Strand magazine is to publish a recently discovered short story by Dashiell Hammett, ‘So I Shot Him’.
‘He gave us both Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles — so for a generation of readers, Dashiell Hammett more or less defined both “hard-boiled” and “suave.” Not bad, that.
Now, from the long-deceased author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, comes a never-before-published short story: “So I Shot Him.” It’s suspenseful, full of secrets no one’s telling, and — according to Andrew Gulli, editor of the mystery magazine that’s publishing the story — somewhat more than what you might think of as vintage Hammett.
“Vintage in that you have the great vivid characterization that Dashiell Hammett is so famous for,” Gulli tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “The terse dialogue, and the great tension
that he ratchets up. But it’s not vintage in that there’s a lot of psychological elements to it. There’s also even a bit of a literary feel.”
Ask Gulli to describe the tale, and he’ll locate it in terms of two other storytelling titans: “I’d say it’s sort of like F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Hitchcock.”
Written “somewhere in the ’20s or maybe the ’30s,” Gulli says, “So I Shot Him” turns on an encounter between one man who’s terrified of the water and another who’s trying to get him to take a swim. Is there a subtle murder plot afoot? And why is that one fellow’s wife so anxious about what’s going on with the other guy?
“You’re going to be asking more questions about it than if you’d just read a typical short story — even a typical noir short story,” Gulli says. “To me that’s what the main
attraction of it was; there are more questions at the end than answers, and as an editor that’s what you’re looking for in a good piece of fiction.”
Ahead of the publication of A Man of Parts, a reimagining of the life of H.G. Wells, David Lodge introduces Wells to readers of the Observer.
‘I already knew something of Wells’s life from writing literary criticism about his work, but the more deeply I looked into it the more astonishingly rich in human and historical interest it appeared. Beginning inauspiciously (he was the son of unsuccessful shopkeepers and was apprenticed to the drapery trade at the age of 14), it stretched from 1866 to 1946, a period of global political turmoil, including two world wars, in which he played a public role. The bibliography of his published work contains some 3,000 items, including more than 100 books. He met and conversed with nearly every well-known statesman and writer of his time, and in his science fiction and speculative prose he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb. He made a strenuous effort to direct the Fabian Society towards his own idiosyncratic model of socialism (an updated version of Plato’s Republic), nearly destroying it in the process, and worked selflessly if vainly all his life for the cause of world government. His Outline of History, published in 1920, was an ambitious attempt to “teach the peoples of the world . . . that they are all engaged in a common work, that they have sprung from common origins, and all are contributing some special service to the general end”. It was a global bestseller.
“Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century,” George Orwell wrote in 1941, “are in some sense Wells’s own creation.” Between the wars, however, his influence gradually declined, along with the quality of his writing. The triumph of literary modernism in the 1920s made his work look old-fashioned, and the novels that have retained classic status, such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly, all belong to the first 15 years of his long literary career. His mind remained fertile with new ideas – in the late 30s, for instance, he proposed something he called the “World Brain”, an enormous bank of human knowledge stored on microfilm and transported free to users by aeroplane, which needed only the invention of the microchip to resemble the internet – but the world paid diminishing attention to them. There was pathos in his own sense of this neglect in his last years, and in his deepening pessimism about the fate of the human race, epitomised in the title of his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether.
Wells was also a prophet of the sexual revolution of our own era. He believed in free love and practised it tirelessly.’
The Telegraph profiles Charles Portis, the man who created Rooster Coburn.
‘After three years in Little Rock, Portis moved on to the Herald-Tribune, working for three years in New York before his spell in London. Based near the Savoy Hotel, he combined reporting with his duties as bureau chief. He was amused rather than annoyed by the constant clicks of the telephones that indicated British intelligence were tapping his calls. He also dealt with Downing Street, as he remembered: “The Prime Minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He gave us – a handful of American correspondents – one or two off-the-record interviews and spoke of Lyndon Johnson as, ‘your, uh, rather racy president’, referring, I suppose, to Johnson’s barnyard humour.”
He quickly became disillusioned with the whole business of “management comedies”. As he says: “I wanted to try my hand at fiction, so I gave notice and went home to America.”
That was in November 1964. Four years later, he had published True Grit to widespread acclaim. Roald Dahl – who rarely reviewed books – wrote in praise for the American first edition dust jacket: “True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since…Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last 20? I do not know. I expect some have, but I cannot recall them right now. Marvellous it is. He hasn’t put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer!”’
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