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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, which was first published in 1934 and then republished in October 1935 as part of the Penguin series. It is officially Penguin number 14 and the first Penguin crime title not by a British author to join the imprint. For those who are new to these podcasts, it’s worth knowing that the famous Penguin series with its iconic triband design included lots of different genres of books, of which crime fiction was just one, all given a number and arranged in sequence. Each genre had a colour, crime being green, of course, and I’m just reading the green penguins — that’s why the numbers aren’t sequential. In between our book last time, number 6A, and number 14 today were seven other titles that weren’t crime fiction. If you’d like to check what those books were and see what the next crime titles coming up are, you’ll find a full list of Penguins linked in the episode description.
I have to say, I was really surprised when I was first researching the early Penguins and realised that a Dashiell Hammett title had been included so near the beginning. Hammett, of course, was an American author closely identified with the hardboiled and noir schools of detective fiction, and doesn’t necessarily fit into our cosy, British view of what the Penguin series consists of. But really, Penguin was about making popular books readily available at a low price, and The Thin Man was already a very popular book. It’s also one that was entirely unfamiliar to me, as a reader of British crime fiction from the 1930s, so I’m excited and a bit nervous to dive into it today.
Luckily, my guest for this episode is a bit more familiar with Dashiell Hammett and American crime fiction than I am. He is CriminOlly, or Olly for short, and he runs a YouTube channel where he talks about crime, pulp and horror books, and I’m delighted to have him with me today as my companion for The Thin Man, the first hardboiled detective novel I’ve ever read.
Before we proceed, I’ll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are “entering the spoiler zone”, you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. For maximum enjoyment of Green Penguin Book Club episodes, I recommend that you read the book ahead of listening. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Olly gives this one.
If you enjoy this kind of episode where I talk about one specific book, I think you will really enjoy an event I’m doing on the 17th of July in at Foyles bookshop in London with the Backlisted podcast. We’re going to be talking about Endless Night by Agatha Christie in a not dissimilar format to this, and you can buy tickets to be part of the audience right now at the link in the episode description. If you aren’t able to come in person, the recording will be released on their podcast feed later on, so I recommend subscribing to that so you don’t miss it.
With all of that said, let’s get into The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. This was Hammett’s fifth and final full-length novel, appearing in 1934 after a condensed version ran as a magazine serial the year before. Unlike many crime writers, he actually had considerable experience as a real-life detective, having joined the Pinkerton Agency in 1915 and picked up his work there again after his service in the First World War. He started writing fiction for magazines in the early 1920s and branched out into full-length novels in 1929 beginning with Red Harvest. The protagonists of The Thin Man, Nick and Nora Charles, appeared only in this novel and its film adaptation,, but they were such a hit that five more films were created featuring them through the 1930s and 1940s, two of which were drawn from screen stories written by Hammett. Subsequently, they also starred in radio, television and stage adaptations. The novel is narrated by Nick Charles, who like his creator is a former Pinkerton detective, and is set in New York City where he and his wife are spending the Christmas holidays of 1932 with their dog, Asta.
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Caroline: So, Olly, tell me a bit about your background with reading and crime fiction in general. What are you bringing to this book?
Olly: I’ve been a lifelong reader and I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t read and enjoy fiction in particular. Fiction has always been my thing rather than nonfiction. And I think I fell into reading crime fiction in my teens. I was always a big acquirer of books and used to love going around like charity shops and things like that on a Saturday morning and picking stuff up.
I remember coming across, I think in fact it was a Penguin crime book, which is one of the Ed McBain 87th precinct novels and that really got me into crime fiction. I’d not read, I don’t think, a great deal of crime fiction before that, but I just fell in love with the process of watching detectives unravel a mystery and get to the bottom of it and try and figure out various elements that needed to come together to come to a solution.
That was 35 years ago now and I’ve continued to read and enjoy crime fiction since then. And I’m someone who doesn’t, I don’t have a specific niche of crime fiction that I particularly enjoy or specialise in. I just enjoy all of it. But what I do enjoy in particular is that popular style of fiction that very much reflects on the time in which it was written.
Caroline: Have you read this book before or any Dashiell Hammett before?
Olly: So I hadn’t read this one before. I’ve read a couple of other Hammett things. The Maltese Falcon, I read a couple of years ago and enjoyed. And I’ve also read Red Harvest by him. Which are two very different styles of crime fiction, and I think I was expecting something a bit more similar to those going into The Thin Man. But the three books I think are very different from each other.
Caroline: Yeah, so this was my first Dashiell Hammett full stop, being normally a reader of the British Golden Age stuff. And yes, I think I was expecting something different based on just what I knew about him and having seen the film of The Maltese Falcon and that kind of thing. So yes, it was very surprising to me, actually, what we got, but we’ll get more into that later. From the very beginning of the book, it has what immediately to me read like a very famous opening line, even if I didn’t know that. It felt like it was up there with, ‘Last night i dreamt i went to Manderley…’
‘I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on 52nd Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping’. It just immediately felt iconic in a way that some sentences do. What did you think of it?
