Today we remember the figure of Samuel Dashiell Hammett
(May 27, 1894 - January 10 1961), American writer of detective novels, to mark the 50 anniversary of his death.
As I wrote at the time, I can not forget the weekend I discovered Hammett. His books have always been at home, in the paperback editions of Alianza Editorial, those with the covers of Daniel Gil. In particular I read "
The Maltese Falcon" and the mixture of brutality and elegance of Sam Spade prevented me from releasing the book until I finished. Hammett wrote half a dozen novels in a relatively short period of time -
The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest
,
The Dain Curse ,
La Llave de Cristal, The Thin Man, Woman in
Darkness - a handful of great short stories from 1935 and just write anything else. Played, smoked and drank and gave the money earned, fought for the causes they considered just and ended imprisoned and persecuted by the McCarthy witch hunts, but not before participating in the two world wars and end up buried in the Arlington military cemetery .
Hammett's books are full of categorical statements: "The
Menda had changed little and had not improved at all," 'In this place sells only authentic whiskey before the war' - I tried to count how many lies there in that sentence. At the moment he found five prospects for several more, "" When a Chinese start shooting, and do not release the gun until you empty the magazine "," Gone like a fist disappears when opening a hand "... Hammett, which began in the pulp fiction
to five cents a word, sculpted in his novels an accurate X-ray and brutal social tensions of the turbulent times he lived: two world wars, union struggles, the crack of 29 and the consequent depression, Prohibition ...
had actually read Hammett much earlier. A childhood friend gave me a comic "
Secret Agent X-9 " which fascinated me for years for its elegant lines and complex plot. It is a comic strip published in newspapers intermittently in the years 30, and Alex Raymond
cartoonist and writer Dashiell Hammett.
A curious story about this comic is that Raymond was greatly stressed by the workload that was supposed to draw Flash Gordon and X-9 simultaneously. When Hammett could not help the hero brought down in a basement or somebody hit a shot to a bulb for a couple of days the test was all black with some "bubbles" in which he exclaimed "
Traitors! " "
Where is the light? ", "
Ay!" and then another couple of days almost all black least Cachin lit a match, until readers began calling the paper and drew pissed at X-9 back to the light ...
Hammett's stories have inspired directly or indirectly
multiple movies. The most faithful adaptation of one of his works to the film is of course "
The Maltese Falcon" by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart. William Powell and Myrna Loy starred in six films based (more or less) in "The Thin Man
." "Miller's Crossing
" of the brothers Cohen is a version of "
The Glass Key," and as seemingly disparate films as "Last Man Standing
" by Walter Hill, "
A Fistful of Dollars " of Sergio Leone or "Yojimbo
" of Akira Kurosawa was inspired by "
Red Harvest," the Machiavellian intervention of unnamed detective in a corrupt mining town deep systematically facing local mafias together until their destruction. Towards the middle of "Red Harvest
" Agent of the Continental can sit on all sides, and then pretty faced, in a
peace conference at which removed literally all the shit of all against all those who succeed in getting out alive of the meeting do definitely willing to annihilate once and for all ...
This post is a rehash of another Hammett wrote about a couple of years will .
More here. Again, thanks for coming. If you liked the post you can subscribe
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