Hammett and Chandler birds of two vastly different feathers

[Craig Clark]

Adam J Thornton writes:

> One should not simply lump Hammett and Chandler together as detective-story
> authors.  Hammett is, as far as I can tell, pretty much what he's
> advertised as.  Sam Spade is a private dick filled with low cunning and
> knuckles.  On the other hand, Marlowe is an intellectual.  Chandler's books
> are amazingly overwritten, and it's quite intentional that Marlowe went to
> college before becoming a private investigator.  Just recall the
> conversations on Eliot with the chauffeur in _The Big Sleep_.  Chandler has
> a self-conscious irony about him that Hammett, as I recall (I've read
> Chandler much more recently), lacks.

I agree completely, except in that Chandler himself made the 
association. Personally I like Hammett but I love Chandler, whose 
greater command of prose style marks him out as, IMHO, the superior 
writer. The greatest irony is that Chandler's famous "The Simple Art 
Of Of Murder", an essay in homage to Hammett, is actually more about 
his own fiction than about Hammett's.

  
Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"