One Book, One Denver 2008
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
| Place a hold on The Thin Man now! | Resource Guide (PDF) |
About the Book |
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The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting when his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities and cold-blooded murder. Dashiell Hammett's classic tale of murder in Manhattan became the popular movie series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, and both the movies and the novel continue to captivate new generations of fans. Place your hold on the book now. Other Media Types The Thin Man Films |
About the Author |
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| Born in Maryland in 1894, Samuel Dashiell Hammett dropped out of school at fourteen. Over the next several years he held a string of menial jobs, from which he was usually fired.
In 1915, he responded to an intriguingly vague classified ad, and soon found himself employed as a Pinkerton detective. Around 1922 he decided to stop being a detective and start writing about them. Appearing primarily in the pulp magazine Black Mask, Hammett's work soon became a favorite with readers. Bringing his real-life detective experience to his writing, he is today regarded as a founding father of the "hard-boiled" genre, as well as elevating detective fiction to the level of literature. Many of his stories featured a pudgy, middle-aged operative of the Continental Detective Agency, known only as The Continental Op. His best-known creation was Sam Spade, the tough, shifty detective of The Maltese Falcon. Like the Op, Spade was based in San Francisco, a city Hammett knew well. If a Hammett story mentioned a pawnshop or apartment building at a certain location, it probably existed, and possibly still does. Hammett's writing career was short. He produced four novels and almost all of his short stories between 1922 and 1931, a span of barely nine years. A fifth novel, The Thin Man, followed in 1934. Then... nothing. Why the long silence? Ironically, Hammett had come to loathe the hard-boiled genre that he had pioneered. He aspired to write mainstream novels that would rival those of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It wasn't to be: Hammett barely published another word during the last 27 years of his life. During the 1950s, Hammett's support of leftist causes brought the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he was called upon to testify. Hammett's refusal to name names resulted in five months behind bars. It also caused him to be blacklisted; his books were removed from libraries, and his radio shows cancelled. A man of many contradictions, Hammett was a celebrity and a recluse, a writer so successful that he no longer needed to write, a Marxist who served America proudly in two World Wars, a wealthy man who was always broke, and a man who chose prison over revealing information that was nobody else's business. Hounded by the IRS, he died near-penniless in 1961. More on Dashiell Hammett may be found in the Library's book databases. |
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Further Reading |
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Other Books by Dashiell Hammett |
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The Thin Man Glossary and Book Discussion Questions (PDF) Please consult the One Book, One Denver Resource Guide (PDF) for more events and information. |
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Updated: September 11, 2008
