MGM director W.S. ("Woody") Van Dyke was a big fan of detective novels - he'd even written a few himself. When he learned that the studio had the rights to Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Thin Man, Van Dyke thought the story of private eye Nick Charles and his wife Nora would make a terrific film. The couple is rich, witty, sophisticated, and very much in love. Nick has retired from sleuthing, but is drawn back to solve the disappearance of a former client, the "Thin Man" of the title.

Woody Van Dyke knew exactly who should play Nick and Nora. He had just directed Manhattan Melodrama (1934), starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, and had been struck by the chemistry between Powell and Loy. The two had developed a bantering friendship, and their between-the-scenes repartee was charming and lighthearted. That was exactly what The Thin Man (1934) needed. MGM executives didn't agree. Both actors came with a lot of baggage, and studio bosses couldn't see them as the glamorous detective duo.

William Powell had been in films for over 20 years, playing villains in silent films. In talkies, Powell moved to the other side of the law, playing private eye Philo Vance in a series of B-movies at Paramount and Warner Brothers. Powell's agent, Myron Selznick, had been trying to get his brother David to sign Powell to an MGM contract, but the studio considered Powell washed-up. At 29, Myrna Loy was already the veteran of over 80 films. An athletic Montana gal, Loy had been improbably typecast as Oriental vamps and seductive "other women." Like Powell, she'd worked all over town. MGM production chief Irving Thalberg thought Loy had potential and signed her to a contract, but after two years, her best roles had come on loan outs to other studios.

In the end Van Dyke had his way, and proved that he knew what he was doing. He instructed the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich to play up Nick and Nora's affectionate banter in their script for The Thin Man, and to make the mystery secondary. That was easy enough for the Hacketts, whose own marriage and personal style was very Nick-and-Nora. And for Powell and Loy, it was a delight to play, from their first appearance in the film, with Nick instructing a bartender on the finer points of shaking a martini, and Nora making a grand comic entrance by falling on her face. The Thin Man was shot on a "B"-movie budget, very quickly -- accounts vary between 12 and 18 days. Not for nothing was Van Dyke dubbed "One-Take Woody."

Audiences adored The Thin Man, and so did critics. It was a huge hit, and turned around the careers of Powell and Loy. The film earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Five sequels followed, with Van Dyke directing three of them, After the Thin Man (1936), Another Thin Man (1939), and Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). The other two were produced after Van Dyke's death in 1943 and included The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), directed by Richard Thorpe, and Song of the Thin Man (1947), helmed by Edward Buzzell.

The Thin Man and its sequels also created another star - "Asta," the Charles's wire-haired terrier. It was a breed that hadn't been particularly popular in this country, but the "Thin Man" films changed all that, creating a national craze for wire-haired terriers. Asta was played by several dogs, but Myrna Loy later recalled that she and Powell were never allowed to make friends with any of them, because the dogs' trainer didn't want to break their concentration. In fact, Loy claimed that the first Asta, whose real name was "Skippy," bit her, "so our relationship was hardly idyllic."

Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Producer: Hunt Stromberg
Screenplay: Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett
Editor: Robert J. Kern
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Costume Design: Dolly Tree
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, David Townsend, Edwin B. Willis
Music: Dr. William Axt
Cast: William Powell (Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Maureen O'Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant), Nat Pendleton (Lt. John Guild), Minna Gombell (Mimi Wynant), Porter Hall (MacCauley), Henry Wadsworth (Tommy).
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by Margarita Landazuri

A buddy of mine recently commented that one of the worst things about Christmas was the crappy music. And while I have to agree after a recent trip to a Memphis shopping mall, I'd like to offer a few alternatives to Celine Dion, Mannheim Steamroller, Michael Buble and various assorted junk.

This is by no means supposed to be a Best of or Top Five list, only a few off-the-cuff recommendations that have been continual favorites in the Atkins' household. Anyone who has more, please add your comments below.

