The Thin Man

I don't spend much time trying to figure out detective stories; I usually just go along for the ride. In this one, however, I had a pet theory that turned out to be 180 degrees from the actual solution. Nick and Nora Charles weren't quite as fascinating and witty as I expected them to be, but there was enough snappy dialogue to keep interest high through a quite labyrinthine mystery. Of course when Charles explains it all in the last chapter it sounds so very simple.

The Glass Key

Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key is hardboiled all right but more thinly plotted than his other books. Ned Beaumont is a character to remember – smart, savage and subtle all in one.

Chocky

Chocky is the imaginary friend of an 11-year-old ... or is it imaginary? The science fiction writer John Wyndham, probably best known for The Day of the Triffids, published this short novel a year before his death in 1969. His skill in unwinding the story, from an apparently innocent incident on the first page to a startling conclusion, is superb. Everything builds in a suspenseful, cinematic fashion. Steven Spielberg has reportedly secured the film rights, but I imagine it being done by Hitchcock, alas.

The Dain Curse

If Red Harvest was a little rough around the edges, Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, his second novel, shows the full flowering of his talent. The shift reminds me a little of the transition from John Dos Passos's Streets of Night, a good enough novel published in 1923, and Manhattan Transfer, the masterpiece of two years later. Hammett is completely in control of his material and form, which is evident in the fact that, as complicated as the mystery is, the reader is able to follow it easily. That wasn't the case in his first novel, at least for me. The Dain Curse is a multigenerational saga of murder and deceit broken into three "books," each self-contained but linked to the others. It's a bravura piece of plotting and style.

Nightmare Alley

William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, published in 1946, succeeds on multiple fronts. It is a harrowing rendering of a con man's rise and fall; a seedy portrait of carny life; and a psychological biography of a damaged man. Throw in tarot cards and degrading behavior and you have a rich novel, written in a sharp style, that will linger in the memory.

Red Harvest

The title of Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, refers to the blood spilled throughout its pages. The writer drew from his experiences as a Pinkerton detective in his stories, which broke new ground in frankness and violence. A reader from the vantage point of nearly a century since Red Harvest's publication would do well to consider a few extenuating circumstances before judging it too harshly. Since it was originally written as a serial, the chapters have a self-contained aspect that impedes the flow of the novel. Also, the startling originality of Hammett's effort has faded with the years and the explosion of copycats in the genre. The best way to read Red Harvest is probably to imagine yourself in 1929 and encountering it for what it is: a new form of expression. On those terms, it is an undoubted masterpiece.

The Maltese Falcon

It is impossible to read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon without imagining the actors from John Huston's 1941 film, and for that Huston deserves high praise. He had found the 1931 pre-Code version a disappointment and scripted a movie that followed the book pretty much right down the line. Hammett's snappy dialogue was a template for those who followed, both his equal (Chandler, Macdonald) and hacks. In the novel especially, the black bird is the perfect vehicle through which ethics and desires are revealed. A morality play with no moral, the book is a dark pleasure.

The Ringmaster

The Ringmaster by Darryl Ponicsan (author of The Last Detail) works less as a novel and more as fictionalized reportage. In that capacity, it provides an interesting look into the workings of a medium-sized circus circa 1975. After a while, the travel and staffing problems become repetitive, but the reader will put down the novel as an insider into a grimy subculture.

Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved is a difficult book to evaluate. The magical aspects didn't work for me, which undermined the entire project, and the text was stylistically erratic. By the latter I mean that there were large chunks of the book that flowed beautifully and meaningfully, only to be stopped by dense "writerly" passages that seemed to be nothing so much as showing off. It is doubtless a novel that would benefit from multiple readings; maybe I'll give it another go sometime.

The Last Detail

This 1970 novel by ex-sailor Darryl Ponicsan follows the classic picaresque road trip formula, but with some added satisfactions. The story is simple: Two Navy lifers must escort a seaman from Norfolk to Portsmouth Naval Prison. The young man has been convicted of stealing $40 from a charity collection box and sentenced to eight years and a "DD" – dishonorable discharge. The excessive punishment weighs on the two Shore Patrol men, "Bad-Ass" and "Mule," to the extent that they decide to show the convict a good time before he's locked up. Military injustice, racism, the perils of thinking that "doing your job" is enough to excuse anything – these themes and others are effectively explored in this entertaining, bawdy novel.