This is an interesting book in terms of structure.
Now, I won't spoil the actual mystery, since I do think spoiling the end of a mystery is generally a bad idea unless it's truly awful, and I don't really have much to say about it on a thematic or symbolic level. It's a relatively simple and standard motive done by someone connected to the situation.
For context, The Thin Man is something people are probably more familiar with in adaptation than the original book, since there's been multiple and more popular film adaptations of it. However, it was published in 1934, and set at the end of 1932. This does date the book in various ways, including the casual dropping of the n-word in the middle of the book in some dialogue (from a cop named Guild), the nonchalance over someone beating their adult child, people just kissing on the lips in a not-necessarily-romantic fashion (as in, family members), a ubiquity of hats, and a LOT of both day-drinking and heavy drinking in general.
Some of what is in the book is due to Hammett having originally been a member of the Pinkertons before he got into writing detective fiction. The Pinkertons, whom occasionally got an obvious reference to them, were a private detective agency. They did have some good points, such as preventing an earlier assassination attempt against Abraham Lincoln, but they are mostly bad in terms of how they were thugs who would spy on union activity and be used as enforcement in labor disputes for the rich and powerful. And, currently, they're a private security firm, so they've firmly decided to be shitty.
In this regard, Hammett's work is quite cynical about the whole thing. His approach is a bit different than later requirements for the Hays Code and TV production code and the like. The cops are, in this book, thugs themselves, and the former private detective who gets dragged into a case has to explain and get the cops on the right track repeatedly. This is something much more common in older works before the advent of those censorship codes and the rise of copaganda as a whole thing, that the story has a detective of some kind (even if that's not their official job title, like Nick in this book or Arsene Lupin in those series of stories)... but that detective is essentially doing the cops' job for them because the cops are just plain bad at their job. They ignore evidence, trample things, rough people up for no reason, etc.
However, I do think the structure is what's the most intriguing to me. A thing that was becoming more prevalent at the time was the idea of "fair play" whodunnits- stories that present the clues to the audience and allow them to play along by trying to figure out who did it before the denoument. Earlier works like Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin actually aren't fair play, but they're still interesting for different reasons (and the characters still come across as intelligent because of how those stories and their plots are structured).
Usually, fair play whodunnnits tend to present the crime and the detective or equivalent is on the scene already, and then we get a catalog of the immediate evidence. As the story goes on, there's complications and new information that was originally hidden, and so on. While the latter is also true of this story, the former is not.
This book is structured in a more realistic way. We get a first person narrator, Nick, but we don't actually get a whole lot of his internal monologue, probably to avoid revealing things too early or else writing out something that would break the verisimilitude of the character (such as him outright lying to the audience). But, importantly, Nick is semi-retired and only gets dragged into the story due to his other connections with the various characters.On top of that, we don't actually get the full crime scene that the detective then explores. We get specific details being relayed to Nick and his wife at various points. A lot of later works avoid this, in favor of hiding information through more information- that is, the clues to solve the case are hidden in the scene itself among things that might be relevant that are also at the scene. This gives the structure a strange feeling if you're used to other works, like it's being entirely presented out of order.
In some ways, I'm not sure what to make of it. It might be partially a product of the era of its publishing, or else because of the author drawing on his experience, but what is realistic is not necessarily what is good. The more realistic option in a lot of mysteries is more boring or muddled for a story and so it's often avoided. It's also why certain poisons tend to be favored in mysteries- they're much more dramatic (strychnine, tetradotoxin) or quick (cyanide).
Likewise, how Nick gets dragged into the story includes someone early in deciding to put a thing in a newspaper about him being involved before he actually did. This results in a criminal who wasn't involved showing up and freaking out because he wants his name cleared. Thing is, this feels quite inorganic- that he wrote a character too hesitant to get involved with the case that he has to force it to get him introduced to one of the criminal contacts and one of the police involved. I don't see the point of having Nick being so hesitant in the first place, since it doesn't really add anything and feels more like padding and an excuse to have an early fight scene.
Though I will admit that the fight scenes are relatively clean- they're quick and describe enough without being bogged down.
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