I’ve been slowly re-reading Gene Wolfe’s epic, The Shadow of the Torturer, but today I was near a bookshelf holding Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and opened it up and looked at the first page.

I was hooked again.

It has been about two decades since I read the narration of “the continental op” (I’ve never even bothered with The Maltese Falcon or The Glass Key because they weren’t in first person) and Nick and Nora in The Thin Man. But the prose is still as pleasing and inspiring now as it ever was.