Olly: I loved it and I think it’s a really interesting opening line because it’s very much got two halves to it. So that first half is your classic hardboiled crime style opening, the detective leaning against the bar seems to evoke a lot of the things we think about when we think about hardboiled crime fiction, but then he immediately makes it feel very domestic. It’s Christmas, he’s waiting for his wife, he’s doing the Christmas shopping. The two halves almost conflict with each other, but in quite a delightful way.
Caroline: Yes, and the word speakeasy also immediately places us. We know when the book’s published and then that word I think gives us a big hint that we’re in the late prohibition era. What do you know about that era? What do you feel about it?
Olly: I don’t know a great deal about it, other than what I have gathered through popular fiction and movies and things like that. But that was one of the things I really enjoyed about the book was that sense of place and the sense of abandon. I had to doublecheck when I was reading it, when it was written, to realise it was actually written towards the end of Prohibition, rather than after the end of Prohibition, because it feels the amount of drinking in this book, it feels like the shackles have been taken off and everyone was going well, but actually, as you say, it’s still within the Prohibition era.
Caroline: Yeah, that really struck me as I felt almost like it was a parody or something that every half a page it’s like someone’s can you mix me a cocktail or fill me up again? And actually that was something I found generally with this book. I think because I hadn’t consumed much hardboiled or crime fiction from America of this period before, but it’s so culturally pervasive that I’ve seen the parodies, I’ve seen the films, I’ve heard the jokes, that then when you actually come to the original thing, it feels magnified to you, which I wasn’t expecting.
And yeah, the drinking and their very fast paced social life as well, that Nick and Nora every night, they’re out to dinner here or going to the theatre here or doing this. It’s not how I live, but it was good for the book, it was good for the plot.
Olly: Yes, it was fun to read it and it does feel quite different, I think, from what we think of as the classic hardboiled detective who’s a loner and who, when they do their drinking, they do it alone and they’re miserable. Whereas this, as you say, it’s like really sociable. They live a party lifestyle, which was really fun and engaging to read and an interesting counterpoint to the crime elements of the book.
Caroline: Something else that arises from that opening line as well is that we’re immediately in the first person. ‘I was leaning against the bar,’ and I think also within a couple of pages we can surmise that this I, Nick, he’s the detective figure of the novel. How much have you come across that first person detective style?
Olly: I think it’s quite common, particularly in this style of fiction, the private eye style of fiction in my experience is very often written from the first person. People like Raymond Chandler, who was a contemporary of Hammett’s, wrote in that style as well. And I think, as you say, it’s become something that’s been parodied so often that we come to really associate it with that particular style of crime fiction.
Caroline: I can’t put my finger on exactly what the parodies are that I’m thinking of, but I’ve definitely seen it in sketch shows and things like that. The wavy glass door with the name on it and then the bottle of whisky in the drawer and all of that.
Olly: Yeah, absolutely.
Caroline: The death in this book, the primary death that Nick is reluctantly investigating for most of the book is the death of Julia Wolf, who is this secretary to this inventor figure, but we never actually meet her, nor does Nick visit the crime scene, or really do anything that you might expect a detective investigating a murder to do. The death is obviously pivotal to the plot, but does it actually feel like a serious blow to anyone in the book, do you think?
Olly: I don’t think it does. And the thing that struck me about it was the discovery of the body feels like more of an impactful event than the actual murder itself. Nobody really seems to care about Julia, but the fact that someone has discovered the body and it’s had an impact on them, becomes quite an important storyline or plotline throughout the book.
Caroline: Yes, you’re right. And what happens exactly at the discovery of the body is then a subject of much speculation and importance later on. And also the way in which Julia dies, I think, feels very right for this type of book. I think the phrase they use is she’s found bullet riddled with four shots or something like that, which, yes, feels very American hardboiled, even though, as we’re going to discuss, this book is not fully of that type. Am I right in thinking that’s classic?
Olly: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact she’s a beautiful young woman as well definitely plays into those hardboiled tropes, I think.
Caroline: It is interesting how no one seems to really care about Julia for Julia. They only care about what her death represents to their ongoing schemes. There’s no attempt to portray her as sympathetic or even a character of much of anything. That same withdrawn feeling you get around Julia, I get a little bit around Nick Charles the narrator and the detective, because he’s a former private eye. He’s not an active detective anymore. And he doesn’t enter this case, with anything like enthusiasm, does he?
Olly: No, he’s a really interesting character and the exact opposite of detectives you normally get in hardboiled fiction, who tend to be crusader type characters who are just driven to solve these crimes and save the innocent, for want of a better expression. Whereas, yeah, Nick seems to be quite enjoying his more relaxed lifestyle, his partying, staying up all night and drinking and things like that. And yeah, gets quite reluctantly drawn back into this. It takes multiple attempts by different people and multiple things happening to actually draw him back in again to that crime fighting life.
Caroline: Yes I think I’m right in saying that Dashiell Hammett himself had been a detective. He’d worked for the Pinkerton Agency. He definitely has plenty of first hand experience of what this life is like. But this his one and only novel writing about Nick Charles, he doesn’t draw on that. He shows him as a man of leisure.