* "Christmas Caravan" Squirrel Nut Zippers: Although perhaps forgotten along with the swing dance craze of the late '90s, this album holds up tight. Every song is a gem with my favorites being "Indian Giver" and "Carolina Christmas." One of the best -- most original -- Christmas albums of all time
* "Christmas Island" Leon Redbone: I remember first hearing Leon Redbone as a kid during his guest appearances on "Saturday Night Alive" and being fascinated by this weird guy playing a tuba. Redbone is a true American original and this album mixes the classics with some Redbone originals.
* "Twas the Night Before Christmas" Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns: Man, I can't tell you how much I love this album. This is New Orleans swamp pop at its best with some funky, cool songs like "Rock 'N' Roll Santa Claus" and a "Jingle Bells'' that's just killer.
* "Christmas with Johnny Cash" Johnny Cash: What can you say? Cash. Christmas. The classics catalog covered by The Man in Black.
* "If Every Day Was Like Christmas" Elvis: Perhaps, the greatest Christmas album of all time. I like this partucular compilation because it contains the original Elvis Christmas album and many of the songs he recorded in the late sixties and early seventies. You really can't beat "Blue Christmas" or the super nasty "Santa Claus is Back in Town" and "O Come, All Ye Faithful" really brings down the house with Elvis in all his glory backed by the powerful TCB band.

Hope you enjoy these few picks and look forward to hearing a few of your own.

This holiday season, I'll be working with Square Books here in Oxford, Mississippi to sign copies of all my novels, including the recent special editions of both Crossroad Blues and White Shadow. Each of these new editions, just out this month, contain never-before-published bonus materials and -- of course -- make fine gifts.

Contact books@squarebooks.com or call (662) 236-2828 to place orders.

Although I've written stories about Chicago and San Francisco, most of my work has taken place where I live in the Deep South. Right now I'm working on a new crime series set here in Mississippi and much of Infamous happens in Memphis during the Great Depression.

I'd like to say it's an original idea to move the crime novel out of the big city and into a Southern rural landscape. But I have to list a long line of great Noirs written long before I began to publish. The first great Southern Noir is William Faulkner's Sanctuary. The story begins with a lush frat boy and his date, Temple Drake, stumbling upon an old house in rural Mississippi overrun by toughs and a Memphis bootlegger named Popeye.

Crime is a strong theme in Light in August and takes center stage in Faulkner's terrific mystery, Intruder in the Dust. A brilliant novel about a wrongly convicted black man and the nephew of his attorney set to find the truth. This novel was published long before To Kill a Mockingbird and in my opinion far outweighs that story in complexity and depth. (Not to mention some great investigative work including the exhuming of a body and the matching of bullets.)

There is also little doubt that Flannery O'Connor is one of the best hardboiled stylist of all time. Wry, tough and darkly hilarious, you can't find a better noir short than "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

During the 1950s, the height of the pulp age, native Mississippian Elliot Chaze wrote some terrific noir including the classic, Black Wings Has My Angel. Black Wings has long been out of print and an original Fawcett paperback will run you about $400. But bootleg cheap printings can be found online. The novel is a hardboiled heist tale with maybe the most memorable snuffing of an femme fatale of all time. The story is haunting and moody and captures New Orleans and Mississippi with a dead-on feel.

Even though I was born and spent most of my life in Alabama, I've spent most of my writing career in Mississippi. One of the highlights of living in Oxford was becoming friends with the late Larry Brown. Larry was a retired Oxford firefighter who rose to literary fame in the 1990s with his tough, hardboiled short stories and novels including two crime classics: Father and Son and Joe.

Father and Son is the story of Glen Davis, a recently released con who returns to his small Mississippi town to raise hell and destroy all those who get in his way -- and a few who don't. One of the meanest scenes in all crime fiction comes when Glen visits a local juke joint and decides to crucify the bar mascot -- a small monkey. Glen is such a mean son of a bitch that he later wishes the animal were still alive so he kill it again.

Those two books are a must, not to mention Daniel Woodrell, the working Arkansas writer, who has perhaps greater fame among writers -- the true writer's writer -- than a mass audience. His books are dark, compelling and written with brilliance. The Death of Sweet Mister is an instant classic -- an overused expression that's all to true here. But my favorite of his work has to be the incredible Winter's Bone -- a book that mixed mythology and meth running. A book that rivals any work by Cormac McCarthy.

You could include McCarthy's dead-on noir, No Country For Old Men, here. But I believe Texas is its own genre, and for this short, hasty list, I'm including only the Deep South. (Same goes with the Cajun country of James Lee Burke.)

Anyone with any other titles that need to be recognized let me know.