| inspiration/book recs |
[07 May 2013|08:40pm] |
I'm a huge fan of Dashiell Hammett, who wrote plenty of those classic, hard-boiled detective stories in the '20s and '30s. (Eg The Maltese Falcon) But somehow I never read Red Harvest until I went on a recent trip and, oh, man. If you're interested in getting some inspiration for this time period, to read something contemporary to the period/pick up some of the verbal cadences, and/or for gang warfare/general criminal shenanigans in one corrupt town, I highly recommend it! It just made me think of the Roaring 20s scenario like crazy. Shootouts; revenge; booze running and bribery; a slightly pathetic, sympathetic and yet somehow fascinating cast of misfits and outcasts... Plus Hammett's prose is (imo) always so goddamn clean and sharp. The man can turn a phrase.
(Of course, if you want something more fun, there's always The Thin Man with the ridiculous Nick and Nora.)
Stella's definitely got some of the old film noir-y, classic detective story elements in her--your old time femme fatale. Let's just hope she doesn't meet the fate of most of noir's femme fatales. Hammett's anti-heroines seem to have a mixed record, off the top of my head (prison, death, made a mockery of...)
I'm also currently reading Last Call by Daniel Okrent, which is a great book about the Prohibition. It's so fascinating to see what led up to the Temperance movement, what was behind it, and how it was entangled with seemingly disparate movements like woman's suffrage.
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