Monthly Archives: July 2022

Book review

The Thin Man was Hammett’s last published novel, appearing initially in a magazine in 1934, although he went on to live until 1961. Hammett was a left-wing writer during a period of America’s history where this was very much going against the political grain, eventually finding himself blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House of UnAmerican Activities. Earlier he had gone to prison rather than reveal the names of contributors to a fund he set up to support eleven men appealing their convictions for “criminal conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the Government by force and violence.” It is fair to assume that it was these experiences which put him off novel writing, although of course he continued writing in other formats.

Hammett is widely credited with creating a new form of detective novel, the ‘hard-boiled detective’ genre. This was a world apart from the refined novels of writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, Raymond Chandler famously summarised the distinctive element of Hammett’s novels: that he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley“. The Thin Man is a fine example of this genre.  

Anyone reading the novel without being aware of the setting will be shocked to find out that the story is set in December 1932 – that is to say in the last days of Prohibition. Given that it remained technically illegal to drink alcohol in the USA, Nick Charles, the novel’s principal character, drinks relentlessly, asking for alcohol at every opportunity like a man dying of thirst. Nick is a former private detective, having retired early following marriage to a wealthy socialite, and is visiting New York with his much younger wife, Nora, to celebrate Christmas and the New Year (and presumably the impending demise of Prohibition). He is reluctantly drawn into investigating a complex murder. A scientist, the titular thin man, has gone missing, and his assistant and former girlfriend is found dead by his ex-wife, on whom suspicion inevitably falls. Their children also act suspiciously and are candidates for the crime, but the police’s focus is on the missing scientist, Clyde Wynant. Together with the local police Nick and Nora drink heavily and talk smart as they try to crack the case.

The focus on drinking throughout the novel is relentless and eventually quite funny:

 ‘“How do you feel?”

“Terrible. I must’ve gone to bed sober.”’

……….

‘“Don’t you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?”

“No, thanks.”

“Maybe it would if I took one?”

…….

‘“Why don’t you stay sober today?

We didn’t come to New York to stay sober.”’

The dialogue is the whip-smart wise-cracking we have come to expect from private detectives and their glamourous assistants, but which Hammett seems to have invented:

“She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

Nick in particular has a great line in sarcasm, particularly when he is teasing his wife, who to be fair gives him as good as he gets:

“I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine.”

I shook my head. “At breakfast.” “But it’s Christmas now.” “Breakfast.”

“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”

“You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the…”

……………

“Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: “What are you holding out on me?”

“Oh, dear,” I said, ” I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the…”

The novel is fast-paced – Nick and Nora rarely seem to sleep, and think nothing of setting off at midnight to yet another party. The novel’s resolution seems a little hurried, with everything wrapped up in a few pages once the partying runs out of steam. The novel was very successful and spawned a film, a sequel, and a long-running television series. On its own merits the novel is enjoyable but slight – the reader’s enjoyment is mainly derived from the humour and the wide range of criminal characters, but the plot is almost an after-thought. The same could be said of many of Raymond Chandler’s novels, of course. Hammett was without doubt a profound influence on Chandler, and his style and technique can be found on almost every page of the latter’s work. At the same time I would argue (and I don’t think this is contentious) that Chandler evolved the genre to another level. The principal differences between the two are the latter’s extraordinary turn of phrase (“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”). Marlowe is also a much harder, more violent man than Nick, and the overall body-count in novels such as The Big Sleep is much higher. While Nick can shrug off a bullet wound with a light bandage and another slug of whisky, when Marlowe is beaten up we feel every blow.

P.S. I’ve written more here about the differences between Marlowe and Sam Spade, Hammett’s main character in novels such as the classic The Maltese Falcon.

The Thin Man, by Dashiel Hammett, 1934

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Book review

The imbalance in my reading habits – more than three quarters of all the books I have reviewed over the last 10 years were written by men – has been nagging at me. I wanted to explore whether this was just a case of being a sexist reader, or a symptom of something else going on in publishing and literature.

