Hard Boiled Summer Reading

[foxinthestars]

I signed up for my library's Adult Summer Reading program (if I read 8 books I get a raffle entry and free books), and currently I'm working on "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett. I picked it up awhile back at a thrift store having seen the movie years ago and just being curious about it because it's so famous.

It's... different.

Like, it's just about as misogynistic as I would have expected, and the dated slang throws me off only occasionally. It's oddly clunky with how obsessed it is with desciptions, especially of people's changes of facial expression (maybe this is what taking "show don't tell" too far looks like), and I'm bemused at how much of it is basically Sam Spade laconically hanging around his office and apartment while people stop by and exchange impenetrable dialogue. The main characters are constantly lying to each other and making judgments about each other's lies that the reader is mostly not privy to, and it's more annoying than compelling. And there's also... I just feel like this story is the product of a culture alien to me, so it has an odd flavor that I'm not sure what to make of.

It's like Toxic Masculinity Pho.

(Well, if you're as inexperienced as I am. I've only had Pho once and the waitress had to tell me not to eat the basil.)

Comments

[gramarye1971]

...I eat the basil in pho? Or at least I pull off the leaves and let them soak in the broth before I eat them.

At any rate, I do think that Hammett's particular brand of noir is really best left to the cinema, where voiceovers can cherry-pick the best (or possibly the most visibly interesting) lines and leave the rest to the camera.

[foxinthestars]

Yeah, I picked up the whole sprig and started nibbling on it. ^_^;

[smurasaki]

Noir is weird. I read "The Maltese Falcon" and I think "Red Harvest" by Hammett (something else by Hammett, anyway), as well as one or two Raymond Chandler books some time back. I was trying to understand what people saw in hard boiled detective novels, but I had so much trouble making sense of how people act in that genre. People in stories actually from other cultures are more comprehensible!

[foxinthestars]

True enough! I finished the book now, got to the end with "maybe I love you and maybe you love me" and I'm like Well if so, I as the reader sure as heck don't know about it!

On the other hand, I expected more thrill from it I guess. Like, hardboiled things just happened one after the other and the tension level felt constant rather than having a plot arc (and I'm sure those had been invented already, Poe could do it --- I maybe ought to look up his detective stories...).

[smurasaki]

As I recall, all of the ones I tried were similar. Though I assumed the lack of thrill was because I had so much trouble relating to the protagonists. I hadn't thought about plot arcs (or the lack thereof).

I do know that some of Agatha Christie's more adventure-y mysteries date from about the same time (or a little earlier) and they read more how you'd expect. Though I think detective style mysteries in general have more roller coaster style plotting - even the 70's/80's TV shows I like tend to have multiple exciting events over the course of a single case.

(But in all of those cases, I like the protagonists, which makes a huge difference as far as both tension and satisfaction goes.)

[foxinthestars]

Yeah, and I mean you can have lots of excitement-crests on the way to the big overall crest --- and I don't even mean to say the traditional plot arc is the be-all end-all of storytelling.

But I suspect you're right and it mostly comes from "I don't care what happens to these people." (Like, a guy stumbling in with the titular Maltese Falcon and then keeling over dead probably would have felt like a ramp-up if I gave a damn about any of this.)

I followed that up with a movie that didn't grab me ("Paprika" --- disappointing for a Satoshi Kon film), and I had to stop and remind myself "okay, I care about the people in all this other stuff I'm reading/watching*, it's not just me..."


*Just caught up on the manga version of "The Devil is a Part-Timer," which I find quite fun, and I love everyone in that bar. Heck, I'm well aware that the characters in the "Libra of Nil Admirari" anime have no depth but I still care what happens to them. Et cetera...