Today we start reading The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett!
If you would like to read along, we’ll read Chapters 1 to 13 this week and discuss them next Friday. The full details are here.
These first chapters introduce us to our narrator, Nick Charles, his wife Nora and their pet Schnauzer Asta, the Wynant family – Clyde (the ‘thin man’), his daughter Dorothy, son Gilbert, ex-wife Mimi, and her new husband Jorgensen – and assorted policemen, gangsters and lawyers. We also discover a bullet-riddled corpse . . .
Before we get started, here are a few of the locations we’ll meet in this first section.
Chapter 1 opens on 22 December 1932, at the height of Prohibition, with Nick Charles leaning against the bar of a speakeasy on 52nd Street. This was almost certainly the 21, the most famous bar on that street, which opened in 1929 (and sadly closed in 2020).
We know that Hammett drank there in October 1931, with William Faulkner, with whom he shared an uncanny resemblance. (Hammett was tall and Faulkner was short but their hair and moustaches are almost identical!) They turned up late and drunk to the publisher Alfred Knopf’s apartment for a reception in honour of Willa Cather.
At the speakeasy, Nick meets Dorothy Wynant, who’s looking for her father, and thus the plot gets going. Most of the early chapters, however, take place inside Nick and Nora’s apartment in the Hotel Normandie.
There was a Hotel Normandie in New York, but it had been demolished in 1926.
A more likely model for Nick and Nora’s hotel is the Pierre, which opened in 1930 and still dominates Central Park. Hammett began writing The Thin Man in the Pierre before running up bills and skipping out in September 1932.
Hammett then went to stay in the Sutton on East 56th Street, where the house manager was the author Nathanael West – author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. West arranged cheap accommodation for several of his literary friends, including Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. Incidentally, West’s wife Eileen was the sister of Laura Perelman (wife of the writer S. J. Perelman) whose pet dog was called Asta.
Hammett finished writing The Thin Man at the Sutton in about six months. Perhaps the Sutton was the model for the Courtland Hotel where Nick and Nora visit Mimi Wynant-Jorgensen for Boxing Day dinner in Chapter 10.
Finally, at the start of Chapter 3, Nick and Nora attend the opening of Honeymoon at the Little Theatre. The Little Theatre, now known as the Hayes Theater, is the smallest Broadway theatre with 597 seats.
The comic play Honeymoon by Samuel Chotzinoff and George Backer did indeed open at the Little Theatre on December 23, 1932. Here is the review that ran in Time magazine – the review sounds funnier than the play:
Honeymoon is a loquacious comedy which somehow never becomes as amusing as you hope it will. In it is ingratiating, puppylike Ross Alexander as a young man who is visiting Paris with a new wife whom he is beginning to find very trying. They are staying at the apartment of his bride’s kinswoman (Katherine Alexander), a nobly understanding beauty who ably substitutes when the bride goes off to Nice in a huff. Also in the cast is Thomas Mitchell (Clear All Wires), the obliging hostess’s burly ex-husband. To him, a quixotic race-track habitué with a curious interest in Scandinavian tongues, goes the brightest irrelevancy in the play: “Do you speak Swedish? . . . Neither do I. . . . Hard to find anyone who speaks Swedish.”
Enjoy the first section of The Thin Man! I look forward to discussing next Friday . . .
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Good morning. I started last night. Reading the descriptions of Nick as a Greek ex-PI suggests a physicality I don't see in William Powell, although it's hard not to see Powell as Nick. What do others think? And, I don't remember who said it, but Nick can hold his liquor. I imagine people drank more then. It's only in my lifetime that the stigma of addiction has taken hold despite Prohibition and regular church attendance. I've heard the stories of my great-grandmother knowing where to find all of the best speakeasies in town. If Google is believed, the average American drank thirteen drinks a week in the 1920s. I think Nick has them all beat. Happy Advent, all!
I've seen many great productions at the Hayes Theatre, named for Helen Hayes. This post made me want to know more.
100 years ago tonight at the Little Theatre you could have seen "Pigs," which ran for nearly a year. The premise: Senior is upset with Junior's pleas to borrow $250 to buy 250 cholera-infected pigs.
My favorite notes from the Playbill:
This Theatre, with every seat occupied, can be emptied in less than three minutes. Choose NOW the Exit nearest to your seat, and in case of fire walk (do not run) to that Exit.
During the Second Intermission Iced Tea and Cocoa wil be served in the Tea Room. There will be no charges, and it is requested that no fees be given to any attendant in the Little Theatre.