(urth) Off-topic Question

[thalassocrat at nym.hush.com]

On Sun, 18 May 2008 13:36:32 +1000 Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> 
wrote:
>On May 17, 2008, at 10:12 PM, dcooperv wrote:
>>
>And, man, Chandler is underrated.
>
>That's some complex and delicious stuff there.  Marlowe is *so* 
>much  
>smarter and better-educated than he lets on; one of my favorite 
>not- 
>quite-reliable narrators (there's the Wolfean connection).  As far 

>as  
>I'm concerned, _The Big Sleep_ is one of the great books of the 
>20th  
>Century.  Chandler is--hey, another Wolfean connection--a genre 
>writer  
>who was *spectacularly* good, not just compared to the rest of the 

> 
>genre, but period.
>
>Adam

But don't downplay Hammett. On the weekends & Wednesdays I'm sure 
he was a better writer than Chandler. Of all the stories written by 
either of them, I think "The Glass Key" is the best, as well as the 
most Wolfean. All showing, no telling, and the biggest puzzle is 
trying to work out the protagonist's interior state, just from his 
actions.