He’s married a rich woman. He now manages her business interests for her. And yes, he does do the classic amateur detective thing, although obviously he’s not an amateur really, but he’s retired, of he encounters the case socially. It’s a chance encounter in a bar and then it’s, oh, this lawyer is an old army friend of mine, et cetera, et cetera.
Do you think that works for the plot that we spend about half the book of Nick reluctantly going, oh, I guess I’ll look into it if I have to.
Olly: I’m not sure it works for the plot, and I’m not sure the plot moves as quickly as it could do, but I think it works for the book, because as you said earlier, it’s not a pure hardboiled style of book. There’s a lot more going on than that, and I think Nick’s character and Nora, his wife’s characters are the things that really make the book as enjoyable as it is. So I think his reluctance feels right for the book and for the character, but not necessarily for the plot.
Caroline: Yes, you’re right. I think maybe Hammett is writing a novel about Nick and Nora in which a murder investigation happens to be going on in the background is how it often feels. I’m sure this is just accurate to the time, but everyone is just on the phone all the time in this book. There’s one particular scene where Nick’s, I think having a conversation with the police character, and three times Nora goes off to answer phone calls and comes back and reports what’s been said.
Olly: Going back to what I was saying about my love of fiction that places you in a particular time, I guess that it was a new technology and people who could afford it loved to use it. So it’s lovely seeing stuff like that reflected in books like this, things you wouldn’t necessarily think about from a particular time that actually were really important to the people of that time.
Caroline: Absolutely, yeah, that’s a big part of why I love to read this stuff as well, and a few other aspects like that, the telephone thing, but then also the fact that Nick and Nora live in San Francisco, but they’re in New York for, I think, an unspecified period of weeks, visiting people, spending Christmas, doing some business. And they’re staying in an apartment which is entirely theirs, but they don’t ever seem to cook. There’s a restaurant, I think, in the apartment building where they can just summon food.
Olly: Yeah. They do seem to live a very privileged existence when you think about the time in which this book is set and was written. Many people in America were living a very different existence. And I think maybe that’s in some ways the appeal of this at the time was that it’s like classic Hollywood, isn’t it? It’s how the other half lives and being able to immerse yourselves in their lives for a period of time.
Caroline: There are a few references in it, I think, to people of their social class, even, who are now struggling because of the big crash at the end of the 20s. Another fun contemporary detail is Nick’s incessant stockbroking. Every so often he’ll just be like, oh yeah, buy gold, sell mines, do whatever.
Which is again, really nothing to do with the plot, he’s just doing it. But so Nick’s reluctance to investigate the murder goes in tandem with the official investigation, which is being done by the police. We don’t get that many named police characters, though. The main one we have is Lieutenant, or I guess Lieutenant, because he’s American, Lieutenant John Guild. What did you make of him?
Olly: I enjoyed him as a character, but I think it feels like he’s almost in there, as peripheral other detective characters sometimes are in this kind of fiction, to allow the hero to expound upon their theories and things like that. And I love the fact when he’s first introduced, he’s full of admiration for Nick, who he remembers from when he first started on the beat.
So there’s this hero worship stuff going on. I think Hammett uses it to build up your perception of Nick as previously having been a detective, which is referred to before that, but you don’t necessarily see evidence of it, if you like. So I think Guild is used to build up Nick’s character rather than to be much of a character of his own.
Caroline: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, because this is, as we say, the one and only novel Hammett wrote about Nick Charles. And it’s a bit unusual, perhaps, to start with a detective at the point when he’s already retired. And you would expect a novel like this to come after, say, half a dozen covering his exploits as a PI. And so, yes, you’re right. Guild does allow us to have him exist prior to this book.
Olly: And it’s interesting because Hammett, whilst as you say this is the only book about Nick his other books, the ones I’ve read, are all very different in terms of the detectives in them. Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is much more in the classic hardboiled style. The kind of detective Nick probably was a few years ago before he met Nora.
And then The Continental Op who’s in Red Harvest is more I suspect, the kind of detective that Hammett himself was when he worked for the Pinkertons in that, he works for an organisation, they tell him what to do, he goes and does jobs for them rather than being someone who picks his own cases and investigates them. So Nick as the now retired detective I think is an interesting part of that trio.
Caroline: That’s a really good evolution that he was touching on detectives at different points in different books. I’m also just fascinated as a side note about Hammett’s preciseness with his books. I know he wrote a lot of short stories as well, and that was a big part of his writing life, but so many writers at this time, they write a book with a successful character in it and then they write twenty more, because that’s how you make money, that’s how you build a career. But he’s like, no, I’ve done that one, now I shall do something totally different.
Olly: Yeah, and this one, like Red Harvest, I think, was originally a short story or a series of short stories, so he was one of those people who could just churn out short stories but sometimes evolve them into novels. So maybe there was something there in that original short story that he liked enough that he wanted to expand it.
