Welcome to Litsy!

I‘m not a “hard boiled / noir” aficionado but maybe I should be, who doesn‘t love an MC walking around, shot & drunk, unwittingly solving a crime. From the description I thought Nora would be a more involved character, so that was a let down, but I was entertained.

#ChristmasCrimeChallenge

My current co-worker

Packs quite a punch for such a short novel (115 pages). I really want to rewatch the movie now - the Fred MacMurray version. I've never seen the remake.

But can someone explain to me why the characters' names were changed for the movie? From Walter Huff to Walter Neff, and from Phyllis Nirdlinger to Phyllis Dietrichson. At least the first names weren't changed.

"I puffed at the cigarette. It was one of those things with filters in them. It tasted like a high fog strained through cotton wool."

-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

#fog. #HauntsandHexes

@Eggs
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Hated this.

The main character is an insufferable misogynist with no redeeming features, and since he doesn't seem to care what's going on, there's no reason why we should either.

Read as an example of the Hardboiled subgenre, and suitably unimpressed.

⭐️⭐️

Reading this for HRCYED subgenres prompt and I'm not sure I can weather the sexist writing to enjoy the story.

"She was a blonde woman of a few more years than thirty. Her facial prettiness was perhaps five years past its best moment."

Feminist rage piqued.

I found an old volume of mystery stories & novels while antiquing a couple weeks ago. The first novel in the collection was The Maltese Falcon, which I have never actually read. It had some good twists but wasn't amazing. Overall this only gets a so-so.

This bail is more a reflection of my reading mood than the book. Dorothy B. Hughes has interesting plots and writes well, but I just couldn't find the headspace to get into this one.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it‘s an origin story setting up the reader‘s understanding of a character for a series, also being a series set around a black man at a time that was rare. On the other hand, it‘s a whole lot of people menacing each other without much of a through line and a ludicrous number of bodies piling up. I can‘t quite give it a pick. Pretty cool that my library has a signed first edition.