I think it's a good idea to first revisit my initial thoughts and predictions:
Jorgensen's a turd.
There is something about Mimi that I seriously do not like. She is bad news.
Wynant is innocent.
Morelli is innocent.
A certain creepy brother has aroused my suspicions. Gilbert is somewhere in the middle of this.
For the most part, I was pretty on point. I seemed to have missed the real story altogether, though.
Long story short? Wynant's lawyer, Macaulay, killed Julia Wolf. Macaulay was present right from the start of the book, but he was always slightly more in the background than the other characters. Other than his being the only one in touch with Wynant, there was nothing to really call your attention to him. Little did I know, that was the key to unraveling the entire plot. You see...
Macaulay killed Wynant.
!!!
Throughout the entire book, Wynant is dead. All of the letters and communications from Wynant are bogus. Mac sets them all up on his own. He and Julia Wolf were scamming Wynant, and when Wynant found out, Mac killed him. Julia started to get unreliable about keeping quiet, so Mac killed her too. That's where the book opens up.
I never saw it coming.
Nick figures it out somewhere in the last couple chapters of the book, and he plays dumb until they can get Mac lured in to arrest him.
Hats off to you, Dashiell Hammett. You can sure write a great detective mystery. My final opinion on The Thin Man? Two stubby thumbs up!
I came, I read, I conquered.
Now, to pick the next biblio-victim.
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