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The Glass Key
''The Glass Key'' is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. First published as a serial in '' Black Mask'' magazine in 1930, it then was collected in 1931 (in London; the American edition followed 3 months later). It tells the story of a gambler and racketeer, Ned Beaumont, whose devotion to Paul Madvig, a crooked political boss, leads him to investigate the murder of a local senator's son as a potential gang war brews. Hammett dedicated the novel to his onetime lover Nell Martin. There have been two US film adaptations (1935 and 1942) of the novel. A radio adaptation starring Orson Welles aired on March 10, 1939, as part of his '' Campbell Playhouse'' series. The book was also a major influence on the Coen brothers' 1990 film ''Miller's Crossing'', which features a similar scenario. The Glass Key Award (in Swedish, ''Glasnyckeln''), named after the novel, has been presented annually since 1992 for the best crime novel by a Scandinavian writer. Plot summary The story rev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Glass Key (1942 Film)
''The Glass Key'' is a 1942 American crime drama film, crime drama based on the The Glass Key, novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. The picture was directed by Stuart Heisler starring Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd (who plays the actual lead despite being billed third). A successful The Glass Key (1935 film), earlier film version starring George Raft in Ladd's role had been released in 1935. The 1942 version's supporting cast features William Bendix, Bonita Granville, Richard Denning and Joseph Calleia. Plot After falling for Janet Henry, the daughter of reform candidate for governor Ralph Henry, shady political boss Paul Madvig is determined to help Henry get elected. Paul's right-hand man, Ed Beaumont, rightly distrusts both Janet and her father, and believes they are stringing Paul along only to dump him after the election. Janet becomes engaged to Paul, but is put off by his crudity. She is attracted to the more sophisticated Ed who fends off her advances o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (; May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade ('' The Maltese Falcon''), Nick and Nora Charles (''The Thin Man''), the Continental Op (''Red Harvest'' and '' The Dain Curse'') and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9. Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time". In his obituary in ''The New York Times'', he was described as "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction." ''Time'' included Hammett's 1929 novel ''Red Harvest'' on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 1990, the Crime Writers' Association picked three of his five novels for their list of '' The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time''. Five years later, four out of five of his novels made '' The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Continental Op
The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. He is a private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office. The stories are all told in the first person and his name is never given. Profile The Continental Op is a master of deceit in the exercise of his occupation. In his 1927 '' Black Mask'' story "$106,000 Blood Money" the Op is confronted with two dilemmas: should he expose a corrupt fellow detective, thereby hurting the reputation of his agency; and should he also allow an informant to collect the $106,000 reward in a big case even though he is morally certain—but cannot prove—that the informant has murdered one of his agency's clients? The Op resolves his two problems neatly by manipulating events so that the corrupt detective and the informant get into an armed confrontation in which both are killed. Decades of witnessing human cruelty, misery, and ruin, as well as being instrumental in sen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mercury In Retrograde (film)
''Mercury in Retrograde'' is a 2017 American drama film written and directed by Michael Glover Smith, and starring French actress Roxane Mesquida. The film follows three couples from Chicago as they navigate personal challenges while vacationing together for a weekend in southwestern Michigan. The film premiered at the 2017 Full Bloom Film Festival in Statesville, North Carolina where it won the Best Narrative Feature award. Plot Three couples from Chicago vacation together for a weekend at a lakeside cabin in Michigan: Isabelle and Richard have been together for five years and are deeply unhappy; Jack and Golda have been happily married for 10 years; and Peggy and Wyatt just started dating and don't yet know each other well. Over the course of three days in this relationship drama, hidden tensions and secrets slowly come to the surface. Background and production In an interview at RogerEbert.com, Smith discussed the notion of vacations being "anything but an escape" as the i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bosch (TV Series)
''Bosch'' is an American police procedural streaming television series produced by Amazon Studios and Fabrik Entertainment starring Titus Welliver as Los Angeles Police Department detective Harry Bosch. The show was developed for Amazon by Eric Overmyer, and the first season takes its inspiration from the Michael Connelly novels '' City of Bones'' (2002), ''Echo Park'' (2006), and '' The Concrete Blonde'' (1994). It was one of two drama pilots that Amazon streamed online in early 2014 (together with '' The After''), and viewers offered their opinions on it before the studio decided whether to place a series order. The seventh and final season was released on June 25, 2021. Amazon announced another season, produced for IMDb TV as part of rebrand to Amazon Freevee, to be retitled as '' Bosch: Legacy'', in January 2022, and it premiered on May 6, 2022, and was renewed for a ninth season prior to the season premiere. Plot Season 1 In the pilot, a dog finds a human bone, which tur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Simple Art Of Murder
''The Simple Art of Murder'' is the title of several quasi-connected publications by hard-boiled detective fiction author Raymond Chandler: *The first, and arguably best-known, is a critical essay on detective fiction, originally published in ''The Atlantic Monthly'' in December 1944. A revised, expanded version was included in Howard Haycraft's 1946 anthology ''The Art of the Mystery Story''. *The second is a separate, shorter essay, mostly describing Chandler's personal experiences writing for pulp magazines, originally published in ''Saturday Review of Literature'', April 15, 1950. *The third is a short story collection, also originally published in 1950 (by Houghton Mifflin Co.), which contains eight of Chandler's stories pre-dating his first novel ''The Big Sleep'', that he wanted remembered. **While first editions of this collection feature an abridgement of the ''Saturday'' essay as an introduction and the ''Atlantic'' essay as an afterword, later editions tend to featur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham ( ; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, ''Liza of Lambeth'' (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End theatre, West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories. Maugham's novels after ''Liza of Lambeth'' include ''Of Human Bondage'' (1915), ''The Moon and Sixpence'' (1919), ''The Painted Veil (novel), The Painted Veil'' (1925), ''Cakes and Ale'' (1930) and ''The Razor's Edge'' (1944). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Untermeyer
Louis Untermeyer (October 1, 1885 – December 18, 1977) was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961. Life and career Untermeyer was born in New York City, the son of a German-Jewish jewelry manufacturer. He initially joined his father's firm as a designer, rising to the rank of vice president, before resigning from the firm in 1923 to devote himself to literary pursuits. He was, for the most part, self-educated. He married Jean Starr in January 1907, and their son Richard was born in December of that year.Tillona, Francesca (March 20, 2009). Jean Starr Untermeyer" ''Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia''. Jewish Women's Archive. www.jwa.org. Retrieved 2016-07-05. (Richard Untermeyer committed suicide in 1927, at the age of 19.) After a 1926 divorce, they were reunited in 1929, after which they adopted two sons, Laurence and Joseph. He married the poet Virginia Moor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as ''The New Yorker,'' and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music; adaptations included the operatic song cycle '' Hate Songs'' by composer Marcus Paus. Early life and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the Culture of New York City, cultural life of New York City, ''The New Yorker'' has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric American culture, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of Short story, short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous Fact-checking, fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue. Overview and history ''The New Yorker'' was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a ''The New York Times, N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Kennedy (author)
William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his novel '' Ironweed''. Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York. The novels make use of incidents from the city's history as well as the supernatural. Kennedy's works include ''The Ink Truck'' (1969), ''Legs'' (1975), '' Billy Phelan's Greatest Game'' (1978), '' Ironweed'' (1983), '' Roscoe'' (2002) and ''Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes'' (2011). One reviewer said of ''Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes'' that it was "written with such brio and encompassing humanity that it may well deserve to be called the best of the bunch". Kennedy also published a nonfiction book entitled ''O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels'' (1983). Early life Kennedy was born and raised in Albany, New ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, " Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in '' Black Mask,'' a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, ''The Big Sleep'', was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but '' Playback'' have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other ''Black Mask ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
