The Return of the Thin Man
Noirtastic news Crimeziners! Dashiell Hammett reaches out from beyond the grave and offers us a final installment of The Thin Man.
As most will agree Dashiell Hammett elevated the crime genre to the status of true literature, and The Thin Man was Hammett’s last—and most successful—novel, so Crimezine is very excited to reveal that Hammett actually wrote not one, but two sequels, that will be published under the title, The Return of the Thin Man.
Following the enormous success of The Thin Man movie in 1934, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, Hammett was commissioned to write stories for additional films. He wrote two full-length novellas, for the films that became “After the Thin Man” and “Another Thin Man”. Neither of these stories have been previously published, in book form, although a fanzine did reveal a brief snatch of the story 25 years ago.
Heaven help us Crimeziners, first it was James M. Cain reaching out from beyond the crypt with The Cocktail Waitress, now we find Hammett returning in ghostly fashion. Whatever next? A revelation from the posthumous if somewhat whiskey drenched Chandler estate perhaps? There has to be a golf addled lawyer, or a scarlet septugenarian secreting a browning Chandler M/S defiantly in the bottom of a Marlowesque fliling cabinet, somewhere—we just know it!
Until that glorious, if somewhat inevitable revelation comes Crimeziners, we will have to content ourselves with the news that there is a Johnny Depp/Rob Marshall movie remake of The Thin Man heading our way very soon. You heard it here first Crimeziners!
The Return of the Thin Man will be published November 6, 2012.
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