There is a special debt we owe them, a debt to Chandler, Hammett and Cain. They excised pointless ornamentation, moved their stories forward with a spare, ruthless vigor and so superimposed the realities we already knew with characterizations we could believe, that they achieved a dreadful, and artistic, inevitability….
"The Institute" is a faint and embarrassing echo of the persuasion that used to be [Cain's]. It is not the intent of this reviewer to make a witless and vulgar display of disapproval…. The intent is to show where grasp of the methods and materials has faltered and weakened.
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