christmas Fireside” features a character familiar to readers of Mark Twain: the naughty boy. Compared with the affably mischievous Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, however, “Jim” is a downright monster. But Twain’s satire isn’t really about boyhood. If anything, Twain has written what might be called an “anti-story”—less about what does happen to Jim and more about what does not. He has two targets: the laughably implausible Sunday school catechisms of the era and (particularly in the closing paragraphs) the American propensity for rewarding corruption and vice among members of its political and entrepreneurial class. “Bah, humbug!” one might think, but what keeps the young Mark Twain from being the Californian Scrooge is a sense of impishness to mitigate the cynicism.  

You can read the story via the below link:  

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/12/christmas-fireside-for-good-little-boys.html

Elmore Leonard: Four Novels Of the 1980s

I've been a huge admirer of the late, great Elmore Leonard since the early 1980s and the first two Leonard crime novels I read - City Primeval and LaBrava - appear in the new collection of four of his novels from the 1980s.

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s in the Washington Times.

Library of America is performing a stellar service to the legions of readers who admire the crime-thriller writer Elmore Leonard (and include me in those ranks). At hand is the second volume of a planned trilogy that brings back four of the master’s best novels. And they vividly display Leonard’s talent for sparkling stories — ranging from an elaborate scam involving an aging movie star to the search for an assassin in glitzy Atlantic City. Leonard, who died in 2013, created a legacy that surpasses even such masters as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Ah, and Leonard (aka “Dutch”) remains the master of the tells-it-all sentence. A character relates driving through a section of town that was so rough that when he put his arm out the window to signal a turn, “some low-life took the can of beer out of my hand.”

Leonard began writing when he lived in Detroit, and his first novels delved into the underworld of that gritty, tortured city. My first exposure to Leonard convinced me that he must be an ex-convict, given his mastery of thug-speak (“Jack City” for the Michigan state prison) and a seeming insider-knowledge of how to rob a liquor store and roar away on a motorcycle.

Wrong. In “real life” Leonard toiled as a copywriter for an advertising agency, and — very importantly — he had the work ethic essential to anyone serious about becoming a writer. He would arise at 5 a.m. and write for two hours before making breakfast for his two kids. As he once put it, “I had a rule that I had to write a page before I put the water on for the coffee.” At work, he kept a legal pad in his middle desk drawer on which he would write in longhand when alone. His first works were Westerns, when that genre was still popular with magazine and book publishers. When he wished to describe a desert or canyon he turned to a magazine, Arizona Highways, for guidance.

Then he shifted to crime, in a city where the cops were tough and the criminals even tougher.  

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/31/book-review-elmore-leonard-fourn-novels-of-the-198/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Elmore Leonard via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/05/return-to-elmoreland-elmore-leonards.html

NPR: Revisiting A Suburbia-Gone-Sour In Ross McDonald's Crime Fiction

The Library of America has published four of Ross Macdonald's crime novels and Maureen Corrigan offers her view of the late great crime writer at NPR.

Ross Macdonald had a smart answer to the tedious question of why he devoted his considerable talents to writing "mere" detective stories: Macdonald said that the detective story was "a kind of welder's mask enabling writers to handle dangerously hot material." Like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (the great hard-boiled masters whom he revered), Macdonald set out to excavate the dark depths of American life, but to find his own "dangerously hot material" Macdonald descended into uncharted territory. His hard-boiled predecessors had walked the mean streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles; Macdonald moved to the suburbs — a California landscape of mortgaged dreams that already seems exhausted in the four mystery novels of the 1950s reprinted in this Library of America collection. All those images of suburbia-gone-sour that distinguish the work of a John Cheever, Richard Ford, Tom Perrotta, or even the early seasons of Mad Men owe something to Macdonald's penetrating vision.  

You can read the rest of the piece or listen to it via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/21/401222454/revisiting-a-suburbia-gone-sour-in-ross-macdonalds-crime-fiction

Elmore Leonard Shoots His Way Into The Library Of America

Neely Tucker at the Washington Post offers a piece on the late great Elmore Leonard's novels published by the Library of America.

The new Library of America volume of four Elmore Leonard novels from the 1970s has a winner on just about every page.

Flipping . . . let’s see . . . here.

From "Fifty-Two Pickup": Harry Mitchell’s lawyer is asking him about his mistress, an affair for which he’s being blackmailed:

“You score that night?”

“Jim, we were having a nice time, that’s all. I didn’t even think about it.”

“Well, when did you start thinking about it?”

“I guess when I saw her without any clothes on.”

“That could do it.”

See that deadpan thing? In the middle of murderous blackmail?

That’s not easy, brother. Maybe in one line, one book. But to build dozens of violent crime novels based on character, not plot, with a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, often as funny as it is frightening?
It didn’t do anything less than change (and elevate) the way the modern American crime novel is written, and today Leonard’s influence is everywhere from the films of Quentin Tarantino to FX’s hit series "Justified". The release of the book on which it was based — one year after Leonard died at 87 — coincides with the opening Friday of “Life of Crime," starring Jennifer Aniston and Tim Robbins, which is based on "The Switch," also included in this edition.

... It should serve as a reminder of both the depth and longevity of Leonard’s career that only seven authors have more volumes dedicated to their work by the Library — including Henry James, Mark Twain, Philip Roth, William Faulkner and Edith Wharton. The Library, a nonprofit organization founded in 1979, publishes its distinctive black-jacketed volumes to preserve the nation’s “best and most significant writing.”

Gods of crime and mystery, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, each have two volumes.

“He’s the giant figure who looms in the second half of the 20th century” in crime fiction, says Max Rudin, Library of America’s publisher. “He’s the one who recharged the American crime novel.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/elmore-leonard-shoots-his-way-into-the-library-of-america/2014/08/28/cb35cf80-2d32-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Elmore Leonard via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/05/return-to-elmoreland-elmore-leonards.html