The Maltese Falcon – How I Spent 2010's Tacoma Reads Together, a Novel by Dashiel Hammett

 

Browsing, Walking Tours, Grand Theft Books, and another kind of book theft - patriarchal opportunism that silences the voices of women,  Diaries, Conferences, Portents - And Cozy Sessions With One Cozy Mystery Novel Series After Another

 

Before computers in the library, my finding method, browsing, seemed the only one possible.  And it seems it was not the best.  In computer language, now, I mean my default method.  (Of course I had the Dewey decimal system and the card catalogue,  worked for twenty hours a week two years in high school at the library and had Library of Congress at the University of Washington.)  But I always return to browsing. 

 

Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, Tacoma Reads Together choice for 2010, immediately brought me back in time to the movie after a concert at the Eagles Auditorium - more than one approach to the Reads Together, I located the concert in Seatle Times microfilm (early November, a Halloween Be-In, and it was the Youngboods).  And, gazing up at the sculpted eagles on finials, I walked past the Eagles Auditorium.   Later I went on the walking tour of Dashiel Hammett's Tacoma.

 

Some approaches are great, some not the best.  Maltese Falcon from Novelist pulled up Maltese Manuscript, a mystery by Joanne Dobson.  It was about book theft on the large scale, the plot climaxed with a visit to a house, room after room and floor to ceiling lined with the treasures scored by the book thief, all preserved appreciatively, and all solely possessed by the thief. An illegal way to handle Reads Together.

 

I needed to reread The Clue in the Diary (Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene) - because the diary was in Swedish.  Keeping a diary can be a way to handle Reads Together. 

 

Joanne Dobson's Maltese Manuscript featured a mystery writers conference.- "Dead Blondes in Red Dresses: Whiteness Studies in American Crime Fiction" was a panel one afternoon at the Conference.

 

One could sense a portent in what one read - a mystery novel used Josephine Tey, maybe the only adult mystery series writer I had read, as a character and portrayed the theater of a drama of a mystery play - it set up a place in England, a train station - In C.S. Lewis, the Arthur Ransome books, Enid Blyton, new Harry Potter, all use train stations - but a particular element, a architectural feature - a clock...

 

I remember this clock feature - perhaps I should have been warned that I did not have time to read detective novels.

 

Instead, I realized this was just one novel.  One needed to Find Mystery Novels in a Series - and so on to the Simon Shaw books, the Sara Hoskinson books (one of which was set in an historic Swedish community in the Midwest),  The Millenium series. (And the Millenium series reintroduces Sodermalm, in Stockholm, for myself and for many tourists. The Millenium series worked well with Methland, by Nick Reding, a non-fiction discussion of America's heartland and the meth epidemic)

 

In October Books at Twelve-Ten read The Thirteenth Tale - a mystery.

 

I had thought mystery novels were as they appear to be - gruesome thrillers that appeal to people as a diversion, laughing at the terrible darkness.

As one reads a mystery novel series information develops - the setting or the characterization of the protagonist or others introduces the reader to new information - in the series of mysteries the category of the information develops the characters as well.  I am twenty-fourth in line at Tacoma Public Library and at Peninsula Library (24th!) to read the current Agatha Raisin mystery, a series by M.C. Beaton.  Both Agatha and her significant other are incompatible, the variations and facets of this truth have progressed through the yearly volumes since 1994. 

 

Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence:  the woman writer in nineteenth-century America  Joanne Dobson's volume of criticism presented Dobson with the idea of developing her own series of mystery novels about the way Patriarchal oppression silenced the voices of women.  Joanne Dobson writes her own series of mystery novels.

 

Then, back to browsing.  As I passed through the 747's I found a book of Cotswold cottage decorations.  Later I located a Stratford-Upon-Avon and the Cotswolds near the 914's that that describe this area.  Already I had xeroxed a map section near this area.  For I had wanted to know more about the part of England where my father was stationed for a year and a half before VE Day in 1945 when he returned from England and was married.

 

There are sections in these books that share with the reader an every-day United Kingdom knowledge of Norfolk and Norwich, Brighton, Blockley.  But because of my father Cirncester had been a known word for me.  And I had known how to pronounce it.