The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammet

"The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two."

A few months ago, I was scanning the shelves at Stories after work, looking for something immediately satisfying. I bought two books by Dashiell Hammet, having never read detective or mystery fiction of any kind and thinking that that would be the best place to start. I read the Maltese Falcon immediately with mild enjoyment and then promptly called a friend of mine who has an extremely endearing love of hardboiled detective movies from the forties and arranged a viewing….and I must confess, I liked the movie more. So it wasn’t without hesitation that I started the second Hammet book from that shopping trip, The Thin Man.

The Thin Man was Hammet’s last book and although the Maltese Falcon skyrocketed him to literary fame, The Thin Man was his most commercially successful, spawning a series of movies and an eventual television show. Published one year after Prohibition, The Thin Man unfolds around a wealthy couple vacationing in New York, whose drunken, hazy holiday gets co-opted by a murder investigation involving acquaintances. Rather than pursue the case out of professional consideration (Nick is retired from detective work), money or even personal connection, Nick and Nora embark on this murder mystery because it is entertaining, not once does it interrupt their social gatherings or parties. In fact, it becomes a kind of playful and flirtatious activity for them and above all the story is hysterical. Nick and Nora are in a perpetual state of tete-a-tete forcing the dialogue into a much more clever dimension than I had expected. The violence is cartoonish, complete with frying pans, macho posturing, tripping and lots of dramatic gasping. The actual murder itself takes on laughable qualities of mistaken identities, a mentally unstable suspect, a femme fatale whose manipulations are targeted and effective, a young boy obsessed with cannibalism and a weepy teenage girl. The Thin Man felt like restoration comedy dressed up as murder mystery, checking sentimentality at the door all the while skewering convention.
Although I haven't seen any of the movies or the show, from my brief youtube perusal it seems as if the spirit of the novel was retained. I'll have to organize another viewing party!