The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

This was more hard-boiled than I expected - though not quite as hard-boiled as Hammett's earlier novels. (See my various posts on his other four books, from earlier this year.)

The Thin Man was Hammett's fifth and final novel, coming at the beginning of 1934 and launching the famous film series later the same year. It's narrated by former private detective Nick Charles, who now spends his time managing his rich wife Nora's affairs...and drinking far too much. (Even given that it's set during Prohibition, and the drinking culture of the '30s, I'm pretty sure Hammett meant his readers to realize Nick is an alcoholic - or whatever word they would have used in 1934, probably "drunk.")

Nick and Nora live in San Francisco, but are in New York for the end-of-the-year holidays - as Nick says in passing late in the book, to get away from Nora's relatives, who are annoying that time of year.

He meets Dorothy, the now-adult (but barely so) daughter of a former client, Clyde Winant, who asks him to help her get in touch with her estranged father. Nick replies that he's not in the PI business anymore, but gets caught up in the case anyway, as he's also contacted by Wynant's lawyer Herbert Maculay, Nick's army buddy from the Great War, and learns from the police that the reclusive Wynant's secretary, Julia Wolf, was murdered two days after he talked to Dorothy.

Events circle around the missing Wynant - an inventor who gave up his lab a few months ago to go do something unspecified, and has only been communicating through Macaulay since then - and his ex-wife, Dorothy's mother Mimi Jorgenson (remarried to a gigolo named Christian, though the money she got from Wynant is about to run out).

Nick keeps insisting he's not investigating anything, but keeps talking to Lieutenant Guild, who is looking into Julia's murder, and shares theories and ideas with Guild. He also keeps talking to all of the major characters - I skipped a few above; there are also some gangsters and a speakeasy owner, plus some minor-character drinking buddies who turn up repeatedly but don't have much to do with the actual murder or investigation.

Well, I should be fair: Nick mostly spends the book drinking, and he's talking with the people who are where he's drinking - speakeasies and their homes. And several of the principals of this case - Dorothy and Mimi and Maculay in particular - keep urging him to solve it.

And, in the end, he does, not entirely to the satisfaction of all of those people (hint hint). There is the usual "I guess you're wondering why I called you all here" scene, and the murderer - who actually killed three people, as Nick details - is carted off by Guild to face justice.

It's an amusing novel, though it does still shade a bit to the hardboiled side, with its gangsters and speakeasies and moral decay, than to a more frivolous drawing-room mystery, like the popular conception of the movie series. (I don't think I've seen any of the movies, so don't count on me for any specific genre-typing there.) Nick does drink a hell of a lot, which is a bit disconcerting, but Hammett clearly meant it to be, which makes it an element of the novel rather than just a bit of the culture at the time.

All in all, if you want to read a Hammett novel, my recommendation would be the first or the last: Red Harvest is still one of the great foundational hardboiled novels, and this one is fun and lively and somewhat lighter in tone. If you want more than that, the Library of America volume Complete Novels includes, as its title implies, all five of them.