This post is kind of a two-for-one, since I recently finished this book and the Inktober is somewhat related. I was introduced to the Thin Man by the old movies, with Myrna Loy and William Powell, so when I came across the first of the books in a thrift store I figured I'd go to the source. The characters here are presented much the same as in the movies; devil-may-care, hard drinking and pill popping, and with a surprisingly loose marriage. In the movies Nick and Nora Charles eyeball other men and women and each acknowledge the other has wandering eyes without having much of a problem with it.
In this first novel, the crime they fall into investigating centers around Nick's own ex-wife, who he seems to still be on remarkably chummy terms with. I'm not saying that's unusual in that day or this, but it seems unusual for it to be presented in media so freely. Nick and Nora are a fun couple to read about, but probably hard to get along with in real life. They throw parties, booze it up, flirt with everyone they meet, and approach crime solving as an inconvenient intrusion on that life. It's a fun read, with modern language and a tangled crime that satisfies my love of mysteries.
On the other hand, Dashiell Hammett saw the movies and wrote the books, and then decided his own characters were utterly insufferable.
His answer to this came not in the form of novels, but instead in new scripts he wrote for a long series of radio plays. In a direct snub to the Thin Man series, he titled it The Fat Man, and every radio series must have a star. A lot of longer-running radio plays went through multiple performers in the lead role, but there was only ever one Fat Man, and that was J. Scott Smart. Being a hefty man himself, Smart not only voiced the primary character, Brad Runyon, on the radio show but also even played him in a movie of the same title. As good a writer as Dashiell Hammett was, J. Scott Smart is reported to have had a hand in editing the radio scripts himself, altering and writing some of his own lines. While the Thin Man book was a fun read, if there were novels of The Fat Man series I would track down and read every last one.
Where Nick and Nora Charles fall into detective work sideways, Brad Runyon does it professionally. There's a point made of his close alliance with the police force, a very real-world truth that most film noir seems to make light of. While he does sometimes drink, there's none of the excess of the Thin Man books and movies, and his only real vice might be food but despite the title there really aren't any fat jokes besides the occasional nod to his size, mostly from Brad Runyon himself. As a character he is hard-working and down to earth, and I get the impression that he'd view his counterpart with skepticism if he met him, then ignore him and get back to work.
The radio plays and the movie can both be found on YouTube with an easy search, and I highly recommend them. Today's Inktober is a portrait of the Fat Man himself, a character who doesn't appear in any actual books but certainly deserves to.
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