Return of the Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

This is two novella-length story treatments Hammett wrote for movie sequels to *The Thin Man*, and it's worth reading. There's less of Hammett's prose as narration but his gift for dialogue glows like a beacon, here. The stories are a little complicated, and if you know what to look for you can see where the screenwriters had gotten tired of Hammett, his characters, and the actors who portraied them; but between the stories and the brief explanations of the movie-business context, it's a very worth-reading book.

"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish... He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." -- Raymond Chandler