Honestly? I think the awesomeness of Nick and Nora Charles got built up a little too much for me before I read this, because I was expecting 200 pages of nonstop witty banter between the two, and was mildly disappointed. Sure, Nick is funny in a dry sarcastic way, and Nora is the sassy drunken aunt you never knew you always wanted, but their banter and witticisms only caused the occasional chuckle.

But lucky for me, the book has a lot more going for it than just the banter. It's a fun, classic 3 More...

Okay...if you're into "hard-boiled" detective fiction or mystery fiction I'm sure you'd rate this book higher. Maybe for me it would even be a 3.5 if I could go there.

The dialogue held me here, the by play and banter between Nick, Nora, and then the entire cast of characters. It was well written and well characterized. I suppose it was also well plotted only, I just don't seem to be a mystery fan. I had to keep dragging my interest back to the book. Maybe the fact that I loved the movie and ther More...

What I learned from this book (in no particular order):

1. A speakeasy is the proper place for a man to wait for his wife to finish her shopping.

2. A Schnauzer is NOT a cross between a Scottie and an Irish terrier.

3. “I hit Nora with my left hand, knocking her down across the room.” If a bad guy points a gun at you and your wife, the standard operating procedure is to knock her out to prevent her from becoming hysterical over such a potentially distressing situation.

4. Women do not really mind b More...

I inherited Dashiell Hammett: Five Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man. I have not read it, and it is packed away somewhere. I HAVE to dig it out!

When it came to reading The Thin Man, I borrowed from the library. I have a....well...not really a phobia...but let's say an acute awareness of the mulitudes of hands that may have touched a library book. It comes to the forefront when I turn a page and find an unidentifiable chunk stuck to the More...

I wasn't aware of this previously, but apparently you just gotta slap a dame when they get hysterical. The things you learn when you read hard-boiled fiction.

"The Thin Man" was read as an attempt to get into the mindset of noir, since a friend of mine is asking me to write him a script in the style. It's one of my first encounters with crime fiction from that era, and I came away generally amused.

Nick Charles is on vacation with his wife Nora. He doesn't want to solve a mystery. He wants to drin More...

My favorite Hammett book. Written with the same economical and sparse style of his other novels, the tone couldn't be more different. Nick & Nora Charles are fun characters who come off much more 3 dimensional - as opposed to archetypcal - than either Sam Spade or the Continental Op.

Plot is almost a secondary concern here which is rare for a mystery. Instead the almost constant drinking and flirting the two main characters engage in (with each other and whomever else is around) get top bill More...

Somehow I never saw this movie or read this book during my six-month crime noir kick in ninth grade (though I did read Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key aroud that time). But, boy, I'm glad that I've read it now.

The Thin Man is the last novel Hammett completed (though he started or pretended to start a half-dozen others) and it has the feel of being a parady of his other novellas and the 1930s crime genre in general. It is fabulously funny - as in, I couldn't go two pages without t More...

How Nick and Nora Charles start their day

Nick: "How 'bout a drop of something to cut the phlegm?"
Nora: "Why don't you stay sober today?"
Nick: "We didn't come to New York to stay sober"

I like their style. Want to hear a story? Well fix me a drink and I'll tell you.

Nick and Nora are in town from San Francisco to celebrate Christmas and New Years in high society style. Between cocktails and during more sober moments Nick helps the New York police solve the mystery of the murder of Julia Wolf, secre More...

This is the first Hammett novel I've read. I don't know why I haven't made the effort to read such an iconic writer before, particularly as I am a long-time crime fiction reader and a fan of "classic" mysteries. It may be my first Hammett, but I'm pretty sure it won't be my last.

I've just finished re-reading all of the novels of Dorothy L Sayers, who is without doubt my favourite writer of "Golden Age" mysteries. It was interesting to compare The Thin Man with Sayers' novels. It's certainly less More...

Dashiell Hammett has been called a master of the genre, I'm not sure about that. What I do know is that The Thin Man was short, entertaining, and kept me reading (and guessing) until the very end.