In the field of literary prizes there is strong evidence that novels written by women are less well recognised than those written by men. Since 1969, 35 men and 18 women have won the Booker prize in its various incarnations. It was the absence of any women writers from the 1991 Booker shortlist that led to the creation of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (although the jury that year was evenly divided in terms of gender). This two to one ratio could be better, but it could be worse: the Pulitzer prize for ‘distinguished fiction by an American author’, has been awarded 70 times since 1948. By my calculation only 18 of these 70 awards have gone to women writers, including such greats as Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Donna Tartt. The Nobel Prize for Literature is no better – only awarded to women 16 times out of a total of 118 awards. This is not just a phenomenon of old-fashioned attitudes – in the so-called progressive decades of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s it was awarded only once to a woman. And only one woman has ever been Poet Laureate in the 400 years of the role’s existence!

Elsewhere the issue persists. In the BBC’s 2003 Big Read less than a third of the novels chosen by the public were written by women, and without JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson the ratio would have been far worse. Only 21 of the 100 best novels of all time written in English chosen by the supposedly progressive Guardian (which is where this blog began) were written by women. The issue is obviously endemic. Other than where specific action is taken to address the imbalance between men and women writers (for instance on some university courses), male writers predominate.

Which obviously begs the question as to why? In The Authority Gap Mary Ann Sieghart cites evidence that novels written by women are reviewed less often than those written by men, which starts the whole process of down-grading the value placed on books written by women. From what little evidence I have been able to track down, women are not published less frequently than men. But that’s not to say that women authors aren’t promoted less effectively by their publishers, placed less predominantly in book-shops, cited less often in academic works – it’s even possible that Amazon’s algorithms are sexist (stranger things have happened). To be clear, I have not identified any evidence of these things – but there is a pattern here!

It may be a statement of the obvious, but we shouldn’t have to accept this diminution of half of the population. All of the examples above are instances of people making decisions to exclude or downgrade women. So the solution is in some ways simple: all literary prizes should work towards being gender neutral. That means choosing to have a balance of women and men on judging panels (as many already do), choosing to long-list and short-list works by men and women evenly, and award prizes evenly, if necessary by having two different awards. As readers we can buy books by more women, review them as often as we review books by men, and try to avoid the discrimination, unconscious or otherwise, that has been going on before Gutenberg developed his printing press.

More on men reading women

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Book review

Bodily Harm felt strangely familiar: the premise of the novel echoed strongly with me, but I am struggling to pin down from where. In the novel Rennie Wilford, a Canadian ‘lifestyle writer and journalist’, suffers an upsetting relationship breakdown following surgery for breast cancer. In an attempt to escape she engineers an opportunity to travel to the small Caribbean island nation of St. Antoine to write a travel/holiday piece. Here she finds the island uncomfortable and alien, but slowly becomes embroiled in the febrile local politics. An attempted coup or insurrection goes badly wrong, and Rennie is caught up in the aftermath.

Frustratingly I can’t identify what book or books this reminds me of. It is possible that the cumulative effect of so many tropes is what is causing this ‘deja lire’ phenomenon.

The contrast between Rennie’s life in Toronto and her experience on the islands is striking. At home she was originally a political journalist specializing in unspecified ‘abuses’ but now writes about ‘lifestyles’:

“You write about something until people become tired of reading about it or you become tired of writing about it, and if you’re good or lucky enough it’s the same thing. Then you write about something else.”

Rennie lives with Jake, an unpleasant sexually aggressive and frankly abusive young man. He has a vacuous job as a label designer

“not just labels but the total package: the label, the container, the visuals for advertising. He was a packager. He decided how things would look and what contexts they would be placed in, which meant what people would feel about them”,

Canadian culture is portrayed as synthetic and superficial, and Rennie is profoundly unhappy without really realising it. Her breast cancer diagnosis brings this unhappiness to the fore, and shortly after Jake moves out Rennie comes home one day to find two policemen waiting for her, inspecting a sinister coil of rope left on her bed by an intruder. This is the catalyst for her getting out of Toronto, albeit temporarily. The Caribbean island state of St. Antoine is undeveloped and unwelcoming, and Rennie never takes her purported mission, to write a travel piece about the island, very seriously. She meets a number of ex-patriates including Paul, a drug smuggler who may or may not also work for the CIA and Lora, a fellow Canadian who has ended up in St Antoine with no real idea as to why. She also meets some locals including Dr. Minnow who is a candidate in St. Antoine’s elections, the first since independence from the British. What starts as a travelogue degenerates into a nightmarish experience as St. Antoine’s political factions go to war, and outsiders are all suspects.

