Dashiell Hammett
Man of Mystery
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Dashiell Hammett
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Narrated by:
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Steve Baker
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By:
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Sally Cline
About this listen
Dashiell Hammett changed the face of crime fiction. In five novels published over five years as well as a string of stories, he transformed the mystery genre into literature and left us with the figure of the hard-boiled detective, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade - immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon - and the more glamorous Thin Man, also made iconic with the aid of Hollywood.
A brilliant writer, Hammett was a complex and enigmatic man. After 1934 until his death in 1961, he published no more novels and suffered from a writer’s block that both shamed and maimed him. He is identified with his tough protagonists, but his tuberculosis compromised his masculine identity and alcoholism may have been his answer.
A former Pinkerton detective who valued honesty, he was attracted to women who lied outrageously, most notably Lillian Hellman, with whom he conducted a thirty-year affair. A controversial political activist who stood up for civil liberty, he was also a very private man. In this compact new biography, Sally Cline uses fresh research, including interviews with Hammett’s family and Hellman’s heir, to reexamine the life and works of the writer whom Raymond Chandler called “the ace performer.”
©2013 Sally Cline (P)2013 Audible Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 69
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 69
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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The Secret History of Wonder Woman
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 798
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 704
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 704
Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Narration ruined it for me
- By Julia on 11-09-14
By: Jill Lepore
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Without Lying Down
- By: Cari Beauchamp
- Narrated by: Holly Palance
- Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story5 out of 5 stars 20
Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from the early teens through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter - male or female - for almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and remains the only woman to win two Academy Awards for original screenwriting (The Big House and The Champ).
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Must Read
- By Robert Wallace on 03-19-19
By: Cari Beauchamp
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Careless People
- Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
- By: Sarah Churchwell
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 140
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 127
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Story4 out of 5 stars 127
Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating study of the Fitzgeralds and Jazz Age
- By Sand on 06-11-14
By: Sarah Churchwell
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The Golden Age of Murder
- By: Martin Edwards
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4 out of 5 stars 38
A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Doesn't work as an audiobook
- By Pat on 08-02-15
By: Martin Edwards
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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Empire of Self
- A Life of Gore Vidal
- By: Jay Parini
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 103
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 91
The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well done!
- By Christopher on 03-22-16
By: Jay Parini
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Inga
- Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
- By: Scott Farris
- Narrated by: Scott Farris
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Kennedy Read
- By James P. Barraza on 04-14-17
By: Scott Farris
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The Real Lolita
- The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
- By: Sarah Weinman
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 240
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 216
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Story4 out of 5 stars 217
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Meandering and tedious while never delivering the promised story.
- By Timothy McCarthy on 09-15-18
By: Sarah Weinman
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And So It Goes
- Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
- By: Charles J. Shields
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 79
New York Times best-selling author and biographer Charles J. Shields crafts this fascinating portrait of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut. The first authorized biography of the influential American writer, And So It Goes examines Vonnegut’s life, from his childhood to his death in 2007, and explores how the author changed the conversation of American literature.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Probably only for die hard Vonnegut fans
- By Watery M on 12-22-12
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Ida M. Tarbell
- The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - and Won!
- By: Emily Arnold McCully
- Narrated by: Emily Arnold McCully
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- By AKA1 on 03-16-19
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 208
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 187
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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The Sisters
- The Saga of the Mitford Family
- By: Mary S. Lovell
- Narrated by: Annie Wauters
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 221
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 192
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Story4 out of 5 stars 194
This is the story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; the ethereally beautiful Diana was the most hated woman in England; and Unity Valkyrie, born in Swastika, Alaska, would become obsessed with Adolf Hitler.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great story, terrible reader
- By Victoria on 02-27-14
By: Mary S. Lovell
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4 out of 5 stars 49
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi