Top Ten Tuesday: Be Brief

This month's first Top Ten Tuesday prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl is "Top Ten Quick Reads/Novellas."  I am only counting novellas intended for teens and adults, not middle-grade or junior fiction, because otherwise the whole list would be just my favorite books from when I was a tween/teen.  That would be fun, but not where I chose to go today.

I arranged these by alphabetical order because I didn't feel like trying to figure out which ones would be my next-favorite after Falling Snow, which is definitely tops here.  All titles are linked to my full reviews.

Corral Nocturne by Elisabeth Grace Foley (G) -- western Cinderella retelling

Falling Snow by Skye Hoffert (PG-10) -- fantasy circus Snow White retelling

The Goblin and the Dancer by Allison Tebo (PG) -- fantasy Steadfast Tin Soldier retelling

A Holiday by Gaslight by Mimi Matthews (PG-13) -- Victorian Christmas retelling of North and South

The Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett (G) -- classic about extending a helping hand across social divides

The Reluctant Godfather by Allison Tebo (G) -- funny Cinderella retelling

A Sidekick's Tale by Elisabeth Grace Foley (PG) -- funny western

The Silent Gondoliers by William Goldman (PG) -- funny fable

With Blossoms Gold by Hayden Wand (PG) -- fantasy Rapunzel retelling

Woman in the Dark by Dashiell Hammett (PG-16) -- hardboiled detective story

"Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett

I have no memory of this book.  I KNOW I read all of Hammett's novels about twenty years ago.  But the title is the only familiar part about it.  I didn't even remember that the main character is the Continental Op.  Weird.  Or maybe not weird -- I read all of Hammett's novels in a row, in a big anthology I got from the library, and they did kinda smush together in my brain.  So that's probably why it didn't feel familiar.

Anyway!  I thought at first this book was going to be about fighting Communists because it actually involves a Communist agitator at the beginning, but it turns out to be about a whole lot of gangsters battling it out over control of a town.  So the titular "red harvest" really refers to all the blood that's spilled by the end, not harvesting Commies.  Or being harvested by Commies.

The Continental Op shows up in Personville for a meeting with a man who wants to hire the Continental Detective Agency for an unnamed job.  That man then dies, and it turns out he was basically the last decent, law-abiding citizen of Personville, which is nicknamed Poisonville for a good reason.  The bulk of the book is about the Op setting various gangsters and crime bosses against each other so they will take each other down and he won't have to get his hands dirty.  Except, by the end, he has to anyway.

An unpleasant book about unpleasant people?  Yes, but also... wow, so satisfying by the end when all the baddies have come to bad ends.  It was just the sort of hard, no-nonsense, smooth read I have been craving in these last, unending days of summer.  I don't love Hammett's prose the way I love Chandler's, but he has a straight-forward and slyly humorous style I enjoy anyway.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Plans are all right sometimes," I said.  "And sometimes just stirring things up is all right -- if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top" (p. 85).

The machine-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was (p. 122).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for a lot of violence and blood that somehow manages not to get excessively gory, plus some cussing, lots of alcohol and tobacco use, some laudanum use, and a lot of innuendo about why one woman is so terribly popular around town.

This is my 43rd book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.

"Nightmare Town" by Dashiell Hammett

You may have noticed this book was in my sidebar for like three months.  That's because I was savoring it.  For three months?  Indeed.  It's a collection of a novella and a lot of short stories by Dashiell Hammett, and I was using it as inspiration while I hammered my way through the first draft of my own 1940s mystery book, Murder Most Foul, which I talked about here on my other blog earlier this week.

I had a great time reading this collection.  My favorites in it were:

+ Nightmare Town, the titular novella about a corrupt desert town and two people who try to escape it.

+ "Ruffian's Wife," a short story about a woman who loses confidence in her husband when he turns out to not be the big, bad tough guy she believes him to be.

+ "The Man Who Killed Dan Odoms," a short story about a man seeking sanctuary on a remote farm as he hides from people who want to avenge the man he killed.

+ "The Second-Story Angel," a short story about a writer who gets a surprise visitor in the middle of the night, then learns something even more surprising about her a few weeks later.

+ "Tom, Dick, or Harry," a short story about a robbery that has a really cool twist on the identity of the robber.

+ "A Man Called Spade," a short story featuring Sam Spade, the detective from The Maltese Falcon, and has him solve a murder that seems to be open-and-shut, but isn't.

Particularly Good Bits:

...where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed, honesty not infrequently prevails (Nightmare Town, p. 15).

