The Thin Man
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.
First edition, first printing with "seep" for the word "sleep" at p. 209. Signed by Dashiell Hammett on the title page. [viii], 259 pp. Bound in publisher's green cloth with spine blocked in red and blue and blue mask motif to front board, plum topstain. Near Fine with light wear and irregular fading to cloth. Faint tidemark to top corner of preliminary sheets including the title page where Hammett signed, and contents lightly thumbed. In a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket with very light sunning to spine panel, and light soiling and edgewear. Housed in a custom clamshell case. Layman A6.1.a.
A fantastic signed copy of Dashiell Hammett’s comic noir featuring the retired detective Nick Charles and his spirited wife Nora. Hammett found the writing hard going, though he had sprinted through his previous four novels, each one a success. His fourth mystery, The Glass Key, had been published in April 1931 and sold 11,000 copies in two weeks. Critics praised it as one of the best American detective novels ever written, and Dorothy Parker wrote in The New Yorker that the praise hadn’t been high enough:
“It seems to me that there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett. My own shrill yaps have been ascending since I first found Red Harvest, and from that day the man has been, God help me, my hero.”
The hero was struggling. Hammett had succumbed to writer’s block and severe alcoholism, and had spent all his Glass Key money by August. His publishers paid for him to move to New York so he could concentrate on writing the new book he’d promised them, but he spent his time drinking with William Faulkner instead. He contemplated suicide. Finally, he got to work. In her memoir An Unfinished Woman, Lillian Hellman wrote:
“Life changed….The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself.”
Hellman was essential to the book’s success. She and Dash had just begun an off-and-on collaborative romance that lasted until Hammett’s death in 1961. He dedicated The Thin Man to Lillian, although – always cruel – he informed her that she was his model for the female villain Mimi, a compulsive liar and man-hating man-eater, as well as tough and witty Nora Charles, who's game for anything. When Nick slugs her to get her out of the path of a gunman, she glares at him after coming to: “You damned fool, you didn’t have to knock me cold. I knew you’d take him, but I wanted to see it.” Nora's relationship with her husband is a lighter version of the relationship between the writer and his muse.
The Thin Man was published January 8, 1934 and sold 20,000 copies in the first three weeks. Hammett wrote the dust jacket copy and selected a photo of himself to grace the front panel – a lifelong consumptive, he was certainly thin enough to model for the title character. It was his most commercially successful novel, even though – because? – it was considered seriously risqué. The Canadian government banned the book, and the English publisher removed a line spoken by Nora to Nick: “Tell me the truth, when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?” Knopf played up the controversy and made a covert reference to the line in its advertising.
MGM immediately bought the movie rights, and the film adaptation starring William Powell and Myrna Loy was released June 1934. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich turned Hammett’s snappy dialogue into a sparkling screenplay that emphasized the banter between the two charismatic stars. The film was a high point of Golden Age Hollywood and spawned five beloved sequels. Dashiell Hammett was rich once more, eventually earning almost a million dollars from book sales and royalties, but his alcoholism and writer’s block returned. Hammett wrote a little and edited the plays of Lillian Hellman, helping to launch her successful career, but he never published another novel.
Price: $65,000