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<\/i>) and for the crime-solving duo Nick and Nora (from The Thin Man<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=0679722637&camp=217145&creative=399369\")
<\/i>), but was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which haven’t been published since their original appearances in pulp magazines like Black Mask<\/i>. The Big Knockover<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=0679722599&camp=217145&creative=399369\")
<\/i> is one of three major collections of Hammett’s stories currently in print, including nine short stories (two of which together form a sort of two-part novella) and the beginning of an unfinished novel.<\/p>\nThat unfinished novel, Tulip<\/i>, is the star piece in the collection is the least Hammett-like and the least readable. In its fifty-ish pages, making it roughly the length of most of the stories in this book, Hammett speaks to the reader through a character who writes for a living but is caught in a post-midlife introspection that has him questioning his choices in his career, including what I take as a fear of historical obsolescence after the wave of post-modern\/realist works that were all the critical rage during Hammett’s own heyday:<\/p>\n \u201cBut couldn’t you just write things down the way they happen and let your reader get what he wants out of ’em?\u201d I’m not sure if Hammett ever could have finished Tulip<\/i>, although he wrote the last few paragraphs; the story has no plot at all, instead just relying on an extended, meandering dialogue between the writer, Pop, and the character Tulip, who wants more than anything to give Pop the material for some new story or book, even though Tulip’s stories themselves may be mostly fiction. Dialogue tends to read quickly, of course, but the lack of any narrative greed made Tulip<\/i> slow going overall, and would be of interest only to Hammett completists or those who, like me, wished for more of a window into the writer’s soul.<\/p>\n The remaining stories in The Big Knockover<\/i> are pulp detective stories, and in general lacked the austerity and tension of his best novels or even of the stories starring the same detective found in the collection The Continental Op<\/a>
\n\u201cSure, thats’ one way of writing, and if you’re careful enough in not committing yourself you can persuade different readers to see all sorts of different meanings in what you’ve written, since in the end almost anything can be symbolic of anything else, and I’ve read a lot of stuff of that sort and liked it, but it’s not my way of writing and there’s no use pretending it is.\u201d
\n\u201cYou whittle everything down to too sharp a point,\u201d Tulip said.\u201d I didn’t say you ought to let your reader run hog-wild on you like that, though I can’t see any objections to letting them do your work for you if they want to, bu \u2013\u201d
\n\u201cNot enough want to make it profitable,\u201d I said, \u201cthough you’re likely to get nice reviews.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=0679722580&camp=217145&creative=399369\")
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<\/i>, book six in the Thursday Next series, which is living up to expectations through the first third.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"