Nick and Nora Charles are debonair couple who bring the reader through a maze of speakeasies, dark alleyways and meetings with well chiseled characters. I have been recently on a Hammett kick and the last two novels I felt like I had a good idea how the crimes were committed and who they were committed by -- this one I was lost kind of like that 'haze' in a dream. I couldn't quite pinpoint where things were going or why... and let the story and the author tell me for once and I gave up guessing. More...

"I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. "Aren't you Nick Charles?" she asked."

The Thin Man by Dashielle Hammett was the only book containing the characters of Nick and Nora Char More...

I have been on a bit of a noir/ crime kick lately... Perhaps it's a longing to be a femme fatale, or maybe I just covet their clothes and the furniture? Maybe both. Anyhow, this is where my kick led me, to Hammett, bien sur, and soon, Chandler. The dialogue is fantastic, the pace is perfect, and the MOVIE! Such fun, I was practically foaming for a martini while watching it, much like my experience with Mad Men episodes and my strong urge for the drink. I only wish themes from The Thin Man were i More...

This was a big disappointment after having read The Maltese Falcon, in all its stark, atmospheric glory. If this is all Hammett had left to give in his later writing life, it's probably for the best that he gave it up. The main characters are so shallow and have such drunken and meaningless lives, I kept wanting to slap them upside the heads. But next to the completely dysfunctional family of the title character, they come off like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa.

On the plus side, Nick and More...

THE THIN MAN is the last of Hammett's novels as well as the last of his novels I had not yet read. His short stories are still awaiting me but over the years I had read all of the small number of novels that he had written but this one.

Must admit that he is an author that I always felt I should like but who I never really could warm up to that much. I often preferred the cinematic adaptations and the motifs that he represented but the stories as such never really seemed to hook me all that much More...

Τέλη του 1932 ο Hammett γράφει το πέμπτο και τελευταίο μυθιστόρημά του. Μετά θα μπλέξει με τις γυναίκες και τα πολιτικά, θα ξαναπάει στρατό στα πενήντα του και θα τον κυνηγάει η εφορία μέχρι θανάτου.

Στον Αδύνατο Άντρα μας συστήνει τον Ελληνοαμερικανό ντετέκτιβ Νικ Τσαρλς (πρώην Χαραλαμπίδης) και τη σύζυγό του Νόρα. Ο Hammett στις “Αναμνήσεις ενός ιδιωτικού ντετέκτιβ” γράφει σχετικά με την περήφανη φυλή μας:

Από όλες τις εθνικότητες που τραβιούνται στα δικαστήρια, αυτοί που είναι πιο δύσκολο να κα More...

This is a classic of the noir mystery genre, and I can see why. Hammett's Nick Charles neatly solves the crime, basically on his day off, despite all the road blocks set in his way by schemers and femme fatales. The flavor of early-1930s New York is there.

The only downside was that between the vast changes in male-female relations in the last 80 years and due to Hammett's spare style, I had trouble picking up on tone of voice, particularly in dialogues between Nick Charles and the women he suspe More...

Ah, the 30s, New York. Prohibition hasn't slowed down the cocktail set, who party until the sun rises. Speakeasies abound, thugs have names like Studsy, cocaine and morphine are the contemporary drugs of choice, and cops are allowed to beat the truth out of their suspects. This is the world of Nick and Nora Charles, at least temporarily while they're staying in the city over the Christmas holidays. Nick used to be a detective, but these days Nick is no longer pounding the streets in his trench c More...

One of my favorite detective's infamous start in fiction! Nick and Nora Charles (in the series, not in the book...) have always been my favorite couple, ever since I watched the Thin Man series as a child. Reading Dashiell Hammett's original novel which launched the series was like travelling back in time to that first watching. Hammett's characterization, writing techniques and quick wit bring this book from another regular old detective novel to a sophisticated romp through New York in the '30 More...

The Thin Man is as much a comedy of manners as a detective mystery, lushly recreating the lives and routines of America's moneyed classes in the 1930s—Mad Men avant la lettre. Written primarily as dialogue and stage direction, this is a novel made for the theatre, and I was little surprised to learn that it had been adapted for film soon after its publication.

There is a pleasant realism to the dialogue, which attempts to mimic the rhythms of quotidian speech by including the pauses, stutters, an More...

Originally published on my blog here in September 2000.

