More Dash

Interestingly enough, Dashiell Hammett was basically an invalid for most of the time while he was writing. He got work as an ad writer, which was great -- good pay, and he finally got to be around people -- except that he drank too much and socialized too much and finally put himself back on his sickbed, and went back to writing fiction.

I think it's amazing that the guy who is the most influential man in detective fiction (sources are pretty consistent about this), was driven to write because his disability money was only enough to pay for rent, not food for his family. Think what fiction would have missed if he had been well enough to work -- even well enough to write ads at an office!

All this has a point, of sorts. Not that I think I'm God's gift to literature (I really don't), but it's a fairly sure bet I wouldn't be writing if I was well enough to work. I wouldn't be doing much of anything but collapsing in bed at night, probably.

As it is I still won't be writing much until I'm over this heat-scare and a cold. (Ha ha. Funny to get them together!) [It's finally getting cooler, though, for which I'm grateful. Watched half a video today, and wandered around the house a lot. That was nice. I feel less like an invalid.]

Today I'm reading The Thin Man. I keep reading further and finding I've read that far before, but I could swear I've never read the whole story.

After this I'm done with his novels, time to start the short stories.

I hope I can get through the Hammett phase without totally wrecking my own writing style. The one thing I've worked on writing since I started the reading (and re-reading), was a continuation of an old short story, and I wrote it with a style very like the one I was reading. Now of course I picked that story to write because I wanted to do that style, but still. I was surprised at how "well" I did. (Lots of blackmail and corruption so far. But I love some of the dialogue.)

I've already picked out things I have to completely re-write in another in-progress story to make the men more like Hammett's characters. Not a good thing. I can't write his stories; I don't want to. I just wish he'd written twenty novels instead of five, and I had them all.

I don't want to put this author on a pedestal, change my style, go off on a tangent and wake up two months from now with a literary, perhaps spiritual, hangover. I've done it before, after a sort.

You may have noticed (if you read this blog), that I have been known to do this: pick an author, and stick with him or her for several months. I've done it with Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie: I just park myself and plow through dozens of 'em in weeks. Then, eventually, I move on. It always affects my writing, at least a bit.

Only it's worse with Hammett, in a way, because it's not just the story I like (some of them I don't), but the characters, and the style. I'm never seriously tempted to copy Christie's writing, or her characters. I like the plots: that's pretty much it. And although I like the characters of Archie and Wolfe, who could imitate Rex Stout?

I know, you'll say nobody can imitate Hammett, either -- and you're right. They can't. But I'm more serious about this, I mean my writing can be more seriously influenced by him than it can be by the others.

In some ways this writer is poison for me. I admit it. I admitted it what? five years ago, when I first read The Glass Key. That didn't stop me from thinking about it all these years.

This is silly, I know. To go on so long. But I think about these things, and this is my first real chance to get on here and spill my guts. Somehow it's not the same thinking things over in your own mind, and I've gotten enough used to writing in here that making a journal entry in a tablet isn't the same, either.

Another thing I've noticed is that I love, love, absolutely love it when the author deals with what I call "buddy-ship." It's not quite friendship, but it's more than friendship, too. I guess it's a glimpse into the world of some guys. I like how it's handled: so real. It's dealt with almost more than romance in his stories, which I like.

Glass Key, to my mind, is basically about the breakup of a buddyship. From almost the first page you see the tension beneath the surface, the ties of friendship and family-ship being stretched just a little too far. By the last sentence, you've witnessed the aftermath.

Since I read that he was basically an invalid when he wrote most of his stories, it makes a lot of sense to me. Here he was, stuck at home with his wife and kids (at least for the early stuff), probably pining for the days he could go out and work and hang out with other guys. And here I am reading his stuff in bed, really wishing I could go out and have some human interaction. I know, I know: Armchair Freud. It still makes me feel some measure of closeness to the author.

I'll shut up now.

But one last thing -- did you notice the last sentence in the first paragraph of Dashiell Hammett's Wikipedia entry? It sounded like a veiled accusation to me. How rude!