Wow! Dashiell Hammett, author of detective classics like "Continental Op", "The Thin Man" and "The Maltese Falcon" teams up with superb illustrator Alex Raymond of "Flash Gordon" fame to create a thriller comic strip. What more could you ask for?

Well, truth to tell this series has more in common with "Doc Savage" or "The Shadow" than Sam Spade. Still it's a rollicking adventure as a mysterious murder kicks off a killer gang's plan to pirate a shipload of gold and slay anyone who gets in their way! X9 mows 'em down with Tommy guns, gats and grenades but they keep coming over land, sea and air!

This is the beginning of X9's career, and is early in Raymond's, too. Hammett left the author's chair at the end of this series and X9, later renamed "Secret Agent Corrigan", became a bit more campy, eventually turning into something of a "James Bond" clone when artist Al Williamson took the strip over after Raymond's fatal car crash. Lots of fun.

Reading this collection of letters by the author of "The Maltese Falcon" and other great mystery novels provides a revealing insight to the thoughts and feelings of this intensely private man. Peppered with delightful sides of humor it is easily readable. One can dip into one or another of the phases of his life: the early short story years, his service in World War I, fame and fortune in books, radio, and film; marriage, fatherhood, divorce, romances, chiefly with Lillian Hellman, service in Alaska in WWII, his jailing for defying the anti-communism of the 50's, his final illness, poverty, and death. In letters to Hellman, and his own daughters, Mary and Josephine he comments with a a few words on hundreds of books he read. A compendium of the books fills five and one-half pages at the end of the book. There is no explicit explanation of why his voice fell silent after his brilliant novels, but the perceptive reader is given clues in the man's own words, written with no intention to have them preserved for history but fortunately available to us now.

The author was aided by other researchers in gathering facts about Samuel Dashiell Hammett's life. He followed leads, found answers to questions, and interviewed anyone who claimed to have known Dash. SDH worked at different jobs before joining Pinkerton as a detective. He joined the Army in 1917, and contracted a lung disease and TB during the 1918 Flue Pandemic. His disability pension wasn't enough for his family; he studied at a Business College and started to work in advertising. He then began to write for publication. In spite of his lung disease he smoked and he drank.

SDH began to gain success by 1923 with his short stories; he was too sick for any other work. His advertising job ended when he collapsed with bleeding lungs; he also had hepatitis. He renewed his literary efforts, and success followed. He then wrote longer novels, and gained more wealth and fame. He left his family and moved to New York's literary milieu. He indulged in liquor, women, money, and fame; he was "Nick Charles", not "Sam Spade". Drinking handicapped his Hollywood career, and flushed away his talents. Recycling his writings on radio during the 1940s earned him money; this ended after his refusal to testify in 1951. The next ten years were spent in poverty. After his death in 1961 he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, far to the left of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

(This book repeats sentences on the bottom of page 161.)

The gimmick (Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler solving a real mystery together) is entertaining enough, and Nolan eventually builds a enough of a plot to keep most readers going, but I must say I found the book a big disappointment. Despite the little lectures on California missions, the changing editorship of Black Mask magazine, and so forth -- and the pointless cameo appearance of cardboard cutouts labeled Mae West, John Barrymore, etc -- there is no sense at all of life in the '30s. At first I thought the flatfooted style was meant to be a comment on narrator Erle Stanley Gardner's writing, but at his worst Gardner wasn't this banal, cliche-ridden and tautological (again and again, a character's speech will be tagged with a clause summarizing its contents or explaining its already-obvious intention.) But okay, we don't always look for any kind of style in a certain kind of whodunit, and Nolan does deliver a decent mystery. What I couldn't stand -- I wouldn't even have finished the book if I hadn't been stuck in a hotel room with nothing else -- was the constant stream of anachronistic language. The whole point of this entertainment is that it takes place in the '30s, but again and again, the stock phraseology comes from the '70s or later. The Bing Crosbyesque character is "laid-back", someone keeps a "low profile", a celebrity funeral is a "media event" attended by "death freaks." Once would be an irritating but forgiveable slip-up, but when it keeps happening page after page, the carelessness of it becomes downright insulting.