Caroline: Perhaps, as you say, this is more in the earlier books, but Nick really does very little detecting. He doesn’t do any traditional gumshoeing of going round and looking at things or talking to people or examining scenes. He’s mostly just in his flat with Nora, having a drink and complaining about things.
He occasionally goes out for a meal somewhere. And the few instances where he does go out, it’s normally because Lieutenant Guild makes him come with him. It’s like, we’d really like your presence here. How do you think that works to have such a reluctant armchair detective where you might expect to have a full of action PI?
Olly: I thought it was interesting, and it made me feel as a reader like I was more there with Nick in a sense in that people come to Nick and bring him evidence in the same way that the author brings you evidence as a reader. So I thought it was interesting to read a detective in that style for that reason.
But yeah, he’s certainly very different from most of the detectives I’ve read in that he doesn’t really seem to care about stuff that much, it’s almost like a nuisance to him that people are constantly trying to pull him back into this case.
I do enjoy the police procedural style of crime fiction. As I said, Ed McBain was my entry into crime fiction, and that’s a genre he very much wrote in. To read a different style of detective like this was interesting to me, but I did sometimes miss that shoe leather aspect of detective work.
Caroline: Yes, because often when Nick’s getting information, it’s because somebody’s already done that work, off screen or off page, as it were. Guild is just reporting, oh, we checked all the fingerprints or oh, we talked to all these people or we asked the elevator boy or whatever. And we’re just bringing you the outcome of that. There’s very little procedure in this book at all.
Olly: And you don’t even get the style of detection you get from Sherlock Holmes or someone like that, or some of the golden age detectives where they are constantly asking questions and you get long interview scenes and things like that. You don’t even get that, as you say, people do that off the page and then bring him the evidence that he puts the jigsaw together in the background.
Caroline: It’s funny that, I’m just thinking about this now as we’re talking about it, that in a way he’s definitely a detective but he also functions a bit like the Watson for the reader though, doesn’t he? Because he is the figure that stuff is being told to so that we, the reader, can know about it. And I think it’s pretty unusual. I can’t immediately think of any other book where the detective is also the Watson in that same way.
Olly: No, true, it’s interesting, isn’t it? And you can almost imagine a version of this book, which is like several hundred pages long, where you get all the scenes of all the other stuff that’s happening, and Nick is less of a central character, almost like the peripheral character, who then, at the end, joins everything together.
Caroline: Absolutely. You can imagine where Guild is the protagonist, say, and we follow him going to work at the precinct every day and him sending off coppers to go and do different things and get the information back. And then he occasionally has a drink with his old PI buddy Nick to talk it over. Yeah, absolutely. It’s very interesting that this is not that book actually, that he wasn’t interested in writing that.
So I think we will now, for listener purposes, enter the spoiler zone. So go no further if you don’t want to know any more about the plot.
**SPOILER ZONE**
Let’s talk about the suspects that Hammett keeps in play for Julia’s murder. Because actually, even as we’re talking about it, I keep forgetting that it’s Julia’s murder that this book is supposedly about. It just feels so peripheral. But he puts a whole wide range of different people in the potential frame for this. We’ve got a gangster called Morelli, the eccentric inventor, Clyde Wynant or Wynant that Julia worked for, Wynant’s divorced wife, now Mimi Jorgensen, her new husband, Christian Jorgensen, and Wynant’s children, Dorothy and Gilbert, and then his lawyer, Herbert Macaulay, as well, who is, I think an old army buddy of Nick’s, and that’s one of the social ways in which Nick is drawn into this. Do you find this to be a convincing set of suspects, or are they more in the nature of a lot of red herrings?
Olly: It felt to me like a lot of red herrings and it felt like Hammett threw everything he could at this book to keep you guessing. There’s just such a range of different people involved in it. And it feels at times to me like I couldn’t always put my finger on or figure out exactly what the book was trying to be.
So sometimes it feels like one thing and at other times it feels like something completely different. You don’t always know even exactly what the nature of the crime is. You have no real idea about motive a lot of the time. And as you say, there are so many suspects that I found it through the middle portion of the book, almost a bit confusing and bewildering at times, because there were a load of different people to keep track of and no clear one that I was anchoring on I think this is the person I should keep my eye on.
Caroline: Yes, you’re right. In that way, I think it’s a very interesting fiction experiment because he doesn’t commit to any one type of book. Any one of these suspects could be the murdering protagonist in a different kind of book. Morelli is a gangster, so it could be a gangster novel, and Julia is supposed to have had a relationship with him. Then you’ve got like a very romantic gangland book.
All the stuff with the Wynant family is very financial, so the murder could be part of a financial swindle or an inheritance plot or something like that. Then if it’s his divorced wife, there’s a marital breakup novel in there.
Then there are all these hints as well that something really bad has happened to Wynant’s children in the past. So we could be looking at some kind of historical abuse or some other tragedy that’s happened to them and that trauma has now turned them to murder or something. So he keeps all of these possible books in play in the same book, which is very peculiar.
