The thin man

I won't go so far as to say Hammett's redeemed himself in my eyes, but I enjoyed this more than I hated The Maltese Falcon. But I'm also just one guy and he died 64 years ago, so I doubt he's pressed about my opinion.

This had one of the more unique setups in noir fiction that I've read; Nick Charles is a (former) detective who keeps reminding everyone of that crucial fact, but no one seems to listen to him and instead he's approached by multiple characters who believe he's the only one who can help them. He's on vacation in NYC with his wife Nora (who didn't actually feature in the book as much as the marketing blurb led me to expect), and gets roped into the problems of a family he used to be friends with. Also everyone in said family is psychotic.

The poor guy can't catch a break and just relax on his trip, and because everyone in town thinks he's working the murder mystery case that he wants nothing to do with, Nick ends up attracting the wrong kind of attention until he has to solve it for his own safety. Obviously it's very of its time with the treatment/portrayal of women, everyone's an indoor chain-smoking alcoholic, and random racial epithets are casually dropped without thought. It comes with the territory of the genre and I'm used to it by now.

What got me was how complicated the final reveal and explanation was; I had to read a summary after the fact because in the source text I had a hard time following who was responsible for what. Still, expectations were met, and I especially enjoyed the aesthetic and vibes of this story, specifically a prolonged scene in a rowdy and dangerous speakeasy. A perfectly acceptable middle-of-the-road example of the genre. Sure, you could do better, but you could do a hell of a lot worse too.