Review: The Thin Man

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of the 1934 film version of this novel, starring Myrna Loy (playing against type as a playful, rather naïve heiress rather than a vamp) and William Powell. I'm also a fan of the strong, spare noir style. Turns out, though, that I'm not much of a fan of this book.

The film follows the book's plot reasonably closely for a film adaptation, and the characters are largely similar - except for Nick Charles, the detective, who narrates the book. Powell's movie Charles is lighthearted and hilarious; the book Charles is grim, hard-boiled and serious. Both versions have a drinking problem, but the movie plays it for laughs.

There's also such a thing, for me anyway, as a noir style being too spare and unornamented. A lot of the narration is bare and literal, just saying what people did and said, and there's clearly subtext going on, but we're given few clues to what anyone thinks or feels and are left to interpret as best we can. All of the characters, definitely including Charles, possibly excepting his wife Nora, are reprehensible to some degree, and the family at the heart of the mystery are thoroughly dysfunctional, not in the amusing way of the film but in a despair-of-human-nature way.

Despite the style usually not wasting a single word, there's an extended quotation partway through from a book about an incident of cannibalism, given as a response to the ghoulish teenage son's inquiry to Charles about the phenomenon; it doesn't really add anything, certainly not enough to justify the word count that's devoted to it.

However, this is definitely a master of his craft creating a work of enduring significance, and my three-star rating reflects its mismatch with my taste, not its quality.

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