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Many years ago, I had a period "roman noir", these thriller of the 40th Chandler, Hammett...I saw also the adaptation to movie, Huston, Hawks, Lang...There was also that we name in painting some "petit maître", good film director but not great like Joseph Lewis. Secret agent x-9 is the alone exemple of a "roman noir" adaptated to cartoon. King Feature wished to compete with the success of Dick Tracy of Chester Gould. He asked Dashiell Hammett to provide a scenario to a young draughtsman Alex Ray...
DICK TRACY was one of the most popular comic strips in 1933 - or so explains William F. Nolan (a Dashiell Hammett biographer) in this book's introduction. Nolan then tells us how newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst signed MALTESE FALCON author Dashiell Hammett to develop another crime strip. Ultimately, Nolan notes, this led to SECRET AGENT X-9, a collaboration between Hammett and Alex Raymond, who would soon become famous for drawing FLASH GORDON (originally a Sunday-only strip that would d...
He's a private investigator who is secretly a secret agent! Basically the newspapers hired Hammett to invent a Dick Tracy-like character, drawn by the awesome Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon). The disconnect between a Hammett-style detective and Dick Tracy-style agent with a private plane an a Filipino house-boy is not to be missed!
Bettie's Books
My first reaction: "Dashiell Hammett AND Alex Raymond ?! Worked on a comic strip together ?!"This is a beautifully assembled collection published as part of the Library of American Comics series by IDW. I checked it out because I love learning about early comics, but I confess that serialized secret agent stories aren't really my cup of tea. The introductory essay is well written and very informative, setting up the personalities and pressures under which this strip was created. I read the first...
The very first story is the best one here. It's terse and hardboiled, full of twists and schemes, and Hammett clearly thinks nothing of letting a story unfold over eight full months, as the first arc does. Subsequently, editorial seems to reign Hammett in a bit, leading to shorter but still punchy (figuratively and literally) stories. After Hammett's departure, the stories get a little more predictable and formulaic until the very end of the book, when the new creators seem to find a fairly nota...
Alex Raymond à ses débuts comme dessinateur indépendant est déjà très bon. En revanche les scénarios ostensiblement signés Dashiell Hammett ne sont pas meilleurs que ceux, anonymes, des autres strips de l'époque : ils se réduisent à une série de courses-poursuites et à des situations délicates (le héros jeté du haut d'une falaise...) résolues dans le strip suivant (il est arrêté dans sa chute par une branche...). Les femmes, superbes sous le crayon d'Alex Raymond, tombent toutes amoureuses de X9...
Fast-paced, hard-boiled, old-school action.
Disappointing given the talent involved.
A ton of fun. Second book of his I've read today. Delightful and his mastery of language and story is a talent to be coveted by every scribe.
Not Hammett's strongest writing by any means. This is a series of crime stories that all come across more or less the same and none of them good.
When most people here the names Dashiell Hammett & Alex Raymond, the title of this book is not the first thing that comes to mind. In author Hammett's case images of noir detective series is evoked like, "The Maltese Falcon" or the "Thin Man" series. That kind of detective story that is filled with pulpy goodness. The same type of popular fiction associations go along with the work of artist Alex Raymond's work as well; being well known for inspiring genreations of illustrators based on his work...
I enjoyed the exceperts from this comic strip in the Mammoth book of Crime comics so much that I went ahead and tracked down a graphic novel of ALL the Hammett comics for X-9. The edition I bought was published in 1983 by International Polygonics ltd, unfortunately the reproductions in this comic weren't as good as in the other collection. To start with there were four panels per page instead of three so the art was much smaller. They also had no been reproduced very well as some of the text was...
Hammett wrote a bunch of classic crime novels and Raymond is one of the best artists to ever work in comic strips, so I expected this to be great. It's just ok though. It does look great, but I never really got into the story.
Interesting to read Hammett dial it down a bit to write for a comic strip. Alex Raymond's art is nicely reproduced as well. I miss the days of the adventure-mystery strips.
Dashiell Hammett's thriller stars Stuart Milligan and Connie Booth. Great reading, I had a lot of fun, really love Dashiell Hammett.
I actually read the green cover edition under Secret Agent X-9, possibly in 1979 since that is when I bought it. Ordinarily I would give this 5 stars, but since this is not the edition I read...
Olipas tämä paljon parempi kuin muistinkaan. Ja hyvin tehty, puuttui kokonaan strippikokoelmista tuttu asioiden toistaminen. Ennen osattiin.
