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The Thin Man Dashiell Hammett 9780679722632 Books

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The Thin Man Dashiell Hammett 9780679722632 Books

This is a classic tale by a famous writer of "hard-boiled" crime fiction; and in and of itself it's worth reading. BUT...this Kindle edition has absolutely the worst formatting I have ever encountered, and it's so bad it detracts from the experience and degrades Hammett's prose. The principal fault is in the paragraphing. Fundamental writing rules include starting a separate paragraph whenever dialogue from a character is used: this permits the reader to clearly distinguish who is speaking to whom. Unfortunately, in this book that is almost never the case: two--sometimes three-characters' dialog is included in the same paragraph, usually the same line. It forces the reader to re-read just to decide who's talking. Since most of Hammett's writing technique is to let the dialogue carry the thread of the narrative, this flaw is disconcerting and highly distracting. In essence you have to read the book two or three times to understand what's going on.

Quite aside from that, whoever did the scanning needs to get a better OCR program and scanner. The book is shot through with typos that are clearly OCR errors, including innumerable "non-words" that make the reader stop and try to figure out what word is meant.

All in all, I'd say the cost of this book, even in Kindle format, is hardly justified in view of the very, very bad editing. Get another edition.


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The Thin Man Dashiell Hammett 9780679722632 Books Reviews

Please note that this review is of an edition of The Thin Man that sold for about a buck. It is not about any edition of The Glass Key, nor is it about the ten-dollar edition of The Thin Man. This review now evidently appears under everything Hammett ever wrote, but I did not post it under everything Hammett ever wrote. Why can't stop reviews from "bleeding" like this? Again, the following pertains only to an edition of TTM that sold for about one dollar.

DO NOT buy the edition of The Thin Man. Reading this cheap version is like walking a path that ought to have been cleared through the jungle for us but turns out instead to be overgrown with vines. Several other one-star reviewers are exactly right about this but maybe they're not adamant enough. Not only does Nora's name appear here as "Nona," it also appears as "Noma." More than half of the paragraph returns are missing, so, for instance, chapter numbers appear on the same line as text; and dialogue is often very difficult to follow, as each single paragraph might contain words being spoken by more than one character, so the reader must be constantly on guard to catch every last quotation mark. This is especially trying when so many of the conversations consist of rather rapid-fire interrogations. Only a few of the first lines of paragraphs are indented; most are left-justified instead. Here are more word-glitches from just the first 1/4 of this book (and by no means is this list complete) the word "people" does indeed appear here as "pea-pie." The word "hello" is printed as "FIello." We get "in ease" instead of "in case." The word "He" appears as "Fle" and "his" is written as "Ins." Instead of "you" we keep seeing "von." We get "carrving" for "carrying" and "look" for "took." The word "police" is printed as "pohee." The word "hut" is repeatedly used instead of "but." We also find "lover lip," "egg-flog" "fireescape," "ping-pang," and "saundproofing. " It's not too hard to decipher "$iooo" or even "Wbat'd"--but what about "iz1/2"? Or how about this sentence "I said, 'Sb-h-h." And yet there are even worse sentences "she was thing to find my father" is one clause that I have not yet made sense of, nor have I managed yet to decipher "he was glad to find me inane alive." Or how about this little gem, which I promise you I've transcribed accurately "He wore a black derby hat, a black overcoat that fitted him very snugly, a dark suit, and black shoes, all looking as if he had bought them within the past fifteen bought them with the past fifteen calibre automatic, lay comfortably in his hand, not pointing at anything." Shouldn't readers be offended that someone would offer this slop for sale? I say we must be! Stuff like this shouldn't even be given away, but to sell it, even for just a buck and change, is a blasphemy. The Thin Man is a masterpiece of the genre that it in fact helped establish and it deserves to be honorably enshrined in exactly the forms and words that its author intended.
The novel of course is the basis of the better known "The Thin Man" movie, the first and arguably best of the series, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the witty, hard-drinking duo of Nick and Nora Charles. Dashiell Hammett also worked on the screenplay, and quite a bit of Hammett's original dialog is in the film.

Hammett is widely acknowledged as the first of the "big three" originators of the hard-boiled detective story, followed by Raymond Chandler (creator of Philip Marlowe) and Ross Macdonald (Lew Archer). Many critics say Hammett is the least accomplished of the three authors, but he's still a darn good writer, and The Thin Man in my opinion is the most readable and most enjoyable of his books.

If you've never read Hammett, or you're just getting into reading the great 20th century detective novels, this is the place to start.
I’ve been meaning to read Dashiell Hammett for ages, thinking it would scratch the same combination of literary and thematic itches that the works of Raymond Chandler do so well. Unfortunately this didn’t do the trick, perhaps in part because it turned out to be more murder mystery than hard-boiled crime novel. Dated though they might be, I found the racism and sexism throughout completely distracting and the writing paled in comparison to Chandler’s. Though I was amazed and amused by the constant drinking that Nick and Nora Charles manage to accomplish throughout the story. At one point Nick declines his wife’s offer of breakfast, complaining that it’s too early, and requests a drink instead. It’s no wonder one of my favorite bar tenders in Portland named his dog Asta after the Charles’ pup. I’ve not given up on Hammett just yet. I’m going to read The Maltese Falcon and see if Sam Spade, Hammett’s solitary private eye, and his moody milieu are anything like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and his hard-boiled environs.
This is a classic tale by a famous writer of "hard-boiled" crime fiction; and in and of itself it's worth reading. BUT...this edition has absolutely the worst formatting I have ever encountered, and it's so bad it detracts from the experience and degrades Hammett's prose. The principal fault is in the paragraphing. Fundamental writing rules include starting a separate paragraph whenever dialogue from a character is used this permits the reader to clearly distinguish who is speaking to whom. Unfortunately, in this book that is almost never the case two--sometimes three-characters' dialog is included in the same paragraph, usually the same line. It forces the reader to re-read just to decide who's talking. Since most of Hammett's writing technique is to let the dialogue carry the thread of the narrative, this flaw is disconcerting and highly distracting. In essence you have to read the book two or three times to understand what's going on.

Quite aside from that, whoever did the scanning needs to get a better OCR program and scanner. The book is shot through with typos that are clearly OCR errors, including innumerable "non-words" that make the reader stop and try to figure out what word is meant.

All in all, I'd say the cost of this book, even in format, is hardly justified in view of the very, very bad editing. Get another edition.