newyorkness

One of the things I really love about Hammett's The Thin Man (which, if you were thinking of the movies, I am not referring to at all -- the novel is completely different) is that it is almost an entire novel's worth of the kind of mise-en-scene and general atmosphere one gets in the chapter "The Hat Trick" in The Glass Key -- when Ned Beaumont goes to New York -- or even (in a different way) in Salinger's Franny and Zooey. It's funny, because I used to not even like The Thin Man; then again, I used to not like The Glass Key either. I'm always surprised by Hammett, no matter how much I read him; it always seems like the things I think I have to look outside of his works to find are already in his works, or rather in the works I haven't read as many times.