I don't like eloquence: if it isn't effective enough to pierce your hide, it's tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts ("Zigzags of Treachery," p. 99).

Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details -- and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you ("One Hour," p. 253).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for lots of different kinds of violence, some light and occasional bad language, and the occasional oblique reference to sexual activity in a non-descriptive and non-titillating way.

This is my 17th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.

"The Continental Op" by Dashiell Hammett

This was an enjoyable collection of short stories featuring Hammett's never-named detective, or operative, who works for the Continental Detective Agency.  Hammett himself was a Pinkerton Agent, and I have always assumed that he based the way the Continental folks work on how the Pinkertons worked, which is a lot of fun.  Cuz the Pinkertons kind of fascinate me.  

Anyway, I didn't particularly love any of the seven stories in this, but I had a great time reading them.  My favorites were:

• "The Golden Horseshoe," in which the Op sets out to find a runaway husband and uncovers a pretty sinister extortion plot.
  
  
• "The House in Turk Street," in which the Op starts looking for one guy and ends up in the middle of a big mystery concerning a totally different guy.
  
  
• "The Whosis Kid," in which the Op follows a hunch and cracks open a gang of thieves.
  
  
• "The Farewell Murder," in which the Op gets hired to prevent a murder, and does, but not the murder he was hired to prevent.

I found it interesting that the Op tended to follow hunches and let events play out around him, not taking an active role until toward the end of the story most of the time.  It was almost like he was as much an observer as the readers, which is a unique way to handle a detective story, especially a hardboiled one.

I also liked that you get to see the Op working with other Continental operatives as part of an organization.  It's really different from the usual lone private investigator so many hardboiled mysteries feature.

Particularly Good Bits:

It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant.  I was bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man's palm ("The Golden Horseshoe," p. 84)

According to the best dramatic rules, these folks should have made sarcastic speeches to me before they left, but they didn't.  They passed me without even a farewell look ("The House on Turk Street," p. 107).

I'm at that middle point around forty where a man puts other feminine qualities -- amiability, for one -- above beauty on his list ("The Whosis Kid," p. 205).

"Always in a hurry when we're quitting for the day," Begg said, his freckles climbing up his face to make room for his grin ("The Main Death," p. 241).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for some bad language, quite a bit of violence, and veiled innuendo here and there.

This is the 16th book I've read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett

I've seen the 1941 movie adaptation of The Maltese Falcon probably nine or ten times.  And I've read this before, though not for like fifteen+ years.  So, what I'm saying is, I was not reading this mystery book to find out whodunit.  I was reading it for the joy of the hardboiled flavor, really.  And it did not disappoint.

One thing that I really enjoyed was how much of the dialog from this book got included in the Humphrey Bogart movie.  Like, all the good lines come from the book.  I love that.  Hammett's dialog is not as snappy as Chandler's (nor are his descriptions as staggeringly wonderful), but he writes plenty of zingers, and I dig that so much.

The basic plot is that Sam Spade, private investigator, takes a job that ends up tangling him with a very colorful collection of characters who are all trying to get their greedy little paws on a falcon statue of incredible value.  Bodies pile up here and there, but Spade figures it all out and sees that justice is carried out in the end.  Dark, cynical, bitter, and twisted as the story and the characters may be, justice is still upheld.  I love that.

Although I could hear Bogart throughout the book when Spade was speaking, it really cracked me up that Spade doesn't look anything like Bogart.  In fact, the way Hammett describes him, he looks a lot more like Vincent Price in my head.  But Price of the 1950s, not the 1940s -- he would've been just a little to boyish in the early '40s to play the role.  Still, I had fun imagining him in the role.

Particularly Good Bits:

Spade said nothing in a blank-faced definite way (p. 43).

Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers (p. 57).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for lots of cussing, some violence, oblique references to sexual deviance, references to a female character sleeping with someone to gain their trust, and some coarse dialog.

I am contributing this review to my We Love Detectives Week blog party that I'm hosting over on my other blog.  If you haven't stopped by to join the fun yet, there are still a couple days of party left!

This is also my 35th book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list.

"The Thin Man" by Dashiell Hammett

When I said I was going on a Dashiell Hammett kick, I meant it.  My goodness, I am enjoying his books!  

I feel like, when I read this for the first time, fifteenish years ago, I just didn't get its humor.  In fact, I recall being rather disappointed by it, for whatever reason.  Not sure if I'd seen the Myrna Loy/William Powell movie version already and thought this didn't measure up, or what.

