Reading in Reykjavík

Year of publication: 1931 Genre: Thriller Type of mystery: Murder Type of investigator: Amateur (gambler, sworn in as a (crooked) district attorney's special investigator) Setting & time: An unnamed American city, contemporary Story: Gambler Ned Beaumont is the right-hand man of crooked politician and crime boss Paul Madvig. The latter is supporting a senator for re-election and plans to marry his daughter. Then the senator’s son is murdered and people start getting mysterious letters that implicate Madvig in the murder, and Beaumont, who considers Madvig to be his friend, starts investigating the case as a gang war is brewing. Review: This is one excellent tour de force of a thriller. Red herrings, twists, crossings and double-crossings – this story has them all, even twists that are so twisted that some of them become double switchbacks. You never really get a complete grip on what is going on – the plot moves too fast and every character is too slippery and...

Year of publication: 1929 Series and no.: The Continental Op, first novel, preceeded by and based on short stories Genre: Noir thriller Type of investigator: Private detective Setting & time: Personville, a fictional town in the western USA, probably California or Nevada. Story: The nameless narrator, know to the reader only as the Continental Op, arrives in the small city of Personville where the crime situation has become so bad that people have started calling it Poisonville. His client is murdered before he can meet him, but the dead man’s father retains his services to find the killer. The Op starts investigating and uncovers all sorts of nastiness, and events finally lead to him becoming so annoyed with the place and it’s criminal elements that he decides to clean up the town. Review and rating: Like the previous two Hammett novels I have reviewed, this one is written in a spare and quick style and the narrative moves fast. The story is nasty and brutal and slightly tem...

This is the second Hammett novel I read for the top mysteries challenge, which leaves two. Besides reading the book I watched the movie, which is the most faithful book to film adaptation I have seen. Year of publication: 1930 Genre: Hardboiled detective story Type of mystery: Theft, murder Type of investigator: Private detective Setting & time: San Francisco, USA, contemporary to writing Story: A woman approaches private detective Sam Spade and his partner, Archer, with an apparently simple request: to tail someone. But Archer is killed on the job and Spade is approached by two more people and asked to find a valuable statuette, the Maltese Falcon. The woman turns out to be after the same thing. What follows is a merry-go-round of ruthless lies, intrigue and murder. Discussion and review: Sam Spade is one of the most famous detectives in the history of detective fiction, because he was a perfect prototype of the tough guy detective who used brawn as much as brain to solve hi...

I was recently lucky enough to come across a cheap hardcover omnibus volume of all five of Dashiel Hammett’s novels, and as four of them are part of my Top Mysteries challenge, I consider this a piece of good fortune. This book, Hammett’s final novel, was the spark that started the series of Thin Man films, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as sleuthing pair Nick & Nora Charles. Like many others, I was under the impression that Hammett had written a series of Thin Man books, but when I did a little research, I discovered that this was the only book and the rest of the Thin Man stories were all movie originals, some of which seem to have been based on stories written by Hammett exclusively to be turned into movies. Year of publication: 1934 Genre: Mystery, detective novel Type of mystery: Murder, missing person Type of investigator: Private detective (retired) Setting & time: New York, USA; 1930s Story: Retired private eye Nick Charles gets dragged into a case involvin...