He Came Nowhere Near My Tabloids!

Dear God. Is it time for another blog? How does this keep catching me all unawares?

Okay. So my latest work from Loose Id is a gay riff on the Thin Man movies (yes, this does annoy a lot of folks who wish they'd thought of it first). But I'm not claiming to be Hammett or Chandler, I'm claiming to be Josh Lanyon doing a riff on Hammett.

Anyway, the book is called This Rough Magic, and it's a lightly comic 1935 mystery about a dashing San Francisco playboy and the hardboiled detective he hires to find a missing folio of The Tempest.

What this story is not is noir. But then neither is The Thin Man. Certainly not the films, but not even the novel. And nothing (well, few things) annoy me more than when some bright-eyed kid with a fedora too small for his swollen head starts throwing around terms like noir and hardboiled like confetti in an Armistice Day parade. 

So, in case you were wondering, what inspired the alcoholic, burnt-out communistic ex-PI Dashiell Hammett to write The Thin Man? Well...Hammett had social ambitions. He'd met a dame, you see, and she was an intellectual dame with social amb--well, no. She was a chick who loved to drink and could write and she was willing to put up with Hammett. So that was pretty much it. You can't really blame The Thin Man on Lillian Hellman. 

 Of course those of us weaned on crime fiction have great fondness for The Thin Man, but the fact is, we're mostly fond of the films. Most of us blabbing about the book haven't actually read the book. That's pain-fricking-fully obvious. We've seen the films and we're hoping to crib our way through like college students who read the Cliffs Notes on Wuthering Heights before the big exam. That whole long, meandering scene where Gilbert talks about cannibalism? Yeesh. Now there are those who see that as pivotal to the story and a brilliant an example of...whatever. I confess it bewilders me. I think it indicates Hammett had started drinking again. The prevailing theory is he needed to fill pages. We've all been there.

Anyway, here's the part that gets me as a writer. The success of The Thin Man so...winded Hammett that he never wrote again. No. Not true. He never wrote another novel, but he wrote a few shorts and there are theories that he co-wrote Hellman's work (which I personally find pretty specious and probably more wishful thinking than anything). But there was no surpassing The Thin Man. It was everything he'd hoped it would be -- and what could be worse for a writer?

In fact, The Thin Man was so enormously successful that I think it paralyzed Hammett in some ways. Not that he hadn't had a string of successes. The Maltese Falcon anyone? Red Harvest? The Dain Curse? But The Thin Man is in a class all its own, and it spawned a generation -- is still spawning -- snappy, sophisticated crime fiction about romantic couples who make witty love in between solving gruesome murders.  

Which is where This Rough Magic comes in. At least...I hope this is where it comes in. I don't pretend to be Hammett. I don't pretend to be writing The Thin Man. No people were eaten in the course of my story and there are no cute little dogs. There isn't even a murder. But there is snappy dialog, a bit of romance, and I think -- hope -- enough of a mystery to keep you guessing. 

And, oh yeah, it's the first book in a new series called A Shot in the Dark. I hope you like it!