Hammett, Dashiell

The Thin Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934

8vo. Publisher's green cloth, stamped in red and blue; sunned and browned, spine nicked and frayed, discreet label to the rear pastedown ("The Holliday Bookshop"). Original black, white and red photographic dust-jacket; rubbed and worn with a few closed tears and internal tape repairs. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Layman A6.1.a

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A presentation copy of the first American edition: "For Eric and Gerty with my best, if illiterate, regards and things. Dashiell Hammett. X, his mark. New York Jan 23, 1934."

Banned in Boston and all of Canada, The Thin Man was Hammett’s fifth and last novel. It sold 20,000 copies within the first three weeks and was admired by Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, who described Hammett as “undoubtedly the best of American detective story writers, and The Thin Man is certainly the most breathless of his stories,” (William F. Nolan, Hammett: A Life at the Edge, New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983, p.139). Hammett lived for a decade off of the earnings of his Thin Man franchise–his 1933-1950 income from the novel and series of Thin Man movies approached nearly a million dollars.

The sexually frank tone of the book, somewhat scandalous for its time, was offensive to many people. At one point in The Thin Man, Nora asks Nick: “Tell the truth. When you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?” to which he replies, “Oh, a little.” Redbook didn’t have the nerve to print this in its serialized version of the novel; the editor stated that he was shocked by the “new candor” and the “common condition of literary nudism.” Knopf, on the other hand, capitalized on the controversy, placing an ad in The New York Times which stated:

We don’t believe the question on page 192 of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man has had the slightest influence upon the sale of the book. It takes more than that to make a best seller these days. Twenty thousand people don’t buy a book within three weeks to read a five word question (Nolan, p. 139).

The English first edition, however, lacks the notorious sentence since, as critic Julian Symons said tongue-in-cheek, “Erections did not, at that time, exist in the English novel” (Nolan p. 140).

Successful as the book was, Hammett claimed he was bored by it, and said it would be “the last of the damned things,” meaning mystery novels. It turned out to be his last novel of any kind–after The Thin Man, Hammett could not write fiction at all. His final attempt had the working title “Tulip” and was a clearly autobiographical work about a man who cannot finish a novel: Hammett in fact never finished it.