This collection of 20 stories, most of them out of print for many years, is must reading for hardboiled fans. It doesn’t matter a bit that they don’t live up to the uncritical claims Hammett biographer William F. Nolan’s introduction makes for them, though it would be nice if Hammett handled the heroine’s viewpoint in “Ruffian’s Wife” with the same cool efficiency as the hero’s viewpoint in “One Hour,” or made the O. Henryish “Second-Story Angel” into as sharp an anecdote as the noir western “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams.” What matters is that the editors have preserved between one set of covers all three Sam Spade short stories, seven heretofore uncollected ones starring the Continental Op, a generous sampling of Hammett’s uneven non-series work, and a pair of headliners: the title novella, a fast-moving ode to the city man stranded in the middle of nowhere, and “The First Thin Man,” a 50-page fragment that shows Clyde Wynant’s murder hooked up to a completely different plot without a trace of Nick or Nora Charles. An answered prayer for Hammett fans, and a revelation for any serious reader of detective fiction—even if the revelation is often of how hard Hammett must have worked to spin his Black Mask straw into the gold of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40111-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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