The Thin Man

Nora Charles, Nick’s wife, is an heiress, and her family fortune is the reason why the couple are able to live their life of luxury. She is vastly more mature than Dorothy Wynant, who is her senior by six or so years. Nora demonstrates humor, intelligence, honesty, and toughness that make her the opposite of both Dorothy’s damsel in distress and Mimi’s femme fatale. Nora is openly curious about everything from the murder to the people she encounters. While Mimi fawns over Nick, Nora often isn’t impressed and tells him so.

If Nick represents an ideal male, Nora is his match. She is the only character who can keep up with her husband’s wit and sarcasm and the only woman who doesn’t seem enchanted by Nick’s magnetism. She is also attractive to the men in the novel, especially John Guild, who is impressed by her toughness after being knocked out. Although Nick handles most of the detective work, as is appropriate given his past employment, their marriage is notably equal and respectful considering the gender norms of the time. She is trusting and secure in their relationship enough that she is neither jealous nor suspicious when she walks in on Nick holding Dorothy. In addition to being wealthy, she is an intelligent, witty presence throughout the novel. She is a notably assertive, capable, and confident character.

Dorothy Wynant is a young woman of 19 or 20 who had a crush on Nick when he worked for her father eight years ago. She is a version of the damsel in distress who fulfills the trope by being the catalyst for the story, as she sets the killings into motion by trying to enlist Nick to help her contact her father, Clyde Wynant.

Although she is attracted to Nick, she constantly tries to manipulate him, though she uses pity rather than her sexuality, as does her mother, Mimi. She is coquettish in that she casually enters into an affair with Harrison Quinn but dismisses him when he gets infatuated.

She is in continuous conflict with her mother and shares many of the same traits, the most notable being that they are both constant and bad liars. Dorothy sees Mimi as a rival for Nick, choosing to drop information, lie, or play on Nick and Nora’s sympathy to get Nick away from her mother. While she is jealous of what she thinks was a relationship between Nick and Mimi, she isn’t bothered by the relationship between Nick and his wife. The stability of Nick and Nora’s marriage highlights the chaotic, misplaced, and pointless jealousy between Dorothy and Mimi as neither stands a chance at breaching the marriage. Nora’s kindness to a younger woman who has a crush on her husband is the opposite of Mimi’s jealous grasping. Nora gives Dorothy nothing to fight back against, so Dorothy uses the stability of the Charles household as a refuge from her chaotic, violent family. She tries to draw Nick in deeper by telling him about traumas from her childhood. Nick, however, does not fall for the damsel in distress trick and shuts her down by simply declaring he’s not a psychoanalyst. Despite being beaten by her mother, Dorothy sobs for her and goes back to their home at the end, caught in a cycle of violence and lying.

Clyde Wynant is the thin man of the title. He does not appear in the book as he was killed three months before it opens, but he is impersonated by Macaulay’s letters and falsely said to be seen in both New York and Pennsylvania.

Nick and others who knew him refer to him as “a good guy, but screwy” (4), and Macaulay mentions he had a stint in a sanatorium. He was an inventor, made a lot of money, and left his family years before the beginning of the book. He had an affair with his secretary, Julia Wolf, whom Nick admired, saying one needed sense and nerve to deal with Wynant.

Eight years earlier, Nick helped him scare off a man named Victor Rosewater who had threatened his life, claiming Wynant cheated him. When Nora asks about the validity of the claim, Nick deflects, so Wynant’s character isn’t fully revealed.

Herbert Macaulay is Clyde Wynant’s lawyer. He is an old army comrade of Nick’s and also the murderer. Money is the motive for all the characters in the novel, and especially for Macaulay, who lost a large amount through bad investing. After working with Julia Wolf to embezzle Wynant’s money, he first killed Wynant to take control of the whole estate, and then he kills Julia either to keep her quiet or to get the bulk of the money for himself, possibly both. When Nunheim tries to extort money from him, he kills Nunheim. Nick speculates that he would have tried to kill Mimi eventually to stop sharing the estate and then gone after Nick when he got too close to the truth.

That he is the lawyer, typically a representative of justice and the law, is in keeping with the genre of the hardboiled detective story where society has been corrupted on every level. Macaulay, being a fellow soldier and sometimes employer of Nick’s, further reflects the lack of sentimentality in the genre. That Nick saved Macaulay’s life in the war doesn’t matter to him as much as the money. Likewise, Nick is able to distance himself from past ties and use his knowledge about Macaulay’s poor marksmanship as a clue since the murderer had to empty his gun in order to kill both victims.

Mimi Jorgensen is a femme fatale. She is Dorothy and Gilbert Wynant’s mother, the ex-wife of Clyde Wynant and recently married to Chris Jorgensen, who turns out to be Victor Rosewater, a man trying to get back at Wynant for cheating him. She is the one who discovers the body, having agreed to meet Julia Wolf in pursuit of cash to support her and Chris.

