Tag Archives: The Maltese Falcon

The Origins of Today’s Detective Genre Fiction: A Review of Dennis Dooley’s Dashiell Hammett

Late Last Night Books

Back in the day, most undergraduates took at least one English literature course. Sometimes it was Shakespeare, 19th century English novelists, or the American Transcendentalists. I took a modern novel course in which we read James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Remembrance of Things Past, and several others––a heavy load for a one semester course. The key lesson in all of these courses is that while it’s possible to read solely for enjoyment additional layers of understanding are available when you analyze and compare each work with others by the same author as well as books by other writers.

A few decades ago the Frederick Ungar Publishing Company launched a line of books about genre authors called Recognitions.

The Critical Line

Late Last Night Books

12/7/2014 – The Critical Line

I watched noir classic The Maltese Falcon again last night, and again I was struck by how faithful the movie is to the book by Dashiell Hammett. Even much of the dialogue is the same. The film received rave reviews and continues to enthrall audiences. Would that this could be true for other books vandalized by the film industry.

Films are a different medium with different requirements. I understand that. Screenwriters are necessary to translate a book into a movie. The question becomes where to draw the line in changing plots and characters to fit a different medium. We’ve all seen the often unhappy results. Characters are warped