Olly: Yeah, and then outside of all of that, you’ve then got the party book that it is as well of just these socialites enjoying their life. There’s tons of weird stuff in the book as well. There’s that section, I don’t know if you remember, where Nick is talking to Gilbert about a historic cannibal and there’s a good few pages devoted to that and it feels completely at odds with everything else in the book. The book as it is, feels like many different parts mashed together into one novel. But that bit in particular really stood out to me as being quite weird and jarring.
Caroline: Gilbert is this teenage boy with this fascination with murder and psychology and he’s very excited to have this family friend who’s a former detective come back into his life and he’s got all these weird questions for him and one of them is about how much cannibalism do you think is there in the US?
And so Nick goes and gets him a book off the shelf and said read that. And then what you as the reader get is about four pages from this book that Gilbert’s reading. And because I was reading on a digital reader where they hadn’t made any difference in the font, I kept checking being like, are we still in this book extract? What am I reading? It’s not even in quotation marks. So yeah, very peculiar. And then that never happens again. There’s no other references to historical cases.
Olly: And I don’t know if that’s just supposed to be like another red herring injected to the reader’s mind, I don’t know how cannibalism could be involved in this case, but is cannibalism involved somehow? But again it’s an example of all the different styles that are thrown into this book.
I spent quite a lot of it wondering if it was a spy novel because you get stuff about Wynant’s experiments. I think he’s been, the things he’s been working on and there’s a lot of mystery about exactly what he was doing. There’s references to communists and things like that.
So I was wondering if it was going to end up being like an espionage type of plot. In the end it’s something completely different from that, but there’s just so many different things going on. It’s hard at times to get a handle on exactly what the book’s trying to be.
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Caroline: Yeah, Maybe this is a good moment as well to talk about that word hardboiled and that general style, because I think there is a very specific set of associations with that as a genre, and Dashiell Hammett is very much talked about as the main proponent of this hardboiled genre, and yet this book of his seems to be writing against a lot of those tropes, don’t you think?
Olly: Yeah, absolutely. There’s definitely elements of hardboiled in here, but there’s just so much other stuff going on as well. And particularly the fact that the central character is happily married. We get so much domestic detail and that to me felt very alien to the typical stuff you get in hardboiled books, which tend to focus on, miserable men who are detectives, who drink a lot and feel compelled to keep solving crime. Nick is the absolute opposite of that, apart from the drinking, obviously.
Caroline: He’s still got the drinking, but yeah, he’s got a wife, and he’s got a dog he loves very much, and they’ve got this secure, happy home, and this circle of friends, and he’s financially secure as well, which I think is something often you come up against with hardboiled as well, that they’re very financially precarious and got to take one more case to make ends meet and all of this.
So yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it, that it’s not that, but it has some lingering sense of that, just because you get the sense that maybe that’s what Nick was like before he met Nora, when he was still a full time PI. And he has some shady criminal contacts who come out of the woodwork in this book to help with this.
At one point, he and Nora go to this club run by a former gangster acquaintance of his and he’s very excited to welcome Nick and he stands them champagne because of their marriage and all this kind of thing. So yeah it’s a lot of turning on the head things that you would expect from hardboiled, I think.
Olly: And I think Nora as a character does that as well. When you think of female characters in hardboiled books, they are usually either the victims or the femme fatale style character. And Nora, is completely different from that.
And I really liked the fact that in this book, she has sexual agency, basically. She’s as much of a flirt with people as Nick is. And was lovely to watch or to read their relationship. They seemed like a genuinely happy couple together who were very much in tune in terms of just the way they wanted to live their lives.
Caroline: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. And that scene where the gangster breaks into their flat and ends up shooting at Nick. And he shoves her down on the floor and tries to knock her out so that she’s not going to experience any of this. And then she’s annoyed with him. She’s like, that was exciting. I could have enjoyed that. Why did you do that? It’s really funny. And then I think the police as well, when they come are very apologetic to her. We’re really sorry, but we need to ask you questions, Mrs Charles and all this. She’s like, no I’m loving this, please ask away. And the police are all very surprised, but also they’re charmed by this. They’re like, oh you got a good one there, Nick.
So yeah, I think it makes total sense to me that relationship and those two characters are the things that then endured from this book into movies and radio adaptations and stuff because yeah, they are really special and they are really unusual.
Olly: Yup.
Caroline: Thinking of this as mystery novel, did this work for you as a mystery? Because as we’ve said, there’s a lot of different genres, there’s a lot of different suspects all going on. Did you have that feeling that you often have when you’re reading a good mystery where you’re being drawn through a story on a thread towards a solution?
Olly: To be honest with you, no, not really with this one. There’s just, there’s just too much going on. And yeah, normally I think of mysteries as being, you start with a wide group of suspects. And as you go through the book, that gradually gets whittled down until you get to the solution.
Whereas in this, there’s no funnel. It’s just a tube with the same number of suspects, pretty much all the way through, sometimes he adds some more, but he never really takes any way until right at the end. When you find out what’s actually been going on.
