Product Description

Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #176515 in Books
• Published on: 1989-07-17
• Released on: 1989-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.com
The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett's classic tale of murder in Manhattan, became the popular movie series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, and both the movies and the novel continue to captivate new generations of fans.

Nick and Nora Charles, accompanied by their schnauzer, Asta, are lounging in their suite at the Normandie in New York City for the Christmas holiday, enjoying the prerogatives of wealth: meals delivered at any hour, theater openings, taxi rides at dawn, rubbing elbows with the gangster element in speakeasies. They should be annoyingly affected, but they charm. Mad about each other, sardonic, observant, kind to those in need, and cool in a fight, Nick and Nora are graceful together, and their home life provides a sanctuary from the rough world of gangsters, hoodlums, and police investigations into which Nick is immediately plunged.

A lawyer-friend asks Nick to help find a killer and reintroduces him to the family of Richard Wynant, a more-than-eccentric inventor who disappeared from society 10 years before. His former wife, the lush and manipulative Mimi, has remarried a European fortune hunter who turns out to be a vindictive former associate of her first husband and is bent on the ruin of Wynant's family fortune. Wynant's children, Dorothy and Gilbert, seem to have inherited the family aversion to straight talk. Dorothy, who has matured into a beautiful young woman, has a crush on Nick, and so, in a hero-worshipping way, does mama's boy Gilbert. Nick and Nora respond kindly to their neediness as Nick tries to make sense of misinformation, false identities, far-fetched alibis, and, at the center of the confusion, the mystery of The Thin Man, Richard Wynant. Is he mad? Is he a killer? Or is he really an eccentric inventor protecting his discovery from intellectual theft?

The dialogue is spare, the locales lively, and Nick, the narrator, shows us the players as they are, while giving away little of his own thoughts. No one is telling the whole truth, but Nick remains mostly patient as he doggedly tries to backtrack the lies. Hammett's New York is a cross between Damon Runyon and Scott Fitzgerald--more glamorous than real, but compelling when visited in the company of these two charmers. The lives of the rich and famous don't get any better than this! --Barbara Schlieper

From AudioFile
Hammett was the quintessential tough-guy writer of 1930s' noir. It's interesting to see how he holds up after all these years; you'll be astounded at how much Nick and Nora Charles drink, for starters. Welcome though it is, this is a less than perfect production. Narrator William Dufris, who normally is in tune with his characters, misses the mark here. The women, even suave, ironic Nora, all sound hysterical and whiny even when they're supposed to be seductive or charming, which makes it hard to tell why anyone puts up with them. This does not help the rather creaky plot, nor do the forced tough-guy male voices, which sound so alike that it's often hard to know which character is talking. No shades of William Powell and Myrna Loy here, alas. B.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Inside Flap Copy
Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.

Customer Reviews

One of my very favorite books!
Boy, these reviews are all over the place, aren't they! Well, they at least give you the plot so I don't have to. Here are some quick comments:

There is so much going on in this book that most people miss much of it the first time (as these reviews show), especially if they don't know Hammett's life. As noted, Hammett modeled Nick and Nora on himself and his paramour, budding playwright Lillian Hellman, so it's interesting to see how he dealt in fiction with their relationship and his ultimate failure to cope with success.

Yet, "The Thin Man" works - and works well - as a straight, hard-boiled detective novel, too (which is why none of the characters are particularly likeable). Also, Nora, one of the few, strong female detectives of the pulp magazine era, has inspired countless woman (including Myrna Loy) through the decades.

Hammett's sparse style of writing, which many critics (including myself) think Hemingway merely popularized, revolutionized American literature. Each of Hammett's words had to do its part. Similarly, unlike those of earlier detective novels, Hammett's characters committed murder and other mayhem for actual reasons! The notion greatly affected Chandler, Macdonald, and all the others who toiled in the garden Hammett created. His books are all classics of American literature.

Some of these reviewers have made too much of the "alcoholism" in the book. Fact is, a certain, large segment of society in the `30s - products of Prohibition - did (or wanted to) drink the way the book's characters do and thought nothing of it. Basically, everybody drank in those days. Even the President of the United States had a bootlegger.

To my mind, an alcoholic is a person who drinks because he or she _has_ to; these characters drink because they _want_ to. Those revisionist Puritan reviewers just don't understand the context of the drinking in "The Thin Man".

Speaking of Puritans, the city of Boston banned "The Thin Man" upon release (thereby greatly increasing its sales) because Nora asks Nick if he got an erection while wrestling with one of the female characters. The word - heard without reaction on TV and in the movies these days - was simply too much for the city fathers. ("Just a little one" Nick answered, if memory serves.) The movie producers could not chance a similar ban on the movie so they cut a lot of the dark humor out of it but introduced Hammett to a lot of people over the world. The problems come when the viewers don't realize the book and the movies are two very different animals.

I would love to see "The Thin Man" made into a movie now - when the producers would respect the work while employing fantastic production values. I'm sure they would remember that Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" did not succeed as a movie until the third try when new producer John Huston wisely utilized most of Hammett's cutting but sparkling dialogue.

Hammett wrote five novels and, while they share similar traits, each one is different from the others and each one is an American classic. "The Thin Man" sees an older, wiser, possibly drunker, Hammett playfully poking fun at himself, Hellman, and the genre he mostly created while staying within the confines of that genre - a difficult trick. "The Thin Man", the most commercially successful of the five, can stand proudly next to its brothers. You'll enjoy it!

Good Read
Just falls short of being called a classic, but nevertheless an excellent read and gathers pace as one reaches the end. I found it very contemporary, almost everything "modern" is discussed or inferred to, be it drug use, incest, toy boys or sexual ambiguity. No wonder it still retains its freshness. I think this is a must read.
Loved when the wife says that they can "fly" back to San Francisco - remember the story takes place in 1932!! Lovely

Asta be the best
What do I love about this book? Let's see: the dialog, the story, the pacing, the characters, the rivers of booze, the gangsters, the weirdos, the Big Apple, the double meaning of the title, the breezy way it all goes down... A timeless classic. I just wish Hammett had been a little more prolific.