… and two from a ‘hard-boiled’ Hammett admirer … and the ensuing edition confusion …

… and I have also been eyeing these two books for quite some time … lots of eyeing going on, actually … and only dealstar on amazon had them under the used-books category … one is the ‘prequel’ to The Maltese Falcon and the other is a fictionalized biography of Dashiell Hammett, just called Hammett … both written by Joe Gores … 

Joe Gores was an award winning American crime-mystery writer … wrote novels and short stories set in San Francisco … his novels feature the fictional private investigation firm Dan Kearney and Associates … and Joe Gores himself was a private eye once … see, lots of similarities with Hammett … and whenever you search for books by Hammett, you are bound to bump into these two novels … at first you ignore, then you are curious … you want to find out more … what, a novel titled Hammett?  you exclaim … and another what! … a prequel to The Maltese Falcon? … by now you are intrigued … and if you are hard-boiled enough, then you want to explore further … dig deeper … this is exactly what happened with me … all this curiosity, intrigue-ment, and exploration, and digging, led me to this uncontrollable desire towards possess-ment of these books … aree, arre, badebhai, kya hora ye … angrezi poora kundhal de rein … sambhalo, badebhai … and so, I seriously contemplated buying these books and started my search for used editions of these books … and I found this edition of Spade and Archer with a suitably old-looking, hard-boiled, and grungy looking cover … I was hooked … and I wanted Spade and Archer with this cover …

 

Actually, Spade and Archer was published only in 2009 and Hammett is in fact the older book, published in 1975 … anyway, I also found a copy of Hammett with the same used-books seller, dealstar on amazon … so after some hesitation and realizing neither will get these books with another used-books seller or with the same price, or with the similar Spade and Archer cover, I bit the bait … and after a couple of weeks look what the bookseller delivered … !!

 

The Hammett edition and cover are the same as was shown on the dealstar portal … but my face fell when I saw Spade and Archer … I was so thoroughly disappointed that I wanted to pick up a fight with the seller for showing something and delivering something else … such a bland undercooked cover … I felt dealstar was using that other cover as a bait, and like a fool I bit it … I wanted to read the book and I got the book, I thought resignedly … but did I really … ??

Then I saw this line at the bottom of the orange cover …

Whoa … what is this? Now, I was really intrigued … I opened the book and on the inside cover there was a whole paragraph … !!!

After reading this I felt like I had transgressed some law or something … who wants all this aggravation, chichcha … I searched the book for further warnings … and found some pieces of reassurance … a sticker at the back with a barcode … and a sticker on the cover with a name I recognise as respectable, namely, Oxfam, and price of the book in Pounds … I heaved a small sigh of relief … oof … secure in the belief that I was not indulging in book-legging … so, the book has legitimately come from England … I surmised … these are extra manuscript proof copies that the publishers had donated to Oxfam … and Oxfam has sold these as used books … and one such copy reached me … and moreover the book has already been printed and all, no ... so, nothing to worry ...

The romantic in me thought “Oh my god!  Is this a rare book or something … they don’t make proof copies in large numbers, do they?  should I preserve this book? put it under a glass case or something?  maybe it will fetch me a good price in the future and finance my retirement” … the cynic in me laughed like a villain and said… “naan-sense … stop day-dreaming, you idiot, you’ve been sold a lemon … this is only an uncorrected proof copy, not the final finished book … you’ll have to buy the final version of the book …” 

Oh, is that so?  I’d better start searching then …

Cruising on the hard-boiled highway: Short-stories by the masters

Now I know why Eliot said, “April is the cruellest month.”  What with the exam season here and the heat, and the other things that came in and filled the gaps, April was a total washout in terms of doing anything even remotely interesting.  Conducting exams, correcting papers, the other added tasks, and all this in the April heat.  Shruti’s university had its convocation in the last week of April and she was being pulled into almost everything related to the event.  Her hours were crazy during this period, not to mention her mood and mind.  I didn’t buy a single book, not even a secondhand book, during this period.  Yeah, it was that bad.  The hangover of the April stress spilled over into May, and the heat also increased.  May brought in its own myriad issues, but I managed to hold on.  I bought some books, some new, some old.  I was very pleased with the new books.  I had started reading Michael Connelly’s Bosch novels sometime in February.  I bought a whole lot of them on secondhand portals on amazon and am binge reading them.  I also managed to watch all episodes of all seasons of Bosch so far.  So, it is Bosch all along now. 

I actually wanted to do a follow-up on the ‘hard-boiled’ post that I put up in March before I got delightfully sidetracked by Lamming and Henshaw.  So, here I am, almost two months later, with a collection of hard-boiled books which I bought in February. 

There is a used books portal on amazon, where one can find real hard-to-find books, or at least I found quite a few of them.  So, the books are exclusive and also expensive.  It was from here that I managed to fill the gaps in my Martin Beck collection.  I couldn’t find these books anywhere else.  I had to pay the clichéd ‘an arm and a leg’ each time, but that was because I was comparing the prices with Abids prices … bad habit … like the clichéd (again!) freshly-landed-in-the-US Indian habit of mentally converting dollars to rupees in the US before making a purchase.  Anyway, all this is proverbial water under the clichéd bridge, more or less.      

I continued visiting this portal and was charmed by the collection of books they offered.  I found and bought my precious Lamming novels from this portal.  I wanted to explore and see if they had anything by the hard-boiled masters.  I was not disappointed.  In fact, I was overwhelmed.  It was a problem of plenty and so, what to choose and what to leave became a problem.  I was, in some way, reconciled to the prices by now.  I decided to go for the short-stories.  I had read and enjoyed the Continental Op stories by Dashiell Hammett and wanted to read more.  I hadn’t read any short-stories by Raymond Chandler.  I found two books of short-stories each by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  And I also found a novel, Woman in the Dark, by Hammett.  I couldn’t resist and bought all five in two batches. Here are the two Chandler collections:

Except for one, all short-stories by Chandler are covered in these two volumes.  I think I was really lucky to find the hardback volume of The Smell of Fear.  It also has, on the cover, the picture of the actor, Powers Boothe, who played Philip Marlowe in the TV series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (aired during 1983-1986).  The other Chandler collection is Killer in the Rain. 

 

These are the two Hammett collections ... 

The Big Knock-over, first published in 1966, is hailed as an important collection that ‘helped revive Hammett’s reputation as a literary writer.’ This collection has an introduction by Lillian Hellman, the playwright, with whom Hammett had an affair for around 30 years.  Apart from other stories, both collections have 7 Continental Op stories each.   

Woman in the Dark is called a ‘three-part novelette.’ I’ll find out what it is only when I read it.  There are two more Hammett collections I am eyeing.  While one is really really expensive, the other is within reach, but they are charging a bomb for dispatch and delivery.  I’ll wait and see.