“The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett” [by David Lehman]

The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett

The stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler once wrote, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

The Thin Man

 
Click here for the full essay, which appears in the current issue of The American Scholar and is now available via Longreads.