Caroline: Yes, that’s a really good point, actually, that you would expect at least some of that process of alibi checking and elimination, but it doesn’t really happen, does it? There is a bit of acknowledgement of, oh so and so was here, but that doesn’t ever seem to rule them out, because they also can’t quite seem to decide when Julia was murdered and how, therefore they’re not fully sure what they’re eliminating people from.
And then there are all these little side quests that people go on, which are just mentioned like Herbert Macaulay goes off to Philadelphia to check out the idea that Wynant might have tried to kill himself there. And we just get, I think he sends a telegram back being like, no, it’s not him.
And then that’s just not really mentioned again to the end. So there are all of these tangents that I found really distracting from the central mystery. And yeah, no one gets eliminated. Everyone feels like a perpetual possibility.
Mimi in particular found her very confusing because she’s the person who discovers the body. She’s also married, or was married to another one of the suspects, the inventor Wynant, and it’s never quite clear whose side she’s on, or what she might be trying to do at all.
Olly: No, she’s got a really weird relationship with her children. She’s got this new husband who it turns out is using an alibi. And is a bigamist as well. I did think the central family are interesting and the relationship between the different characters in that family and Wynant is particularly interesting.
The other thing that really struck me about the book is, in terms of mysteries, there are effectively two mysteries throughout the book. One is What happened to Julia? Who killed Julia? But the other one is, where is Wynant? What’s he doing? Why has he disappeared? And at times those compete with each other.
And sometimes it felt to me like the mystery of where Wynant was the more important of the mysteries or the one that Hammett was more engaged in as a writer.
Caroline: Yes, I think that’s right, because you almost get presented with that first, don’t you? In that very opening scene where Nick runs into Dorothy Wynant in the bar, she’s asking him do you know where my father is? My mother’s trying to track him down, I think because we’ve run out of money. Your first impression of the book is, oh, so this is a book about this man who’s missing and the title is The Thin Man. Is he The Thin Man? So that’s where your brain’s immediately going and you’re like, oh, this other woman’s been murdered. Oh, what? It’s, yeah, but I should say: despite all of that, I greatly enjoyed the experience of reading it. It is chaotic and messy and doesn’t feel fully worked out as a mystery plot, maybe. Or, I don’t know, maybe Hammett’s just being very clever and deliberately doing something almost metafictional with it, I’m not sure. But it’s still good to read. It doesn’t spoil the experience, I don’t think.
Olly: No, I enjoyed it a lot. I’ve talked about all the stuff that’s going on and it may have sounded like a negative, but I love that about it. It feels like he just throws everything into it and it does feel like he wants the reader to have a good time. Even if you find one particular section a bit dull, you know that things are going to be different in the next section and there’ll be some fun to be had there.
I really do think it’s Nick and Nora who pull you as a reader through the book, you can forgive the inconsistencies and the confusions and things like that because they’re just such fun to read. I do wonder If Hammett was trying to mash together different styles of pulp fiction from the short stories he’s written in terms of this being the slightly saucy socialite book, a hardboiled book, a spy novel, it’s got some horror elements as well. There’s just so many things mashed together in this that it becomes an enjoyable read.
Caroline: Yes, absolutely. So I think you’re right. I think if you read this for the mystery, I think you’re going to be probably a bit disappointed. But if you read it for the atmosphere, the place and the characters of Nick and Nora, who are the through line, then I think it absolutely works.
What it also had a few of that was very exciting to me as someone who mostly reads British Golden Age detective fiction are the action sequences like Nick getting shot in his flat, and then the big discovery of the body under the cement in the workshop at the end. That’s definitely not the kind of thing that I’m getting in a Ngaio Marsh or a Dorothy L. Sayers, so I enjoyed that greatly. How did you find them?
Olly: I enjoyed them too. I think in particular that attack on Nick in his flat near the start is really, it comes out of nowhere. I wasn’t expecting it at all. And it immediately injects a bit of peril into the story, which wasn’t there previously, but which then interestingly just fades away again after that.
Nick just completely shrugs it off. He doesn’t seem bothered by the fact he’s been shot in bed, at all. And Nora doesn’t seem that bothered by it either. Which I suppose in a way builds their characters and it is very much part of the people that they are. But yeah, I thought the big reveal at the end, whilst it’s a bit of a mess getting there again, was really well handled. I thought that scene worked really well.
Caroline: Were you surprised by the solution that it is Herbert Macaulay, the lawyer and in solution to the other mystery that you mentioned, that Wynant has been dead the whole time, that there’s never been anyone to look for .
Olly: I definitely was, and I was thinking afterwards, it’s the opposite of what you normally get. In books like this, you sometimes get characters who you think are dead, the plot may hinge on them being dead but there isn’t a body, they’ve been lost at sea or something like that.
And invariably, in those books, they end up still being alive. So to have the complete opposite of that in this book, to have a character you think is alive who people seem to be witnessing and reporting back on and things like that and then to find out at the end he’s been dead the whole time, I thought was a really great twist. I definitely didn’t predict it but I’m not sure I could have predicted any ending for this book because there’s just so many things to try and grapple as you work your way through it.
