I may be slowly listening to all of Ngiao Marsh’s whodunnits, but that’s not all. I listened to a reading of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, whilst awaiting the next Marsh.
The book has an excellent reputation, as do some of the films based on it. I watched the Bogey film in my youth and loved it, as did much of the world. I’ve now ‘read’ the book, and it’s as good as its reputation suggests.
I won’t bore you by reciting the plot; if you don’t know it, go get the book, and reward yourself by reading it.
I do have a couple of problems with it, though. Hammett used a somewhat experimental style, with no exposition of any characters’ thoughts. He very carefully described their expressions and body language, which, I regret to say, didn’t really work for me, because I didn’t get them, as I would have done had I seen then. In the worst case, the first chapters had far too many occurences of Sam Spade winking. Hammett does not describe the winks, so I don’t know whether it was meant to indicate twitchiness, attempts at seduction, this–is–our–secret, or whatever. Fortunately, as the book progressed, this minor irritation stopped.
This didn’t stop be enjoying the book, or the excellent reading, but it did make me feel far more like distant a fly on the wall than being in there with the characters.
Hammett is very different to Marsh, but that will not stop me for one moment listening to more of her novels. Chandler is better than both, indeed, IMHO, the best of them all, but Hammett does prove that Chandler was not a one off. As good as modern whodunnit authors can be, the pre–war Queens are better, and the pre–war Californians are the best.
It’s interesting to compare the worlds described by the two groups of authors. Hammitt’s is the more egalitarian, the rougher, where Marsh’s is more gentle, but thoroughly class ridden. In Marsh’s British empire, people are restricted to class by birth, whereas in Hammitt’s California, for all its roughness, people have some social mobility. In the modern world, that’s reversed: there is far greater social mobility in the modern UK than there is in the modern US, as poor as British social mobility is.
Overall, it’s a great novel.