Christmas day in NY of the 1930s

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 published 1934

Nora sighed. ‘I wish you were sober enough to talk to.’ She leaned over to take a sip of my drink. ‘I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine…Whatever you’re giving me, I hope I don’t like it.’

‘You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the Aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the –’

 

comments: This is Nick and Nora Charles, the original wise-cracking married sleuths. (if you don’t count Tommy & Tuppence, and I don’t.)

It is Christmas Day in New York of the 1930s, and it doesn’t remotely resemble the festival anywhere else. Nora wants her Xmas morning breakfast from an all-night deli: ‘Raw chopped beef sandwich with a lot of onion and some coffee.’

As all good crime quiz players know, Nick Charles is not the Thin Man: it is clear from the book that the title refers to a man they are looking for. But Nick and Nora became very successful characters in The Thin Man films: William Powell and Myrna Loy played them in a series of slick entertaining films. But Hammett never wrote about them again, there is just this one book. It makes for quite strange reading…

Nick is an ex-private detective (as was Hammett) who has retired to look after his wife’s extensive business interests. The couple are visiting New York in some luxury in order – it is implied at one point – to get away from family members at Christmas. It is clearly December 1932. Prohibition is still in place (it will end a year later) but that doesn’t for one moment stop the Charles’s from consuming truly heroic amounts of alcohol, without regard to the time of day, previous consumption or – of course – the law: it is made obvious that there isn’t the slightest difficulty in getting hold of whatever they want, even when the police are around. A speakeasy is mentioned in the first line. To me it is the most overwhelming feature of the book. In the middle of interviewing a drunk woman with a gun who has turned up at their apartment, Nick says ‘I remembered Nora had not touched her Scotch and soda, so I went into the bedroom and drank it.’ The only surprise here is that Nora hadn’t consumed it already.

Over the next week the couple get tied up with the case of the lost Clyde Wynant: an inventor who has disappeared. His secretary and former mistress, Julia, is found dead. His ex-wife Mimi (who has a ‘Queen-of-France’ way of speaking) is around, with her new and possibly shady husband, also the troubled children Dorothy and Gilbert. There are policemen, a lawyer, and various gangsters, night-club owners, random customers. There are a lot of characters.

Solving the crime, or clues or detection, are not really a feature. The crew get together in various combinations in various places, forever all setting off for a different apartment, with someone in the bedroom and someone else knocking at the door, and 3 telephone calls, and look, here’s the policeman turning up. Then off to a bar or a nightclub.

Hammett is seen as very much a hard-boiled, noir writer, but this book is light and comedic with dark overtones, and is about glamorous rich drunk people.

(Although in the middle of all this there is, weirdly, a 6-page description of an episode of cannibalism in 1870s Colorado – a true story, but it is very hard to see why it was included.)

There is a dog Asta who I believe is very attractive to dog-lovers. Even I will admit that the dog they chose for the films is quite endearing. (A wire-haired terrier called Skippy in real life, apparently, and a real pro with many films to his credit.)

Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon featured on the blog in the early days. I said then: ‘It is my belief that Dashiell Hammett is approved of and admired by a lot more people than actually read him. They are rattling good yarns, and (always a plus) he keeps it short. But the stories are very strange and the attitudes not attractive’  - I was unhappy about the ‘misogynistic all-guys-together’ theme. I also said ‘we'll look at his fascinating private life in a future entry’, and that never happened. I can’t even start on that, but recommend the Wikipedia entry. Whatever else he did, this is a man who went to jail rather than name names to the McCarthy enquiries.

The Thin Man is dedicated to Lillian Hellman, his long term partner who had her own controversies. And who tells an extraordinary story about Hammett and a turtle, one that I (as above, no great animal-lover) can never get out of my mind.

The Prohibition picture is a mural from the 1939 NY World’s Fair: the mind boggles rather about how the exhibit dealt with it, but I loved the picture. (from NYPL, of course.) 

The fashion drawing, from the Met Costume Institute, is a Schiaparelli number from 1932 which seemed very Nora.

Caroline Crampton’s Shedunnit podcast did a whole episode about this book earlier this year – you can find it here – as part of her series on green and white Penguin crime books. Very much recommended.