Ep 7 Dashiell Hammett and the Hard Boiled Paperback

Show Notes

Although Hammett is a major influence in mystery fiction, his novels and stores (with the sole exception of The Maltese Falcon) are often left unread. It's a shame because they all hold up well even in 2022. I urge you to get one of Hammett's paperback novels and just sit down and read. Believe me, they will entertain you. Red Harvest (his first novel) might be a good place to start if you've never read him.

This podcast was several months in the making. My thanks to Richard Brewer for sharing his thoughts on The Glass Key with me. He is a delight to converse with.

I took most of the biographical information on Hammett from Nolan's excellent Shadow Man biography, but also from a lesser know biography by Sally Cline called Dashiell Hammet: Man of Mystery. A word of warning: many biographies suffer from the heavy hand of Lillian Hellmen who spun her own mythology of Dashiell Hammett, most of it made to make her (and him) look good.

Another outstanding work, if you want to know about his political activities, is Hardboiled Activist: The Work and Politics of Dashiell Hammett by Ken Fuller. It's an eye-opening book that not only lays open Hammett's political history but looks at the novels from a political perspective. I can't praise this book high enough.

Hammett Paperbacks

Dell was Hammett's first major paperback publisher. The covers of these books are wonderful, but also expensive in fine condition. There have been many Hammett paperbacks over the years. Currently, Random House vintage has all of his novels in quality (larger sized) paperbacks out which might be the best was to simply read Hammett. I prefer the '70s mass market paperbacks as they are easy to find and inexpensive. The British Penguin crime series (green covers) have some marvelous covers, but they are also fairly expensive.

Be sure to look at the paperback covers gallery which is on this blog and is meant to accompany the podcast.

LINKS

The Dashiell Hammett Wikipedia page is surprisingly good with a decent bibliography. There's a decent PBS American Masters program on Hammett, but it appears to miss some of the harsher edges of his life and it gets some details wrong. I really like Claudia Roth Pierpont's profile of Hammett in the New Yorker (2022) which is ostensibly a review of the Library of America's two-volume set of Hammet's works. By the way, this set is fabulous (wish they'd publish a paperback version).

Richard Brewer

My co-host on this episode is a long-time mystery reader. We first met while working at the Mysterious Bookshops back in the 90's. He is also an audiobook director having recently completed the novels of Raymond Chandler as audiobooks. Check out his Facebook page. The Chandler audiobooks (narrated by Scott Brick) can be found here.

Ep 17- Bantam, Louis L'amour and the Paperback Western

Ian Ballantine was a young graduate student in 1939. He wrote a thesis on the economics of the paperback industry in the late 1930s that brought him to the attention of several paperback publishers. He opened the American branch of Penguin Books (a UK company) in 1939. Ian was primarily responsible for re-selling Penguins in the United States. However, World War 2 cut off his shipments from the UK, so he began to publish paperbacks himself. One change he made was to add illustrated covers to his paperbacks which were primarily sold through magazine distributors and needed an eye-catching cover to compete. But when Penguin founder Anthony Lane visited the U.S. Penguin offices after the war, he was appalled at these new illustrated covers. He demanded that the paperbacks be simply text and be color-coded like the British Penguins. Ian Ballantine refused and left the company. Ian started his own company with his wife Betty Ballantine and secured funding from a major hardback publi...

Paperback Cover of the Week: Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel

Signet classics (2008). Cover design by HAVOC Media Burton Raffel was a lawyer turned critic and translator. He specialized in poetry and, in addition to writing his own poetry, he translated Mandelstram, Old English poetry, Horace, Cervantes, a Vietnamese poetry collection along with many books on the structure and meaning of poetry. Raffel’s Beowulf was the first version of the poem I read. In my teens and enthralled by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I sought out anything written by Tolkien. His groundbreaking essay, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics”, was a little over my head then, so I sought a translation of the poem to read. Burton Raffel’s was the most common (and still is). I read the poem in a day and started a fascination with the Beowulf story that has lasted my whole life. I’ve probably read a dozen translations/ve...

Ep 18 Patricia Highsmith & The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith is having a surge of popularity due to the recent TV series “Ripley’ (adapting her novel, “T he Incredible Mr. Ripley”. It is much deserved as her work is unique and unsettling. Most of her major novels (she wrote 22 of them) were written in the 1950s and 1960s and reflect the temper of those times. However, she used her own life, much like a method actor uses memories of their life events, to create characters that are remarkable and troubling. In the podcast, Hal Bodner and I address her troubled life, her views and background as a gay woman and her writing style/themes. We discuss HIghsmith’s masterwork novel, The Incredible Mr. Ripley, a strange crime story told from the point of view of the criminal. Or is he? The short biography was sourced from the excellent bio, “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith" by Andrew Wilson. Her life was one of sex, alcohol and writing, writing, writing. She also drew, painted, designed and constructed furniture, c...

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