The retro pleasures of The Thin Man

If Conan Doyle's detective stories (I don't think any would qualify as novels) are tight little Swiss watches of plot, Hammett's "The Thin Man" is a sprawling mess of a plot and the farther I get into it, I'm almost finished, the less I care about the crime that sets this rough beast into motion - it's all about the people, not only Nick and Nora Charles, truly seminal literary creations that had a long life in films after this novel and inspired other books and movies based on smart couples (Parker for one) but also the weird peripheral characters, Dorothy and her brother Gilbert who pathetically tries to make Nick his mentor, the thugs who run and hang out at the Pigiron Club, the high-society friends of the Charleses. It's not a great novel but it's a lot of fun and it's a template for many that followed in its wake. It's also a very retro story, very much in its time, of a world of hotels and taxis and room service and most of all of private detectives. Parker/Spenser was a throwback but it seems to me today that most crime novels involve either police detectives or often amateurs, often a reporter in fact (many journalists moonlight as crime writers) - but who hires a private detective today? Usually it's about divorce or custody or occasionally protection, but mostly kind of seamy stuff and not material that offers a ton of variety. I don't know - I don't read a lot in this genre and may be all off, but it seems to me that The Thin Man is of a different era.