In an essay on Henry James, James Thurber recounts a night in a "New York boite de nuit et des arts called Tony's," where Dashiell Hammett announced that "his writing had been influenced by Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove." Although confessing his inability to find "many feathers of The Dove in the claws of The Falcon," Thurber discovers a few useful parallels: a fabulous fortune at the center of both books, two designing women who lose their lovers, and a final renunciation scene. (p. 108)

Hammett may seem the least likely writer to be influenced by the Master of the novel, and indeed the two seem to occupy no obvious common ground. The ace performer of the hard-boiled school surely doesn't derive his tight, terse style from the ornate convolutions of Henry James at the highest phase of his mandarin prose, in that stage of his...