I’m reading Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” It’s famous, of course, but was never intended to be anything more than a fast-paced, crappy, detective novel. That’s my take, anyway.<\/p>\n
But I can’t help laughing when I see some of the writing.<\/p>\n
Chapter 9 ends with the following short sentence:<\/p>\n
“His eyes burned yellowly.” I really liked that. Yellowly.<\/p>\n
There are also classic adverbs:<\/p>\n
“‘Stop me when you can,’ Spade replied arrogantly.”<\/p>\n
I mean, if it’s not clear that he’s being arrogant, then something’s wrong with the setup.<\/p>\n
Some of the description of facial expressions is great. I can just imagine Bogart asking John Huston how he’s supposed to have sullen eyes and a truculent mouth, or something.<\/p>\n
Then there’s this paragraph, which begins and ends in the same way. Is that on purpose, or terrible editing? Did he repeat himself because he just used the word, “repetitiously”? I don’t know:<\/p>\n
“… he began to talk in a harsh guttural voice. Holding his maddened face in his hands, glaring at the floor, he cursed Dundy for five minutes without break, cursed him obscenely, blasphemously, repetitiously, in a harsh guttural voice.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m reading Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” It’s famous, of course, but was never intended to be anything more than a fast-paced, crappy, detective novel. That’s my take, anyway. But I can’t help laughing when I see some of the writing. Chapter 9 ends with the following short sentence: “His eyes burned yellowly.” I really liked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}