+Vote!
Crime Always Pays (Free subscription) | 09/30/2008
Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ... What crime novel would you most like to have written? There are so many of them--anything by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, especially THE BIG SLEEP, or Ross MacDonald. They were really the inspiration for writing SWANN’S LAST SONG. And maybe an unlikely candidate, DESPERADOES, by Ron Hansen, about...
+Vote!
Bluegrass Film Society (Free subscription) | 09/24/2008
John Huston's Maltese Falcon (1941) by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir This episode examines the classic "The Maltese Falcon." Based on a book by Dashiell Hammett, starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by John Huston, it is generally considered the first "film noir." As Richard and Shannon examine this landmark film, they discuss film noir's debt to hard-boiled...
+Vote!
Lesa's Book Critiques (Free subscription) | 09/16/2008
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon was the book selected for Maricopa County's The Big Read, sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts. We were fortunate enough to have Betty Webb, author of the Lena Jones noir mysteries, as our discussion leader at the Velma Teague Branch Library. Before she started, Betty mentioned a series of books by a children's writer who is a fan of noir, the Chet...
+Vote!
Denver Post (Free subscription) | 09/16/2008
Every novel chosen for the One Book, One Denver reading program has its admirers and detractors. But the latest selection, Dashiell Hammett's classic detective story "The Thin Man," has unlocked a new genre of One Book criticism: literary snobbism.
+Vote!
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 09/13/2008
Ever since I learned years ago that then Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett had played a part in investigating the infamous 1921 Fatty Arbuckle murder scandal, centered around the death of a wannabe-actress named Virginia Rappe in San Francisco, I’ve wondered how long it would take for some bright crime novelist to see in that historical pairing the ingredients for great fiction. Well, leafing
+Vote!
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 09/11/2008
In a departure from the first four years of the program, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced Tuesday that this year's One Book, One Denver selection is the late Dashiell Hammett's "The Thin Man." Previously, only books centered from living authors were chosen. Hickenlooper said of the change in criteria, "In the fifth year, we decided to be a little more adventurous" and select a "page-turner."...
+Vote!
Red Orbit (Free subscription) | 09/05/2008
Phoenix Public Library will celebrate The Big Read this September and October with a series of free events focused around this year's Big Read selection, "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett.
+Vote!
Dispatches from Zembla (Free subscription) | 08/18/2008
Just finished reading Jim Thompson's crime classic The Killer Inside Me. I found it rather disappointing, specially after reading all the comments on the blurb. One of them says that "if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich would come together in an ungodly union, the result would be Jim Thompson." The other calls him "hardboiled Dante" and "dimestore Dostoevsky" and proclaims, "read...
+Vote!
Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/16/2008
The blurb on the back cover says, "24 of the greatest crime comics ever," and that's close enough to the truth to let you know you gotta have the book. The names you're looking for (or at least the ones I was looking for) are all here: Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins, Dashiell Hammett, Alex Raymond, Will Eisner, Alex Toth, Jack Cole, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and many others. Some really classic...
+Vote!
Bill Peschel (Free subscription) | 07/09/2008
1951: The U.S. government breaks Dashiell Hammett for refusing to cooperate with the Communist witch hunt. In a New York courtroom, the author of "The Maltese Falcon" and other detective novels refused to testify about the whereabouts of four Communist Party members who had jumped bail after their convictions under the Smith Act. Because Hammett was president of the Civil Rights Congress, which paid...
+Vote!
Comics Should Be Good! (Free subscription) | 07/04/2008
This is another one that bounces all over the place, so bear with me. There’s a story that Lillian Hellman used to tell about Dashiell Hammett, a time when he was reading one of her early plays. As he read it, his scowl got progressively more fierce, until finally he hurled the manuscript down and cursed. [...]
+Vote!
Churbuck.com (Free subscription) | 07/02/2008
Institute for Justice: First Amendment Cases: Texas Computer Repair Thanks to Fester for this WTF weirdness. Texas wants computer repair technicians to be licensed Private Investigators. Somehow the hardboiled world of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett doesn’t jibe in my mind with a guy in a shortsleeved shirt swapping power supplies on a beige desktop. Then again, [...]
+Vote!
Crime Always Pays (Free subscription) | 06/29/2008
A surreal, affectionate homage to the private eye detective popularised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Jack Kairo is a one-man show which rewards fans of the hardboiled school of crime writing in particular. The hard-drinking and wise-cracking Kairo (Simon Toal, right) steps out of a case – literally, a suitcase – and into a case that involves the murder of a General Rumsfeld, the solving...
+Vote!
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 06/12/2008
... forget all that flowers in your hair stuff. Instead, slap on a fedora, pull on a trench coat and fire up a jasper as local artist Owen Smith pays tribute to Dashiell Hammett’s private-eye classic, The Maltese Falcon (arguably ground zero for the genre), with a series of posters assigned out by the San Francisco Arts Commission as part of its Market Street 2008 Program. Those placards will be
+Vote!
KansasCity.com (Free subscription) | 06/06/2008
Sam Spade is one of fiction’s icons, the Dashiell Hammett hero who got tangled up in the murderous deal for the Maltese falcon back in 1929.
