Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The stuff that dreams are made of
I don't remember whether that phrase was in the movie AND the book or just the movie. I remember it from the movie, but to tell you the truth, I've always had a hard time following The Maltese Falcon (both the book and the movie). All those people who keep showing up in Spade's office, or in his apartment, and the tortuous plot twists, and all that talk of gunsels and Levantines and ward-heelers... or was the ward-heeler in The Glass Key?
I do love it that Hammett gives me an excuse to pull out the slang dictionary, or at least visit Twists, Slugs, and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang, but for some reason it's harder for me to read Hammett now than it was when I was younger and could rip through The Dain Curse just appreciating the cool binding (it had to be close to a first edition, and I found it wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine in the old part of the library I worked in then, which I would link to here, but I would sooooo hate it if that great early edition of The Dain Curse got ripped off from the library because of this blog that nobody reads anyway) and the creepy atmosphere and the weird characters.
There was a time when I was a major Hammett fan. I read all his books I could get my hands on, as well as a non-fiction book about Hammett's San Francisco and a couple of biographies, not to mention Scoundrel Time, which led to a whole Hellman obsession for a while too. I even had a hamster named Dashiell (Dashiell Hamster, ha ha ha). But I've forgotten nearly all of it now. A couple of years ago I added A Man Called Spade to my Dell Mapback collection, and didn't even read it. My Hammett mania seems like a distant dream. That's how I've mostly missed the 75th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon.
Everybody's blogging it, and Sarah Weinman has a nice roundup here: Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: HammettWatch, in all its glory.
I don't remember whether that phrase was in the movie AND the book or just the movie. I remember it from the movie, but to tell you the truth, I've always had a hard time following The Maltese Falcon (both the book and the movie). All those people who keep showing up in Spade's office, or in his apartment, and the tortuous plot twists, and all that talk of gunsels and Levantines and ward-heelers... or was the ward-heeler in The Glass Key?
I do love it that Hammett gives me an excuse to pull out the slang dictionary, or at least visit Twists, Slugs, and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang, but for some reason it's harder for me to read Hammett now than it was when I was younger and could rip through The Dain Curse just appreciating the cool binding (it had to be close to a first edition, and I found it wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine in the old part of the library I worked in then, which I would link to here, but I would sooooo hate it if that great early edition of The Dain Curse got ripped off from the library because of this blog that nobody reads anyway) and the creepy atmosphere and the weird characters.
There was a time when I was a major Hammett fan. I read all his books I could get my hands on, as well as a non-fiction book about Hammett's San Francisco and a couple of biographies, not to mention Scoundrel Time, which led to a whole Hellman obsession for a while too. I even had a hamster named Dashiell (Dashiell Hamster, ha ha ha). But I've forgotten nearly all of it now. A couple of years ago I added A Man Called Spade to my Dell Mapback collection, and didn't even read it. My Hammett mania seems like a distant dream. That's how I've mostly missed the 75th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon.
Everybody's blogging it, and Sarah Weinman has a nice roundup here: Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: HammettWatch, in all its glory.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 9:12 PM 
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