Caroline: No, absolutely. I think when I talk about golden age puzzle mysteries, a big criteria that we’re looking at is does it play fair by the reader? This book absolutely does not play fair, but also it’s not really part of what it’s trying to do. So I don’t think it’s even fair to really even ask that question, because he’s not trying to lay clues or enable the reader. The whole point is to surprise the reader at the end. And I think he absolutely achieves that.
What did you make of the title? The thin man aspect, because Nick’s big deduction, he is also the one who thinks we should look in this workshop better, because no one’s really looked there.
But then his big deduction after that is, we’ve got this body buried, dismembered horribly, and buried in quicklime under the cement in the workshop floor. And when they dig it up, they find all these clothes have been put with it.
And the clothes are for a very fat man who they think maybe walked with a cane, because there’s some bits of a cane there.
And so the police are like, oh this is a fat man who’s buried here because these are his clothes and Nick’s no, it’s Wynant, he’s a thin man. And that’s the big title reveal. What did you make of that? It feels like something from almost before the age of forensics. As the marquee deduction of the book, it feels quite simplistic.
Olly: Yeah, and I think it seems symptomatic of Nick’s style of detecting, which is he just figures stuff out and you never really know how he’s figured it out. He’s a really good detective because Guild keeps telling you he was and therefore you almost take on face value his deduction.
Caroline: Yes, and I think Nick and Nora’s final conversation in the book really speaks to that as well, which is almost set up a bit like a trial in the way that Nick’s putting his case that it was Macaulay, and these are all the ways that we know that it was Macaulay. And Nora’s going but you haven’t actually proved this, or what if he wasn’t there, or that’s just your theory. She’s almost like the defence, she’s saying, but you have to prove this, he’s innocent until he’s proven guilty. What did you make of that? I thought it was a really unusual ending to a book.
Olly: Yeah, I did too, but it seemed to me to be, again, it comes back to those two characters, that’s so what they’re about as characters that constant sparking off each other that you get throughout the book, that quick fire banter almost, it felt very much in keeping with them as characters But yeah, not in keeping with a mystery novel You don’t expect the great detective to be torn apart at the end and questioned like that.
Caroline: Again, there’s some funny metatextual stuff going on because he’s talking to Nora and that conversation is very much in the first person and he’s saying, we just know this, it has to be him because of this and it just makes sense that it would be him because he was there and he was doing this and he lost his own money in market speculation so he needed money so he was stealing it from his client, it all hangs together, don’t worry about it, kind of thing.
And then there are just these little bits in brackets where it’s almost like Nick of the future is saying, oh then we checked out we did find that he was doing this and we did later prove this. Which again is just very interesting given that at this time, multiple murder would definitely send you to your death in the electric chair, as they reference. So again, maybe it feels like one of those of its time. setting things that this is just how murder was investigated then it was all feelings and vibes, proof later.
Olly: And yeah, it almost feels maybe he was up against a deadline and he just ran out of time. But at the end he just adds those bits in just to cement home for the reader that, the right outcome has been reached without actually having to do the legwork to lay all of that out.
Caroline: Yes, it does feel like a fitting end to a novel that has not focused too much on certainties or clues or proofs. Yeah and also it’s a very good ending to the Nick and Nora of it all. If we take that idea that they are the stars of this novel, it’s a novel about Nick and Nora, it’s not really a novel about a murder case. It’s fitting that it should end with their thoughts on it.
Olly: Yeah, absolutely.
Caroline: Coming towards the end now, do you think having read and reflected on this book, we can give it a genre or a style? Is it a screwball comedy or a hardboiled mystery, or is it just inevitably some mash up of several different things.
Olly: I don’t think you can give it a style other than to say that it’s popular fiction in that I think it was designed probably to try and appeal to lots of different people for lots of different reasons and I think that’s the fun of the book is there’s just so many different elements to it that it’s hard not to in love with it in a way.
Caroline: And I think you can absolutely read it and understand how movie producers eyes would just turn into dollar signs when reading it. And indeed, the films were really popular, and I’ve seen two of them and are really great. And Nick, Nora and Asta are specifically the characters that then have a life far beyond the story.
And I think sometimes when that happens, when you have such obvious standout characters, they can feel very unrelated to the rest of the book, almost like they’re standing in front of a flat backdrop and they’re the only three dimensional things. Did you find that in this book or do you think they are integrated into The Thin Man?
Olly: I’m not sure they fully feel like they fit in it just because there’s so much hinted at darkness in the book, particularly about the childhoods of the Wynant children. And that felt very counter to the party lifestyle of Nick and Nora. But, at the same time, I think the book without them would completely fall apart. They’re so central to the reader’s enjoyment of the book that it’s hard to imagine it without them.
Caroline: Yes, it’s funny as well isn’t it that Nick and Nora do have this domestic life and they seem very happy together but Nick is also fundamentally cynical about the world and particularly about crime and justice and he says at the end, this line that really stuck with me, that murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered and sometimes the murderers.