In the series' third outing Nolan once again hits one out of the park, successfully evoking the spirit of bygone Hollywood glamor. Once again we have the Black Mask boys chewing up the scenery amid spectacular movie sets, Spanish-era estates and a heavy who will strongly remind them of Bing Crosby. But hidden amongst all this is a surprise: the story of an authentic California life. Erle Gardner of Perry Mason fame was born in Oroville, spent a year at Palo Alto High (Paly), defended the rights of Chinese in Oxnard and later moved to Ventura and then Hollywood. As a westerner at that time, Gardner was a bit less sophisticated than his counterparts Hammett and Chandler who hailed from the east coast and England respectively. At a 1997 mystery seminar I heard author Nolan wondering aloud just how to write a novel in the Gardner style, which in many ways is an absence of style really. Nolan needn't have worried. He pulls off this story about the return of a lost love just fine and, anyway, apart from the occasional special effect, his style matches that of only one writer anyway: Nolan. As it should be. It's true that the old saw "show me instead of telling me" can sometimes be applied, but Nolan has a lot of ground to cover and overall does so quite well.

3-and-a-half stars. There is a Chinese curse that states "May you live in interesting times." So to say The Marble Orchard is an interesting book may be interpreted as a good or a bad thing. And there are good and bad elements to Mr. Nolan's work.
The plot involves Raymond Chandler seeking down the killer of his wife Cissy's first husband, even though all the evidence points to suicide. Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, three thugs and an actress specializing in vampiric roles all play parts in the not-bad mystery.
One of the interesting (and unsuccessful) things about TMO is that it is decidedly not hard-boiled. Which may be a valid take on the premise. After all, the authors who wrote the stories were very different from their creations- educated, generally refined men. But this is a fanciful take on the era anyway, so why not go the extra step, I thought? Most of the people were very polite in this novel; its early sections read like one of the English school of mysteries that Chandler disliked and so vigorously deconstructed in The Simple Art of Murder.
But I read on, and at some point, things subtly shifted for the darker and better, and made me realize that the story structure was skillfully similar, even if the trappings were more urbane: the joes and janes peopling the book got nastier, Chandler got sapped and awakened doped (in a scene very like Farewell, My Lovely); Hammett pulled a gun on some thugs; a blackmail plot surfaced; and duplicitous motives appeared out of what had been to that point a disappointingly linear plot. The resolution was as contrived as any good Black Mask novel should be. Not all that plausible, but possible, and entertaining.
Another great thing is how Nolan plays with the way that Chandler and Philip Marlowe *were* alike: a romantic core which appears late in the novel beneath their crust of cynicism. Also, the camaraderie portrayed between Hammett, Chandler and Gardner is a big plus, even if it was entirely manufactured.
The bad things about the novel end up being very few, but they are harmful. Like many modern writers, Nolan seems embarrassed at the lack of political correctness in the original Black Mask stories he seeks to bring to mind. So he creates characters and subplots which advance the story not a whit and seem to exist only to administer some ethereal type of social justice. This treacle was applied, I am sure, with the best of intentions, but garnered the worst of results, coming off as phony, preachy and altogether out-of-place.
Also, the non-stop factoids are interesting for history and trivia buffs to a point, but Nolan goes too far- a litany of what Hammett read as he began his writing career is unnecessary, dull and obvious. The history of cities is again mildly interesting but superfluous; Chandler painted a better picture of SoCal towns with two snotty comments than do the encyclopedic entries of this novel. And, surprisingly, the Chaplin, Welles, Hearst and Temple cameos actually distract from the atmosphere, as they have no relevancy to the plot whatsoever and instead remind us that what we are reading is not historical at all.
Still, Mr. Nolan has succeeded in writing a very well-crafted novel that held my interest despite being nothing like what I expected- not easy to do. And this Black Mask fan thanks him sincerely for keeping an era and a genre, if not exactly a style, alive and kicking.

Una mujer en la oscuridad fue escrita a los dos años de que Dashiell Hammett conociera a Lillian Hellman. Es, con toda seguridad, la más sentimental de las novelas de Hammett. Esta obra fue publicada en la revista Liberty, y permaneció perdida durante años. En el texto se describen de forma magistral los personajes de Brazil y Luise Fischer y, a pesar de su corta extensión, desprende el aroma del mejor Hammett