bookshelf

THE LOST DETECTIVE

Name: THE LOST DETECTIVE
Author: Nathan Ward
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7640-2

BECOMING DASHIELL HAMMETT

by Nathan Ward ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2015

A jaunty narrative for Hammett and hard-boiled fans only.

bookshelf

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), private eye.

Journalist and former American Heritage editor Ward (Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront, 2011, etc.) began this lively, but ultimately slight, book with a single question: how did Hammett transform himself “from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story”? The many biographies of Hammett (Ward cites a few in his bibliography) failed to answer his question, so he set out on his own investigation. Unfortunately, finding little evidence of Hammett’s years working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Ward often guesses what Hammett might have felt, done, or thought. Although he speculates, for example, that “doing his scores of operative reports” honed Hammett’s ability to write pithy narratives, none of those reports are in the Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress. Ward can only deduce what they might have contained from other operatives’ work. Other information about the Pinkerton years came from Hammett researcher and journalist David Fechheimer, who tracked down operatives who had known Hammett. Ward also closely reads Hammett’s detective stories for clues. Since none of his early writing has survived, however, even Hammett’s motivation to become a writer is shrouded in mystery. What is clear was his inability to continue to work for Pinkerton because he was weak, and often bedridden, from tuberculosis contracted during World War I. With a wife and children to support, Fechheimer suggests, “he would have done whatever he had to do to make a buck.” “Down the years,” writes Ward, “Hammett must have wondered what might have happened had he gone on chasing crooks for the agency; whether, once he had run out his string as an operative, he could have settled into a desk job bossing younger detectives.” Or maybe not. Ward ends the biography in 1935, when Hammett was famous, celebrated, and usually drunk.

A jaunty narrative for Hammett and hard-boiled fans only.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8027-7640-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
SON OF THE OLD WEST
by Nathan Ward

- BOOK REVIEW
DARK HARBOR
by Nathan Ward

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.