What I Am Reading: "The Thin Man" by Dashiell Hammett

This was different from and better than The Maltese Falcon. I was expecting a madcap Gatsbyesque romp through New York high and low society, drink in hand, and to some extent I got that. Nick Charles (Greek, despite the name; his family name was Charalambides) is a retired detective, visiting New York from San Francisco with his wife, Nora. To his annoyance, he is drawn into a murder investigation surrounding an old client: Julia Wolf, the assistant to Clyde Wynant, an eccentric inventor, has been murdered, and the inventor has disappeared. As requested by the inventor's daughter, the ingenue Dorothy, his ex-wife, the slippery Mimi, and the family's attorney, Nick consults with the police on the case.

The book is remembered as a husband-wife murder solving team, but Nora is more of an interested spectator than a participant, occasionally offering some useful information or analysis. The plot unfolds in a more linear manner, without the unexplained protagonist machinations of The Maltese Falcon. I am not greatly familiar with detective novels, so I'm not sure if this was the type where you were supposed to the identity of the murderer beforehand, but I did not. It does keep things interesting by having everyone but Nick believe that the inventor did it, and had a good twist ending. There are complicating factors in the forms of Julia's underworld past and connections, and Mimi's new husband's revelation as a con man.

The book was funny, and I was amused by the deadpan references to the couple's heavy alcohol consumption. Nick is annoyed and sarcastic, but is much warmer than Sam Spade was; and Nora is a well-executed foil for the repartee, much more enthusiastic about the mystery and the crime, a regular true crime podcast fan. The book overall is less "hard-boiled," the pulp-era term for straightforward, grim, cynical, unsentimental crime fiction that I confess to finding somewhat laughable today. Overall it was fine.