The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

It's sometimes hard, reading a classic (genre or otherwise) to remember that at some point what that classic did was new and inventive--chances are (especially if the book's nearly a hundred years old) that you're used to seeing it as a trope, something to be riffed on, inverted, subverted. This is a classic, and deservedly so: It's quick and smart and fluctuates between violence and charm. Hammett seems to play a bit closer to whodunit than Chandler, though this book doesn't seem all that carefully plotted--and I kept finding myself wondering how effective the detectives (and other people) in the novel would be if they'd try being sober once in a while.