First Degree

THE THIN MAN--Dashiell Hammett-- Knopf ($2).

Before Dashiell Hammett came over the horizon, U. S. readers could point with pride to no first-rate living U. S. authors of detectifiction (with the exception of such competent plot-tanglers as Mary Roberts Rinehart, S. S. Van Dine). Though murder stories have long been the main meat of a solid minority of U. S. readers, the quality of the domestic supply has been fortified by English importations. But no longer can oldsters shake their heads over the departed glories of Edgar Allan Poe. In Dashiell Hammett the U. S. has again a first-rate writer of crime stories, as indigenous to his country and his day as Bret Harte was to his. This week Hammett fans are racing each other to the bookstores to get his latest, The Thin Man.

As in other Hammett stories, the characters in The Thin Man have lives of their own, are not the traditional puppets with which a tired school of reading and writing has been content. They give the impression of three-dimensional figures whose background takes in far more than the few pages of their story; they act and talk unbookishly, with the hard, queer inconsequence of real life.

Nick Charles had been a private detective, had gladly retired when he married a well-to-do wife. Junketing in Manhattan with his congenial spouse (like all good Hammett characters, Nick is a dogged, early-&-late drinker), he finds himself gradually dragged into an annoying mystery. Clyde Wynant, half-crazy but successful inventor, a onetime client of Nick's, has awkwardly disappeared just when his secretary-mistress has been murdered. Wynant's lawyer, Wynant's remarried ex-wife both want him found, think Nick is the man for the job. But Nick is having too good a time, knows and dislikes the queer Wynant family too well--until a gunman breaks into his hotel room early one morning to crease him with a bullet. Then he gets grudgingly busy. Before Wynant is found, two more murders are uncovered. More conventional in plot than his earlier books and less slaughterous (Red Harvest had at least a dozen murders), The Thin Man is easily the U. S. murder story of the past year, adds one more proof to Author Hammett's title of No. 1 Crime-story Writer of the U. S. Hammett fans, of varying brow-heights, unite in admiring his hardboiled, naturalistic narrative and dialog. Some of them will feel, however, that for once Hammett's naturalism has taken him too far, when Nick's wife asks her husband a question rarely, if ever, seen in print.

The Author, unlike most of his colleagues, writes from his own eight-year experience as a Pinkerton detective. ''The first three or four years were fun," says he. "Then it got tedious. . . . The funniest case I ever worked on was the Arbuckle affair in San Francisco. In trying to convict him everybody framed everybody else." Practically every character in his books, says Hammett, he has known in person. As readers of The Thin Man can see by looking at its jacket, Dashiell Hammett is himself tall, thin, handsome, mildly theatrical. Lover of parlor games, including drinking, expert ping-pong player, indefatigable host, he likes to keep long and late hours. No busman on a holiday, he reads few detective stories, much philosophy. An insomniac, it often takes a whole volume of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West to put him to sleep. Unenergetic, he spent last summer at Sands Point, L. I. within a few feet of the beach, never went swimming. A slow writer, he works on a typewriter, rarely redoes his copy. Other books: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, Red Harvest, The Dain Curse.

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