"The trouble with dames is, dames is trouble," to quote my favorite podcast Beyond Belief, from the episode where they had a gumshoe named Pterodactyl Jones and his sidekick, a ghost pterodactyl.

Seriously though, I really think this novel is no great shakes??? I mean, I'm predisposed to liking noir, and Dashiell Hammett is one of my favorite writers of all time. But Chandler--who is the other pillar of the hardboiled detective genre--doesn't appeal to me at all, which is weird because a lot of the successful contemporary pastiches of hardboiled fiction are clearly more Chandleresque than Hammettesque. Walter Mosley's novel Devil In A Blue Dress, for example, hews more closely to this storystelling style and I liked it a lot.There's just something about the first-person writing that seems insincere and performatively cynical here. The noir tropes that I like are mixed in with the tropes I detest and the mixture just comes out as underwhelming for me.