The last of Dashiell Hammett's five novels, The Thin Man is rather different from the others. Its hero is a slightly older, married version of Sam Spade or Ned Beaumont; Nick Charles has had some of his faith in humanity restored by his wife, Nora. He has even given up being a private detective, as Hammett was about to give up novel writing - and the novel is dedicated to the woman he himself married, Lilian Hellman.

One of Charles' past jobs More...

This was my first Dashiell Hammett, hard-boiled detective novel, and a pretty enjoyable one. In fact, I basically spent the better part of the day yesterday reading it while hanging out somewhere in Hertfordshire. Fortunately, there was a Waterstone’s nearby!

Oddly enough, the least interesting characters for me were Nick and Nora Charles. Nick is a very Humphrey-Bogart-esque figure, a WWI veteran and former Detective who only speaks in ironic, methodically short sentences, sentences which someho More...

The final and perhaps best book, certainly the funniest, from Dashiel Hammet. His previous books were violent hard boiled tales, with a sprinkling of humor; this book is full-out humor with just a touch of the violence. The Thin Man takes place on Christmas, but it could as easily be New Year's Eve, as the holiday is used only to establish a party ambience. And this book is, essentially, a party.

The movie, especially the first one, is as good. Picture Nick Charles laying on the couch, popping aw More...

You know those washing powder tests on TV? You do something impossibly disgusting to a little white affair, pop it in the machine with Brand X and - hey presto, it comes out better than new.

I felt really guilty about starting this book. I'd just finished Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity which so moved me in every way as a reader that I wanted to turn next to something that Perlman could spoil without my caring. Sure enough, I was disappointed by this to the extent it almost got the flick. But More...

Hard-drinking retired detective Nick Charles is pulled reluctantly into a case involving an old client, eccentric inventor Clyde Wynant who appears to have shot his assistant Julia. Despite wanting nothing to do with it, he uncovers a tangled web of deception and connections, including the fact that Wynant’s ex-wife’s new husband is actually Wynant’s bitter ex-partner in disguise, out to get Wynant’s money, and that Julia seems to have had a number of boyfriends in the underworld, as well as bei More...

Don't read Dashiell Hammett, or even the reviews of Dashiell Hammett's work, if you're particularly sensitive to misogyny, violence, and all that stuff. There's a good bit somewhere in the middle where Nora Charles tells her husband that she doesn't have the least understanding of anything people said or did while they were in a certain speakeasy, and trust me, I know the feeling. I love reading noir detective stories, though. There's just some amazing lines and even though they represent a worl More...

I have a lasting love of this book for several reasons. The relationship between Nick and Nora is wonderful, yes, the dialog sings, but there is a relationship there. This is a guy solving a murder with his wife. Hammett has unlimited tough-guy noir cred (try his Red Harvest) but this is one of the only books that I know of that manages captures a relationship in this way. (and if you know of some more, please message me.)

The second thing I love about this book is how Nick operates a social anim More...

If I weren't the mean teacher I am I'd cut Hammett slack and round up to four stars because this---the last of his novels---is a solid 3-1/2. And that's only because it pales in comparison to every one of his other novels except THE DAIN CURSE, which is the true 3-star.

The main knock on THIN is that Hammett was pretty much bored with fiction by this point in his career, having lost his bearings to booze, broads, and just about any other indulgence that began with a B except Billy Barty (too sho More...

This book didn’t get a fair chance with me, I’ll be honest. I love the movie version of this book so much that it’d be nearly impossible for it to match up. In defense of the book, however, there are scenes and dialogue taken directly from the book and put into the movie. Nick’s spirit is captured wonderfully on the screen, although the book makes him out to be a little harder of a character than the movie. Nick, Nora, Mimi, and Guild are pretty much the only characters exactly realized from the More...

Reading this book made me want to see the old movies with Myrna Loy and ?? (can't remember the leading man) ... it's written in a 1930's film noir first person style - for example:
"She asked me if I was asleep. I said that I was."

I think I was more taken with the time-period of the story than the actual mystery itself (which turned out to be a little complicated in the end). It must have been written just after prohibition because everyone constantly drinks (Nick & Nora usually started the s More...