Art Taylor's Blog, page 89

Review: The Lost Detective

I’ve mentioned before that we seem to be in another Dashiell Hammett renaissance: new volumes gathering the Hammett’s own work (The Return the Thin Man and The Hunter and Other Stories), a new biography last year (Sally Cline’s Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery), and now another new study of the author’s early years: Nathan Ward’s The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, which seems to me a must-have for anyone interested in the iconic and influential crime writer or his creations.

Here’s an excerpt from my review in the Washington Post:

“The Lost Detective” is less a formal biography of Hammett’s early years than a loose, entertaining exploration of the many intersections of fact and fiction in the creation of a persona and a literary legacy. Ward weighs the truth of various anecdotes in the writer’s life. Hammett spoke of driving an ambulance during World War I that flipped and threw out its patients, causing him never to drive any car again. But, as Ward writes, “no record can be found of [the] traumatic accident.” Later, Hammett claimed to have solved a case of missing gold aboard the steamship S.S. Sonoma, but as Ward tells us, “the gold was not even found by a Pinkerton.” In presenting these clarifications, Ward brings to the forefront research and documentation that might elsewhere be relegated to endnotes; sometimes he pits one authority against another in dialogue on the page…

Check out the full review here for more.

Reviews and an Interview

It’s still the week before the official release of my debut book, On the Road with Del & Louise, but already I’ve been enjoying such gracious attention from several quarters, including two thoughtful advance reviews of the book and a comprehensive interview about my work on the project.

Check out Lynn Farris’s review of the book at the Examiner.

Terrie Farley Moran reviews the book at Criminal Element.

And E.B. Davis offered some incisive questions about Del and Louise—and about me too!—at Writers Who Kill.

Thanks to each of these folks for advance coverage. Feeling very excited about the coming week!