Oakley Hall essay

[David Casseres]

On 8/28/06, Scott Badger <lupine at ncia.net> wrote:
> Don't know if this'll help, but....Chandler's comment is part of an essay
> that contrasts the parlor mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie, Doyle
> and Milne with the more 'realistic', street-wise, American mystery writers
> represented by Hammett. "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that
> commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at
> hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put
> these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in
> the language they customarily used for these purposes." Saying perhaps, that
> rather than elaborate puzzles, of no worldly sense, Hammett's realism
> carried with it all of the world, but no other meaning than that it simply
> is. "It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny
> that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the
> coin of what we call civilization."

Well, that makes perfect sense to me.  The quotation I was complaining
about did not, and still does not even though I am more sober now than
I was then.  Both Hammett and Chandler did indeed "give murder back to
the kind of people that commit it for reasons," and that's actually a
hell of a good line.  Thanks for that.

As for the Tristram Shandy movie, I thought they had a lot of balls to
make 10% of a movie and then combine it with a "making of" featurette
and all the outtakes, and call that the movie.