By Stuart Mitchner
Dashiell Hammett makes it look easy. I’d never read The Thin Man before. Having seen the 1934 MGM film at least half a dozen times over the years, I didn’t think I needed to. My wife and I knew the story and the characters well enough to name our brother and sister tuxedo kittens Nick and Nora after the detective and his wife. If anyone asked why, the answer was “See the movie,” not “Read the novel.”
Hammett gets a lot said in the first paragraph, which, like the rest of the book, is narrated by Nick: “I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes the result was satisfactory. ‘Aren’t you Nick Charles?’ she asked.”
After a few lines of dialogue and the ordering of drinks, “Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet. Nora, at the other end of the leash, said: ‘She’s had a swell afternoon — knocked over a table of toys at Lord & Taylor’s, scared a fat woman silly by licking her leg in Saks’, and’s been patted by three policemen.’”
Introducing his wife to the girl with the satisfactory body, Nick says, “You look tired, Nora,” and even without seeing the movie, you realize how much he loves her, and the exchange between them after the girl leaves tells you all you really need to know about what makes their marriage work. When Nora says, “She’s pretty,” Nick says “If you like them like that.” Nora grins at him and says, “You got types?” To which he says, “Only you, darling — lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.” When Nora mentions a certain redhead Nick walked off with the other night, he gets the last quip (“She just wanted to show me some French etchings”) and the chapter ends.
Written at the Sutton
Once upon a time in the magic city of Manhattan, there was a hotel managed by Nathanael West, author of Miss Lonelyhearts, who let writer friends like Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman live there “half free, sometimes all free,” according to Hellman in Writers at Work, Third Series (Viking 1967). Earlier in the same Paris Review conversation, it’s noted that Hellman was the inspiration for Nora, that The Thin Man is dedicated to her and was written during their stay at West’s hotel, the Sutton, on East 56th Street.
When the interviewer mentions how “beautifully” the marriage was played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the movie and asks Hellman if that gave her “some gratification,” she says, “It did, indeed.” When it’s suggested “that was about you both,” she agrees, adding “Hammett and I had a good time together. Most of it, not all of it. We were amused by each other.”
Hellman hints at what “not all of it” refers to when she says Hammett was “the most widely read person I ever knew. He read anything, just anything. All kinds of science books, farm books, books on making turtle traps, tying knots, novels — he spent almost a year on the retina of the eye. I got very tired of retinas. And there was a period of poisonous plants and Icelandic sagas … I finally made a rule that I would not listen to any more retina-of-the-eye talk or knot talk or baseball talk or football talk.”
Don’t Ask Why
In her brief prefatory note to The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (Knopf 1965), Hellman shares her thoughts on why Hammett never wrote another novel after 1934: “I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do a new kind of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he was a man who kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life.”
Hellman stresses Hammett’s commitment to The Thin Man in her memoir An Unfinished Woman: “I had known Dash when he was writing short stories, but I had never been around for a long piece of work. Life changed: the drinking stopped, the parties were over. The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ten days or two weeks to go out even for a walk for fear something would be lost. It was a good year for me and I learned from it.”
Born on May 27
Among the casino analogies I’ve used for this weekly date-driven assignment — a spin of the roulette wheel, a throw of the dice, a hand of cards — last week’s device was the “one-armed bandit” commonly known as the slot machine, which delivered the equivalent of a jackpot on May 20, Jimmy Stewart’s birthday. While the May 27 machine has produced a moderately impressive payline with novelists John Cheever (1912), Herman Wouk (1915), and John Barth (1930), no bells rang, no whistles shrilled. It took Dashiell Hammett (1894) to produce that kind of sonic excitement, with help from Hollywood and a shamefully overused but irresistibly useful word that rhymes with sonic. Not only are The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon iconic in themselves, they have produced the iconic creations embodied by William Powell’s Nick Charles and Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade. However, that’s Hammett himself on the cover of the first edition of his last novel (shown here), in case anyone ever doubted that the ultimate “thin man” was the author himself.
Hammett in Princeton
Dashiell Hammett was living at 90 Cleveland Lane in Princeton in the late fall of 1936, the same year that the film After the Thin Man, the second in the Thin Man series, was released. According to Richard Layman’s 1981 biography Shadow Man, shortly after moving in he was asked to leave by his neighbors due to “loud parties, overnight female guests, and drunken students.” Hammett speaks for himself in an interview in the November 11, 1936 Daily Princetonian: “I can’t understand why people get the idea all I ever write is artificial, with tinseled-and-ginned up characters…. I’ve just come back from working on a new Powell-Loy film and I admit lots of those guys out there are screwy. But, hell, they’ve got tons of money to be screwy with. And anyhow, they’re no more bats than a lot of over-stuffed executives I’ve had the misfortune to meet.” Referring to the new movie: “Yes, it’s going to be like the others. They say they’re going to call it ‘After the Thin Man.’ Heaven only knows why. Before Hollywood started monkeying with the plot it was something like ‘The Thin Man,’ but its own mother wouldn’t recognize it now.”