After four years of steadily dwindling support for his One Book/One Denver program, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has decided to make some changes for this year’s event.
First and most important, he’s given up the idea that the book under consideration must be by a living author who can come to town and entertain the masses. Given the discouraging attendance at programs featuring recent honorees, this is understandable, but one wonders what took Hickenlooper so long. Other cities feature books by authors who can’t be in attendance, so why not Denver? At least a dead author can’t be insulted by anemic audiences at discussions of his or her book.
So far so good, but since this opens up the field considerably, you’d think the mayor might go with an author or book that has some kind of local following. Wrong.
In his wisdom, Hickenlooper has chosen “The Thin Man,” a whodunit by Dashiell Hammett that has the distinction of being one of the few cases in which the film version of a book is actually better than the novel. To make matters worse, “The Thin Man” is not even Hammett’s best book, being outranked in the view of most critics by “The Maltese Falcon” and “Red Harvest.”
Still, taste is at best a matter of dispute, and the mayor has a right to his preferences. On the plus side, Hammett, in addition to being an elegant prose stylist, has the distinction of being the only author featured so far in One Book/ One Denver who was actually jailed for sedition, having done hard time for refusing to talk to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. Subsequently Hammett was blacklisted in Hollywood, together with his longtime girlfriend, playwright Lillian Hellman. Local red-meat conservatives are bound to have some fun with this one.
Not that I have anything against either Hammett or the detective novel. Nothing is more truly American than the so-called “hard- boiled school” of writing that Hammett and others championed in the ’20s and ’30s.
Having had its genesis in the hard times of the Depression when a dime was 10 cents more than some people wanted to pay for a novel, so-called “pulp fiction” introduced such writers as Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith and Ross MacDonald to a larger audience than they previously enjoyed in “The Black Mask” and other detective magazines.
Significantly, these writers were also greatly admired by an international audience, notably filmmakers of the French New Wave, including Claude Chabrol, Jules Dassin, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, whose “Shoot the Piano Player” was inspired by a now-forgotten novel by David Goodis called “Down There.” Godard’s “Breathless” featured the film icon Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Highsmith’s first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” was later adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, as was Woolrich’s short story “Rear Window.”
Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black,” originally starring the beautiful Jeanne Moreau, was remade decades later by Quentin Tarantino as “Kill Bill” with Uma Thurman. “Body Heat,” famously featuring Kathleen Turner and William Hurt, is a not entirely successful revision of the earlier film version of James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity,” starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. And the list could go on.
It’s probably no coincidence that the Web page for One Book/One Denver includes a list of showings of various films that are supposed to have connections to “The Thin Man,” though in some cases (Woody Allen?) it’s hard to figure out what they might be.
Hickenlooper was quoted as saying he chose Hammett’s novel because it was a “good read,” which is true. More to the point, it’s a very short read, and the vocabulary isn’t likely to confuse anyone. This can’t hurt when one is trying to reach a wide audience. I’ll only say, as I have before, that it’s disconcerting that given the mayor’s elaborate selection process he couldn’t have come up with a more interesting book.
Of course, no one has yet shown that Denver readers really want to read the same book en masse or that they need someone else to tell them what to read. But since it looks like Hickenlooper is determined to keep this thing going, and nonliving authors are now allowed, I’d renew my suggestion that the late John Williams, the only Colorado author ever to have won the National Book Award, be featured one of these years.
Hickenlooper stubbornly continues to insist that Kent Haruf’s brilliant “Plainsong” is too racy for his audience, but how about Joanne Greenberg, whose “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” in addition to being a wonderful novel has even been the source of a country song? You want to get down and dirty? You want hard-boiled? How about Boulder native John Fante, whose “Ask the Dust” makes Hammett and the other pulp writers look like simpering Pollyannas?
But I’m not naive enough to think anyone connected with One Book/One Denver will pay attention to this. After all, they continue to carry on in the fall, certainly the worst time of the year for a citywide reading program. Hickenlooper has shown that if nothing else, he’s marching to his own drummer, and more power to him for that. But since you’ll have much of the evening left over after finishing “The Thin Man,” check out the film, starring William Powell and the charming Myrna Loy. Despite the celebration of inebriation in the movie, there’s more poetry in the interaction between those two than in anything I’ve read recently.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu.
