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TENTH_CLUE

                                             February 4, 2021


Dashiell Hammett's "The Tenth Clew": an early continental
op story.  There are a few things that are notable about
this story in comparison to some of the others I've been
encountering of late:

(1) The action mostly makes sense, you don't feel like
the main character is being forced by the writer to do
arbitrary things for made-up reasons.

(2) There's a scene where the main character falls off of
a boat into San Francisco Bay, where you get some sense
of what it's like to be fighting hypothermia.

That last point might not seem like much, but it really is
remarkable: writer's are by and large bookish people who
often don't have a good feel for what physical action is
like, and an ignorance of basic human physical limitations
is often on display in their work.

                                           WINDUP_BIRD

                         The Korean drama "The Big Issue"
                         comes to mind, where the main
                         character plunges into a river in
                         the middle of winter and crawls
                         out a day later.


                                                TOADKEEPER


My brother liked to argue that he thought
Hammett's experience as a Real Private eye was
over-played, and there's some truth to that: his          ROMANCE_OF_THE_REAL
professional life was nothing like the extreme
situations of his fiction.

But it's always seemed to me that this misses
the point: yes, detective fiction isn't much
like any one's reality, but the fantasizes of
someone who's worked as a detective are
different from the fantasies of someone who's
just read the fantasies.



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