Hard Boiled

A lot of people had done a lot of shooting, but so far as we could tell nobody's bullets had hurt anybody.

Thus Dash Hammett around about the two-thirds mark of Red Harvest. Wonderfully laconic, as flat as reality. But the curious thing is that the violence of the novel is rarely, if ever, realistic, even when characters are getting themselves killed, as they do regularly. What is realistic is the sense that Hammett knows the world of the criminal in a way that Chandler doesn't.

And Chandler would have turned the line above into an elegant wisecrack. With Hammett it's difficult to be sure the wit is intended due to the scrupulous flatness of the narrative. Must check whether Camus had read Hammett in translation prior to the writing of L'Etranger.