Well, I found it really funny this time around.  As in, it made me laugh aloud, in public, repeatedly.  The wit is as sharp and acidic as a Jane Austen novel, and the plot trots briskly along.  Not as briskly as in the movie, but I enjoyed that the book has more time to develop some of the characters a bit more.  If you don't like sarcasm, you probably won't dig the humor here, but since I do, boy did it ever please me.

The movie version is a little more bubbly and cute than the book, but that's because the movie is a comedy with a mystery in it, and the book is a mystery with humor in it.  Different focuses, different vibes, same story.  Which, if you don't know, features Nick Charles, a retired detective, and his wealthy wife Nora.  They're visiting New York City for Christmas during Prohibition, and people Nick used to know keep ending up dead.  I had forgotten that this is narrated by Nick Charles in first person, which lends a nice, noir-y voice-over feel to the whole proceeding.

Particularly Good Bits: 

Nora said, "I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fascinating people" (p. 129).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for rather a lot of cussing, some violence, lots of alcohol, and some innuendo in dialog.

This is my 31st book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list and my fourth for #ANovelMonthOfMystery.

"The Glass Key" by Dashiell Hammett

The first time I read this book, fifteenish years ago, I had no real idea who Alan Ladd was.  I definitely had not seen the 1942 version of The Glass Key that starred him opposite Veronica Lake and Brian Donlevy.  Not even once.  Cut to 2021, when I've seen it probably five or six times, and that makes this reading experience totally different from that first one.

One of the best parts of this reread was how it cleared up a few things about Ladd's performance in the movie version for me!  I've always been a little bugged by certain expressions Ladd uses as Ned Beaumont because they don't seem natural to him.  In particular, he does these weird smiles where his lips are pulled tight against his teeth so he looks more like he's grimacing that smiling.  I had always chalked this up to Ladd being nervous because this was his first big hero role after he gained fame playing the sympathetic villain in This Gun for Hire (1942).  But now, I don't think that was it at all!

I think Alan Ladd read this book when he got cast in the movie version.  Because Hammett is very explicit about exactly what sort of smile Beaumont is doing at any given moment, whether it's a friendly smile, a genuine and boyish smile, or a controlled and fake smile... with his lips pulled tightly against his teeth.  I think Ladd was trying to draw on the source material and, if you have read the book, you'll realize that's what he's doing.  But, if you haven't, it just looks like he is really uncomfortable in a lot of scenes.  Which, actually, his character does tend to be, so it does kinda work.  But it works better now that I've read the book and then rewatched the movie right after.

ANYWAY, this book focuses on Ned Beaumont (renamed Ed for the movie because whyyyy?), right-hand-man of a political fixer who falls in love with a senator's daughter and decides to put all his political power behind this senator.  The senator's daughter can't stand him, but plays nice so he'll keep helping her dad.  And then her brother gets murdered.  Everyone assumes the fixer did it, but his power keeps him from getting arrested for it because he's in control of the District Attorney and so on.  Ned Beaumont tries to figure out who did kill the senator's son, if his boss didn't, and a lot of violence and excitement ensue.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for violence, including a pretty extreme beating, and contemplations of suicide.  Also some bad language, lots of alcohol use, smoking, etc.  I did mention this is hardboiled detective fiction, right?

This is the 30th book I've read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list and the second book I read for the #AMonthOfMystery challenge on Instagram.

"Woman in the Dark" by Dashiell Hammett

After rereading Trouble is My Business by Raymond Chandler last month, I began to crave more hardboiled detective stories of that same era.  But I have a strict rule about only reading one Chandler book a year that I only fudge on in the must extreme circumstances.  And this didn't feel extreme.  So I had the happy thought of rereading Dashiell Hammett's books.  I read all his novels and short stories in one fell swoop almost 20 years ago, with the result that I can only remember the ones that I've also seen movie versions of, namely The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key.  And even those, I know, are somewhat different from the movies, though I can't remember how.

So, I'm rereading a bunch of Dashiell Hammett.  Some friends on Instagram are hosting #AMonthOfMystery for October, challenging participants to read a lot of mysteries in October because why not?  So I'm joining that because I never need any excuse to read more mysteries and talk about them with bookish friends.  And Woman in the Dark is my first book read for that event.

It's not quite even a novel, really -- it's a slim novella.  But whatever.  It was really enjoyable.  I found myself rooting so hard for Brazil, an ex-con with a temper and dangerous fists, and Luise Fischer, a kept woman trying to get away from the brute who thinks he should be allowed to keep her.  Everything goes sideways and down for a long time, but there's a surprisingly hopeful ending that I absolutely loved.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for oblique references to sex, considerable violence, and some bad language.