SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
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A life as hard-boiled as his fiction
In this extract from his new biography on the great crime fiction writer Dashiell Hammett, KEN FULLER charts a life of artistic highs and personal lows
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
DASHIELL HAMMETT is sometimes portrayed as a “Marxist writer,” usually by observers who are themselves not Marxists. The truth is that he was a Marxist and a writer — although not at the same time. Thus, Hammett’s work and politics are almost, but not quite, separate subjects.
What is often misidentified as an already developed Marxist outlook in some of the stories and the novels — particularly Red Harvest — is in fact nothing more than a deepening alienation from the corrupt society in which he lived.
This alienation led Hammett, an avowed atheist, into nihilism and despair, such that by the early 1930s he was flirting with suicide.
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