Chandler… if he’s prepared.
Oh, isn’t it that kind of thread?
I have to go with Chandler over Hammett. The Maltese Falcon tries to stuff several different styles of fiction into a single story without them all properly meshing. The Thin Man is full of brittle dialog and drinking jokes and was improved by the movies’ making the couple human and likable. The early novels have cruder writing than a Great Writer of only five books should have on his resume.
Not that I would mind any one of those books on mine.
Chandler took the worlds that Hammett created and meshed them into a seamless whole, with prose that melts the synapses. Hammett was brilliant but Chandler make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
I picked up a nice multi-book volume of Chandler at a book sale; now I think it’s about time I dug into it.
I’d have to go with Chandler, too (even if we include Cain - I’ve never heard of Thayer, but will definitely check him out now), though I wouldn’t really find it worthwhile to argue the point with anyone who picked Hammett - both were great. Chandler was just darker (which I prefer) and more modern to my mind - I can relate more to his work, and to the morality he dealt with.
Pop. 1280 puts it to shame, IMHO.
I’m going with Chandler, though I’ve only read two books from each author. I’m a sucker for heavily stylized writing, and that’s what Chandler is all about. The man is a romantic writing the macabre, and Phillip Marlowe is far more introspective than any of the characters I’ve found in Hammett’s books…but then his writing leaves a lot to the imagination.
I want to read another Chandler book soon
Raymond Chandler is the greatest novelist of the mid-20th century. Not only is his prose styled so powerfully, but the themes he visits, over and over, are the themes of great literature: loss, lonliness, the inability of people to make a connection, the horror of the human condition. Hammett’s books are about who did the crime. I enjoy Hammett a lot, but mostly, his stuff works only on the surface, while Chandler uses the noir trappings to tell us something about humanity (and how fucked up most of us are).
–Cliffy
It is rumored that when filming The Big Sleep the director asked Chandler who did what to whom and he responded “Don’t worry about it. I’m not sure myself.”
Urban legend or fact? 
This story seems to change a little bit depending on who’s telling it: sometimes Howard Hawks makes the call, sometimes Faulkner, sometimes Bogart. AFAIK, Chandler never mentioned the incident in any of his correspondence.
But Hawks has mentioned it in interviews and said he made the call. Would seem logical; I doubt Bogart would have cared and it was likely Faulkner would have been the one complaining about the issue, so it would be someone else – and Hawks is most likely – who picked up the phone.
But the who is less important as the fact (attested by Hawks) that someone did make the call. And Chandler was indifferent to the logic of the mystery, being more interested in the mood and dialog.
I should clarify that I think both Hammett and Chandler are Really Very Good Writers, but neither is a Great Writer on the level of, say, Faulkner, who’s my gold standard in that regard.
Also, I gave up all pretense of worrying about liking Great Writers (and Great Artists) a long time ago. Life’s too short to force myself to do more than appreciate Ernest Hemingway.
"She stepped into the room pointing a pair of 45’s…
…then she pulled out a gun."
Sorry.
Although it doesn’t explicity say so here, according to Lauren Bacall it was actually Bogart who brought up the issue with Hawks, who then cabled Chandler. The novel is unclear on the point, though not nearly as convoluted as the film, which was reedited for release in order to improve pacing and emphasize the Bogart-Bacall scenes (with some suggeestive dialog about horse racing that didn’t come from the novel).
Chandler’s novel is more salacious–pornography, homosexuality, and copious nudity and sex figure prominently but wouldn’t be acceptable under the Production Code–but the movie works in it’s own right despite it’s flaws. I’ve seen the film maybe half a dozen times and it makes less sense every time I watch it, which in no way detracts from its charm. (The Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski is a deliberate parody/homage/riff on The Big Sleep with The Dude playing a perennially stoned and clueless version of Marlowe, so when people complain about how plotless and haphazard the story is they’re missing the joke.)
I think Chandler’s best adaptation to film is Farewell, My Lovely, even if Charlotte Rampling’s Velma is intentionally aping Lauren Bacall. Nods to Bogart for playing a good Marlowe, but Mitchum was perfect at playing a broke, perpetually down-on-his-luck, world-weary private dick. Being post-Code it includes a lot of the detail that would have been trimmed out in the earlier era. Chadler’s best work, though, might be his script-doctoring of the dialog of Cain’s Double Indemnity:
Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don’t you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He’ll be in then.
Walter Neff: Who?
Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren’t you?
Walter Neff: Yeah, I was, but I’m sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.
Phyllis: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Walter Neff: How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I’d say around ninety.
Walter Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Walter Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Walter Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.
Walter Neff: That tears it.
Stranger
I have to go with Chandler, just because he’s more fun to read. (IMHO) More Noir, more metaphor, more sense that it is literature, transcending the genre.
Chandler had the best single lines - Marlowe wakes up after having been knocked out, and says, “I felt like an amputated leg” - but The Maltese Falcon is one of the best novels of the twentieth century. So I am going with Hammett.
Especially for the scene in TMF where Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy are waiting for Cairo to show up, and Spade, without any lead-in, begins to tell Brigid about a missing person case he worked on. And the punch line is the single most significant philosophical statement in any detective novel -
Brigid doesn’t get it. I didn’t either, for the longest time. But I think I do now. There is nothing with that kind of insight in The Big Sleep, or The Long Goodbye, which are mostly wish-fulfillment. But Hammett sees how the people in his novels are trying to pretend they are tough and realistic, but just as self-deluded as anyone else.
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, subjectivity. I could have written almost exactly the same paragraph as you, Cliffy, only transposing the names.
I heard it was Hawks who was indifferent; something about how he was directing the film so that each scene was compelling, but the didn’t much care how they hung together. That, plus the film was extensively recut, and new scenes added, when Bogie and Bacall became a sensation before the movie premiered. The studio delayed the release so Hawks could shoot and insert some more banter bits, which wreaked further havoc on the plot. Not that I mind; Hawks never made a wrong turn, if you ask me, and I kind of get a kick out of his screw-the-plot approach to this movie.
Yes, if we’re ranking, then I’d agree with your assessment of Faulkner v. Hammett. And though I try not to worry about it, I do every once in a while get a hankering for a book that requires a little chewing, and doesn’t just slide down like raw oyster. But I do love oysters.
Eesh. SHoulda read Stranger’s post first. Much better overview.
By the way, TCM recently ran BOTH versions–the rarely seen pre-release cut, and the classic doctored cut–back to back. I hope they do it again sometime.
Oh, I like chewing. And Hammett and Chandler at their best have plenty to chew on – the “beams falling” parable that Shodan mentioned is an excellent example. (And may be the single greatest moment between the two authors – and I’d completely forgotten it from my first reading twenty years ago.) Hammett and Chandler are just not the multi-course banquet that, say, Faulkner and Twain are at their best. They’re big meals.
On the other hand, oysters are yummy. But I stay away from the intravenous feedings, the ones that require no effort whatsoever to consume and leave you nothing but plump veins in response. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels, for example – I read a couple of those for fun, but they’re so weightless that the fun evaporates before your eyes.
So: balance. Lots to chew on, but not so much you’ll end up with a sore jaw and bloated gut.
Stranger on a Train: Ditto and ditto.