Because I think Nora’s asking what are we going to do now? How are our lives going to be changed by this? And he’s like, not at all. Our lives will be exactly the same because this is always going on. And then she gets the last line of the book, which is, it’s all pretty unsatisfactory. Which is such an interesting way to end a crime novel.
We’re so used to having them tied up in a bow and just to be left with like, life is hard. What are you going to do about it? Is surprising and I think really interesting. What do you think about that? Do you think Nick is the cynic with a heart of gold or is he cynic all the way through?
Olly: I don’t think he’s cynical all the way through, but I think it’s interesting as a a reader of crime fiction, and interesting that this book wasn’t part of a series because you’re right, in an individual novel, things get wrapped up at the end the killer is brought to justice, things like that, and the world reverts back to normal, the status quo is re-established.
But when you’re reading a series, you know that the next time you pick up a book, someone else is going to be murdered. The status quo will be disrupted again and the detective will have to put things back together. That’s part of the joy of crime fiction. But I think there’s an honesty in the way Hammett lays out that finale to say that yeah, this particular crime has been solved, but there’s a hundred other crimes happening, right now. And I think Nick’s cynicism is refreshing in that regard.
Caroline: it does feel like it’s of the real world. It’s not false in that way. Do you think he’s a good detective?
Olly: It’s hard to say. I think he probably was a good detective. But in this one, he just feels so reluctant. I think for me the kind of detectives I love are the ones who are really passionate about solving the crimes. And Nick, there’s many things he does seem to be passionate about, but solving crime doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Caroline: I think I know the answer to this already, but what would you say is the best thing about this book?
Olly: A hundred percent Nick and Nora. They’re just such a joy to read and it’s lovely reading a book where the central characters, where the detective and their domestic life is the heart of the book. So often, it almost feels like a distraction. A typical trope in detective fiction is the detective having to weigh up their need to go out and solve the crime with having to be at home for the kids and so on and so forth.
Whereas in this the choice that Nick would always make, would be to be with Nora and have fun. And, he very reluctantly gets pulled into solving the crime. So it’s almost the opposite of what you normally expect in terms of the treatment of relationships in a book like this. I thought it was wonderful.
Caroline: It makes me think of the other married detectives in the golden age. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane detect together in the one novel where that really comes up and then the one that I think is very much what you’re talking about is Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, he’s married in later books.
And it is very much like he has to kiss her goodbye and go off to work. She doesn’t come along with him very often. And he does seem to see it as a conflict rather than that’s his choice and the crime can just go hang.
I like at the end of all these episodes to ask my guests to award how many green penguins out of five would you give this book?
Olly: I’ve really gone back and forth on this question because there’s so many things about the book that are messy and that almost don’t work together. I had rounded out on three, but having discussed the book again with you and remembering just how much fun I had with it, I think I’m going to put that up to a four.
Caroline: Four green penguins out of five for The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. That’s wonderful. Thank you very much for joining me, Olly. It’s been a delight to talk to you about this book.
Olly: Thank you for having me on.
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Caroline: I hope you enjoyed our discussion of The Thin Man and that you are already itching to write in and tell me what you made of the book yourself. This is the postbag section, where I catch you up on the correspondence I’ve received since our last Green Penguin Book Club episode. We had a very lively discussion of our most recent book, The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie in the Shedunnit Book Club forum, and I learned some interesting things about French criminal procedure — my guest John Curran and I had said that we felt that all the extra police detectives and officials in addition to Hercule Poirot made the story feel quite cluttered, but now I think perhaps Christie was just trying to be accurate to her French setting. Emily also wrote in in defence of our criticism of Captain Hastings’ romantic exploits in this novel, and to say that as someone who read the Christie books out of order initially, his character in this book feels incongruous. “It’s that the things he does are so out of character for the Hastings we know from Lord Edgware Dies, Dumb Witness, The ABC Murders, and from many of the short stories. I think the Hastings of Dumb Witness would have been mortified to think about his behaviour in The Murder on the Links.” I thought this was an interesting point — Christie was generally pretty uninterested in considering her books as a cohesive series, hence all the inconsistencies that she eventually acknowledged via the character of Ariadne Oliver. The Hastings of The Murder on the Links is certainly not the same person who appears by that name in later books.
Thank you very much to Emily, Jo and and everyone else who sent in thoughts or contributed to the Shedunnit Book Club discussion of this book. If you have a perspective you’d like to share for the next episode, please send an email or a voice note to caroline@shedunnitshow.com and mark it for inclusion in the show. The next book we read will be Penguin 34, Mr Fortune, Please by H.C. Bailey. I’m doing green penguin book club roughly every other month, so listen out for that episode in August. And make sure you’re following the show in Instagram @shedunnitshow to see pictures of the books I discuss and other green penguin updates.
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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was CriminOlly, who you can find making excellent videos about all sorts of books on his YouTube channel of that name.
You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/thethinman. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
My new book, A Body Made of Glass, is currently available to order everywhere books are sold or borrowed. And if you do read it, I would really appreciate a rating or review at your platform of choice — it’s hugely helpful both to me and to other readers who might be deciding if they want to give it a try.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.