The Thin Man

The Thin Man. Hammett, Dashiell. 1933. New York: Vintage, 1992.

With more red herrings than a fish market, The Thin Man is the perfect example of an important work that it is easy to respect but hard to love. It is important in that Dashiell Hammett was really the first writer of noir fiction, a genre that has never lacked devoted readers and writers. The story concerns Nick Charles, a former San Francisco gumshoe who is on vacation in New York with his wife Nora when he suddenly learns of the murder of Julia Wolf, former secretary (and mistress) to Clyde Wynant, an eccentric inventor who previously employed Nick to tail a jealous rival inventor who claims Wynant ripped him off. Nick starts getting messages from Wynant, asking for his help in finding Julia's murderer through the latter's attorney Herbert Macaulay, who served with Nick during the war. Despite his better judgment, Nick gradually becomes involved with the case as well as with Wynant's family: his controlling and dangerous ex wife, strangely bookish son and beautiful but naive daughter. Double crossings and acts of violence ensue as Nick becomes more involved in solving the crime.

Ultimately, the novel is a disappointment given that it starts so strongly. The reader is immediately drawn to the cool world weary charisma of Nick Charles, the archetypical PI who has seen evil in its many incarnations. The main problem with the book is that the concepts it relies upon eventually grow stale. The jokes certainly have not aged well. Reading this book in and of itself is almost a kind of detective work in that one must determine not what is, but what isn't a lie. There are simply too many characters, many of which end up contributing nothing to the plot besides artificial drama. Unnecessary characters aside, one wonders whether this story could have worked as a piece of short fiction instead.

This novel is less a work of noir fiction than a progenitor of the whodunit. One should not dismiss Hammett solely on grounds of this novel; his short stories are excellent in that they are imagistic, with hardly any of the narrator's or other character's thoughts expressed. Stylistically, Hammett is almost surgical in his economy. One cannot deny his ability to write clearly and distinctively. But the story is simply too complicated for the reader to follow along, and there is remarkably less action and bloodshed than the reader would expect. Much of the narrative consists of Nick relaying new information from one character to another; information that he gets from unreliable sources. The contrived nature of the plot alienates the reader. One of Hammett's earlier short stories "The Man Who Killed Dan Odams" is the epitome of simplicity: a man breaks out of jail and hides out in a remote house, taking the woman and boy who live there hostage. He reveals his identity to them, and this leads to his downfall as the they are the family of the man that the protagonist killed (which got him thrown in jail in the first place). What is remarkable about that story is that it is so pared down that there is nothing unnecessary. So focused is the author that every little detail serves some purpose. The images tell the story—in true noir style the thoughts of the characters rarely break into the narrative.

There is little of that precise focus in The Thin Man, even though as far as novels go, it is rather short. If anything, this book tends more toward hardboiled fiction, but it is nowhere near as effective a piece of writing as say, James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. One gets the feeling that this work is less a story than a kind of gigantic math problem with the final chapter (in which Nick explains to Nora how ——— murdered Julia Wolf et al.) serving as a QED flourish.