Hammett’s personal despair had invaded his fiction. Style came to matter to him overly. Years later, the author Norman Mailer observed this tendency. “I had considerable respect for Dash,” Mailer wrote Lillian Hellman in the late seventies, “but not because he would often refuse to face into knotty problems and would instead dismiss them by an exercise of his personal style.” In “The Glass Key,” among the features of Ned Beaumont’s personal code is “never wear silk socks with tweeds.” --Joan Mellen, "Dashiell Hammett Lecture," http://www.joanmellen.com/hammett.html
Hammett’s personal despair had invaded his fiction. Style came to matter to him overly. Years later, the author Norman Mailer observed this tendency. “I had considerable respect for Dash,” Mailer wrote Lillian Hellman in the late seventies, “but not because he would often refuse to face into knotty problems and would instead dismiss them by an exercise of his personal style.” In “The Glass Key,” among the features of Ned Beaumont’s personal code is “never wear silk socks with tweeds.”
ReplyDelete--Joan Mellen, "Dashiell Hammett Lecture," http://www.joanmellen.com/hammett.html
Oops, better change my socks...
ReplyDelete:)
Love this. Thank you Peter.
ReplyDeleteIf you love it Kathleen, it MUST be good!
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