What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.
Interpretation
The focus of the story is on the character of the detective rather than just the mystery itself.
Dashiell Hammett emphasizes that the essence of his storytelling lies not merely in the mystery or puzzle to be solved, but in the depth and behavior of the detective character. This approach invites readers to engage with the personality and methods of the detective as they navigate through the narrative, thus creating a richer, more nuanced reading experience.
In practice
In a writing workshop, when discussing narrative style, I might say, 'What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story.'
We didn't exactly believe your story.' Then --?' 'We believed your two hundred dollars.' 'You mean --' She seemed not to know what he meant. 'I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth,' he explained blandly, 'and enough more to make it all right.
She grinned at me. 'You got types?' 'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
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