While the hardboiled and noir genres often feature a woman who uses her sexuality and charm to trap the protagonist, The Thin Man makes clear that no woman can best Nick Charles except the one he married. It is not for Mimi’s lack of trying. She does everything she can to get Nick to reveal information to her to help her gain advantages over others including her daughter and to keep her out of jail, all while getting her the most money possible. She even spreads rumors about herself and Nick to Guild and her daughter to work the situation to her advantage, but Nick and Nora hardly give it a mention. Her attempt at creating drama is futile against such a confident, trusting couple.

Her violence and lying are annoying to Nick, as they are done so badly as to be transparent—even worse because she feels she’s being clever about it. She is also vengeful, as she tries to blackmail her ex-husband who had an affair and then frame her new, bigamist husband. In the end, she gets what she’s after. With her ex-husband dead, she will inherit money through her children and go back to the lifestyle she wants. The novel offers no hope that her cruelty, pettiness, and violence will be punished. 

Christian Jorgensen, or Chris, is the red herring of the novel. His real name is Victor Rosewater. Eight years before the novel begins, he threatened Clyde Wynant’s for cheating him and then fled to Europe. Years later, he met and seduced Mimi for her money as a way to get back at Wynant. Nora notes multiple times that he’s a good-looking man, and Dorothy implies that she is attracted to her stepfather. The revelation that he is the man who earlier threatened Wynant seems like a good lead to both Guild and Nick, but it turns out to be a false trail. He has a good motive, which leads the authorities to suspect him for much of the novel. In the end, however, he is exposed as a greedy polygamist, but not a murderer.

Gilbert Wynant is the son of Mimi and Wynant and the brother of Dorothy. His character functions as a foil for the logical, no-nonsense personality of Nick. Gilbert’s eccentric questions, lack of experience, and interest in the psychology of those around him bring about opportunities for Nick to humbly show off his expertise on a vast range of subjects.

Whenever Nick is around, Gilbert peppers him with questions about the harsher, more painful side of life, revealing how coddled he is and how worldly Nick is by contrast. This is further illustrated in the scene where Nick pulls Mimi off Dorothy. Gilbert rushes to defend his mother but is so weak and inexperienced that Nick barely registers his punches and kicks. His comments about his mother’s psychology and his disappointment that Nick’s case study about cannibalism doesn’t go deep into the psychology of the convicted man emphasize a ridiculous side of psychoanalysis that Nick stridently rejects in favor of fact.

Lieutenant John Guild introduces himself to Nick without his title, an unusual move for a man in the middle of arresting a shooter. It does, however, reveal character, as throughout the novel, Guild rarely advertises his authority except to casually mention at the end that he has many men under him. He consistently downplays his opinions in deference to Nick’s. At first, this appears to be respect for Nick’s ability and position and the result of a crush on Nora, but it's revealed by the end of the novel that he never ruled out Nick as a suspect and has been keeping a close eye on the ex-detective and simultaneously using Nick’s detecting abilities while treating him as a suspect.

Like Macaulay, Guild displays the corruption in the so-called justice system. He has a bottle of bootlegged alcohol in his desk drawer and doesn’t stop his men from beating up suspects or characters he feels deserve it. His weakness is naiveté about women who look to be from a certain class or have a certain type of beauty. He often makes incorrect, sexist assumptions such as that Nora will be bored by the men’s talk about the murder. She sets him straight: “Dull? […] I’m sitting on the edge of my chair” (57). His stereotypes about upper-class women prevent him from realizing Mimi is corrupt. He assumes she wouldn’t steal anything even though she did, and he allows her lies to sway him into suspecting Nick. The result is his absolute shock at the end when she curses at Macaulay and gives both herself and him away. Despite this bias, he is mostly fair in dealing with Gilbert and open-minded when listening to Nick.

First appearing as Albert Norman over the telephone in Chapter 4, Arthur Nunheim is a blackmailer and police informant who has a crush on Julia Wolf. Because he is following her, he sees Macaulay enter her apartment, and so he tries to extort money from him. The result is that Macaulay guns him down, emptying his gun and giving Nick a vital clue that the murderer is a bad shot, as he had to empty his gun to kill Julia as well.

Nunheim provides the novel with some of its physical humor as he gets a pan thrown at his head during a domestic squabble and goes out a window to escape the police. While he is sniveling and obsequious, his girlfriend, Miriam, delivers wisecracks that typify Hammett’s gritty but funny realism, such as the scene where she is looming over a group talking about Nunheim’s death and cuts it short with the comment “I’ve got to go to the can” (122). Nunheim’s relationship with Miriam is the opposite of Nick and Nora’s. They are poor, distrustful, and unfaithful. Nunheim is neither honest nor tough, and he attempts to escape using his girl, as he calls her, as his excuse. While Nunheim appears in only a few scenes, he adds touches of both the gritty world expected from a hardboiled detective story and moments of realistic humor.