Bodily Harm is not a comfortable read. St Antoine becomes a metaphor for Rennie herself, almost as if her vacation is a dream in which her various traumas are worked through and the characters represent aspects of her life back in Toronto. Her cancer is echoed in the rottenness of the island’s political corruption; the sado-masochism of her relationship with Jake is paralleled in the violence she encounters, and the novel’s conclusion in which she is imprisoned while her involvement with the island’s insurrectionists is investigated is (arguably) a metaphorical representation of her illness and slow recovery. Read this way Bodily Harm is a disquieting portrait of contemporary life rather than the superficial story of a journalist taking a vacation in the Caribbean that it initially promises to be.

Bodily Harm was the novel Atwood wrote immediately before The Handmaid’s Tale which was published four years later. Atwood is not a genre writer, and all of her novels that I have read thus far are significantly different, so it is difficult to find any trace of Handmaid’s in this novel. Having said that the theme of sexual violence being part of everyday life for women does indicate the lines the author was thinking on at the time and which were much more fully developed in the later novel.

Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood, 1981

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Book review

Some reasons for reading (or re-reading) Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary:

  1. it’s the perfect ‘guilty pleasure’ novel
  2. it doesn’t take itself seriously
  3. the pop culture references are fun
  4. the jokes work
  5. Bridget is highly believable and relatable.

Bridget Jones’s Diary originally appeared as a weekly column in the Independent. Bridget is in her early thirties and when the novel opens she is single and looking for a partner. These are the mid-nineties, long before online dating, so she has to find a boyfriend the old-fashioned way – at work or through family and friends. While she rejects the concept of a ticking biological clock, being single into old age is something that preys on her mind.

She doesn’t remain single for long however. Her mother’s attempts to set her up with a family friend, Mark Darcy, at Una Alconbury’s New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet fall flat, but she succumbs instead to the charms of her lecherous boss Daniel Cleaver (the casting of the film version of the novel was inspired in giving this role to Hugh Grant, who is name-checked in the novel, and the role of Mark Darcy to Colin Firth, who of course played Darcy in the television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, also mentioned in Bridget’s diaries). Daniel is the universal bad boy, who ignores Bridget, insults her, refuses to take their relationship seriously and unsurprisingly cheats on her. Mark is there to pick up the pieces, of course.

Bridget is an immensely likeable character. Her diaries chronicle her insecurities and her struggles with her various demons (jobs, weight, drinking and smoking), but she has a strong network of friends who support her through all her relationship and career crises. Bridget’s parent’s relationship struggles provide a form of chorus or background to her own. The novel’s parallels with Pride and Prejudice are not over-emphasised and are done just cleverly enough to be funny without being smug. Like many novels, films and programmes from the nineties, there are aspects of the diaries that haven’t aged well. Sexual harassment in the workplace is treated as a joke and Bridget’s gay friend Tom is referred to using a slur that is now widely considered offensive. There are no black characters despite the novel’s London setting, and some people have found Bridget’s focus on her weight problematic.

This is one of the small category of novels where the film adaptation is so superior to the original that it is hard to read the novel now without having the film scrolling in the background of one’s mind, hearing Bridget’s diary as voiced by Renee Zellweger, and envisaging the costumes, settings and minor characters as portrayed in the film. I don’t think that’s a problem at all – the novel gains from the film rather than suffering from the comparison, allowing the reader to skip over the bits that don’t work (for example Bridget has a redundant brother in the novel who is mentioned but doesn’t appear, so was rightly edited out of the film).

Bridget Jones’s Diary is sometimes credited as being the first ‘chick-lit’ novel (Wikipedia describes it as “the ‘ur text’ of chick lit”). But the term is a fairly dismissive not to mention sexist characterisation of a genre and the term is little used nowadays, thankfully. Usually reading the source novel of a film reveals some interesting differences, but in this isolated instance I think if you have limited time I would recommend the film over the book.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, 1996

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