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Originally Posted by Victoria
I felt the same; glad to have read it, but won’t read another. I have to agree with gmw about the other faults. I don’t think Hammett’s writing was very polished. His overuse of adjectives drove me crazy. [...]
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By using enough descriptions he was bound to get one or two exactly right. I did rather like this early one:
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He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.
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But some sentences were rather awkward:
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“You will please stand,” the man with the pistol instructed him at whose thick chest the pistol was aimed.
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And while I'm quoting things, I thought this was cute:
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“I couldn’t be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but—well, by Gad!—if you lose a son it’s possible to get another—and there’s only one Maltese falcon.”
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And one little bit that I was wondering about, a description of Lieutenant Dundy included:
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A five-dollar gold-piece was pinned to his necktie and there was a small elaborate diamond-set secret-society-emblem on his lapel.
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I was wondering if I should be attaching any particular significance to either item. Any thoughts?
(At the time I read it I thought of
Chekhov's gun. But, by the end, neither of these details appeared to be of any interest to the story, and since neither meant much to me they didn't work as character descriptors either.)