hahaist011's Diaryland Diary

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cutest couple

(it's hot-ish, and how stale and unprofitable seem the uses of a hot-ish world, don't you know. so i am trying trying trying not to )

what is excellent: the introduction robert b. parker wrote for hammet's Woman in the Dark (um, 1933 and pretty much the second-to-last thing hammet ever finished). you know parker: spenser in boston. (and even if eu say you don't, you do; meg powers reads him when she is not reading woodward & bernstein et. al.) excellent--parker writes it all spare and even hard-boiled, and then he steers it tragic. check:

...To my eye the happy ending seems a bit forced, as if Hammet, in order to bring Brazil and Luise together after all, might have bent his hard-eyed gaze away for a moment. I'm rather glad he did, in truth. I too am sentimental.

But if it worked all right here, it led him into a swamp that nearly drowned him in The Thin Man. It was as if Hammet could not accomodate Spade's Flitcraftian* view with his impulse to write, at last, of love.

...Woman in the Dark is subtitled, after all, "A Novel of Dangerous Romance." It is a conjunction Hammet never quite tried before. It is a conjunction that works pretty well here. It never worked so well again, but for Hammet, the writer, nothing else did either.

........................................

some people really know how to have a good time.


* Flitcraft, you'll remember, was the missing-person husband of one of Spade's old clients. Spade tells the story to Brigid O'Shaughnessy (while they're waiting around for Cairo). And listen, better him than me, because dude i wouldn't tell that doublecrossin dame shit.

8:01 p.m. - 2007-06-25

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