Listen up!

School is in session and Ace is teaching.

After reading his reviews of Brick, i definitely want to see it.

But let's be accurate here. Hammett did not invent the hard-boiled detective. Before the Continental Op or Sam Spade, there was Race Williams. Which makes it even more clear that the hard-boiled detective story is not a sub-genre of film noir. The HBD came first and existed as a literary type long before movies could talk.

BTW: I once used the Chandler quote ("But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean" as the centerpiece on of an article on re-engineering. It acutally was published in a peer-reviewed journal.)