#252 The Hunter- Dashiell Hammett
Hammett, of course, is the author of The Maltese Falcon and
The Thin Man. This collection is a compendium of his previously uncollected
short works. Most of them are not the
crime stories that he became famous for. The Hunter however, is such a work,
it’s a detective mystery, of the hard-boiled variety—I’ve never been sure
exactly what hard-boiled meant in a detective story, but here you have it.
According to the introduction, Fred Vitt is particularly
hard-boiled and is on the case of a check forger and narrows it down to a
business owner or his bookkeeper. He settles on the book keeper, but gets
stonewalled: “That was better. Againts antagonism he could make progress.”
He puts on the hard press and gets his confession. Another
good day’s work. The life of a private detective can be a hard, thankless life.
“But he liked its irregular variety, the assurances of his
own cleverness that come frequently to any but the most uniformly successless
of detectives, and the occasional full-tilt chase after a fleeting someone who
was…a scoundrel of one sort or another. Too, a detective has a certain prestige
in some social divisions, a matter in no way equalized by his lack of any
standing at all in others.”
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