The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett, 1930 ★★★★

A Gumshoe Who Sticks

Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction know what they want. Fast plotting, snappy patter, just enough violence or the threat of same to keep it interesting, and not too much of the mushy stuff.

The Maltese Falcon not only delivers on all those points, it works the template to perfection. Just reading the first two chapters awakens you to the fact that before they were tropes, such things as mysterious dames and foggy crime scenes could be so evocative and alive.

Making it all snap together is the dynamic central character of Sam Spade, a tough-talking detective with honest-to-God principles, most especially that no one’s gonna make a sap of him.

The Three Sisters – Anton Chekhov, 1901 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★★½

Misery Loves Company

If I have to recommend one Anton Chekhov play, it would probably be this one. If you want consistency, this is a remarkably consistent and harrowing examination of the human condition at its most tragic. If you want wit, you get ample sidelong observations, pithy and quotable.

If you want compelling characters and an involving narrative, well, you do get the best examples of both from him here. But it is Chekhov, after all, at his most dreary. This is the man who inspired the lyric “I’ve found more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play/Could guarantee.”

If that play was The Three Sisters, Ira Gershwin must have been in one hell of a thunderstorm.

One Of Us: Richard Nixon And The American Dream – Tom Wicker, 1991 ★★★

Tricky Dick and His Critics

Presidents are not well-balanced people. They go out of their way risking derision, abuse, even murder to affect miniscule changes in how things are; at best making compromises, at worst committing crimes. Such an impulse must be questioned; either they are corrupt or insane.

Few presidents wore that derangement so openly as Richard Nixon, a childhood misfit who ran for national office five times and looked more miserable and awkward each time at it. In a business that demands compulsive socializing, he was a proud loner who cultivated many strategic allies but very few friends.

Yet he made himself the most consequential president of the second half of the 20^th century, an era which gave us several.