Dashiell Hammett Read online

  A complex and mysterious man, Hammett published no novels after 1934 until his death in 1961. For twenty-seven years, he suffered from a writer’s block that maimed and shamed him. As he produced less, he drank more, partly to deny his inability to write, partly to mask his tubercular image.

  What was behind that silence? Did he want to write a different kind of book from his characteristic brand of crime, and did he find himself unable to do so? Or was he content to mentor Hellman in her playwriting, or even write parts of them, as some critics believe? Hammett never apologized, never explained, but never stopped writing. On his deathbed, he was still clutching Tulip, his unfinished autobiographical manuscript. Ironically, as new fictional ideas dried up, Hollywood turned his old novels into films and radio series, so that his fame increased during his inexplicable literary silence.

  Hammett’s personal life was paradoxical. The tall, thin man, laid-back and handsome like his later heroes, created many famous mysteries but also left several behind: enigmas often woven around an amalgam of veracity and deceit.

  Like his tough investigators, Hammett walked the mean streets in search of honesty. He never played anyone’s game but his own. He never faked, he never stooped. According to his daughter Jo, he never told a lie in his life (though she said he did confess to her that he had once lied to Bennett Cerf), and friends of Lillian Hellman report that Hellman told them he never lied. But he never told anyone much about anything. His inner world was private, a challenge for biographers. He was also on occasion extremely violent, revealing a frighteningly angry underside to a sensitive, quiet, often reclusive artist.

  Curiously, this man who valued honesty admired attractive women who lied outrageously. Chief among them was Lillian Hellman, who was accused of fraudulence and sued for lies and spent thirty years as Hammett’s companion, fabricating and reinventing his life and hers. I have not only analyzed his domestic and sexual life with Hellman and unpicked fact from myth but have also produced new material on Hammett’s strange but enduring relationship with his separated wife, Jose Dolan, and his two daughters, Mary and Jo. Previously, there has been scant insight and no worthy investigation into these relationships. Though largely an absentee husband and father, with a lifelong companion, he nevertheless remained devoted to his family, and they to him.

  I discuss Hammett’s controversial political activism against the most shaming erosions of civil liberty in American history. Together with Hellman, Hammett was a commanding presence in American political life. The two of them stood up for their beliefs during the late 1940s and the Red Scare of the 1950s, when they fought the McCarthy witch hunts. When summoned before Joseph McCarthy’s committee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, throughout the proceedings Hammett not only refused to name names, he refused to give even his own name.

  Naming and not naming are a big part of this narrative. Hammett, who answered to several names himself (Dash, Sam, Dashiell, Hammett), was as cagey about his identity as he was savagely protective of his privacy. He signed himself in an early story as Peter Collinson, which in the underworld slang of the time meant “Nobody’s Son.” Hammett’s first detective is the nameless hero known merely as the Continental Op. He gave later detectives names like Sam, his own first name, and other characters were named for people he admired, such as a former fellow patient nicknamed Whitey. Curiously, he signed several letters with the names of his characters, like Spade, Nicky, and Whitey, as if reluctant to use his own.

  I decided to use the names he himself used or was called by others: “Sam” for Hammett as a boy and young man until he begins to publish under the name Dashiell Hammett; “Dash” if in affectionate relationship to Lily or his friends; and “Dashiell Hammett” or “Hammett” when talking about his work.

  Lillian Hellman presented the same problem. I chose to use “Lily” for Hellman as a child and adolescent and as an adult if called that by her friends; “Lil” (her husband Arthur Kober’s name for her) during her marriage to Kober; and “Lillian Hellman” or “Hellman” for her professional writing.

  Hammett’s policy of never naming names was an integral part of his ethical approach to his life and work. Hammett’s moral vision became the stuff of literature, but set against that were his alcoholism, his tuberculosis, and his determination to avoid self-exploration.

  Who wouldn’t want to write or read a book about that man?

  PART ONE

  EARLY YEARS, 1894–1922

  CHAPTER 1

  In Baltimore on September 12, 1918, the bells of the City Hall rang out one hundred times. Military bands marched through the streets, and youths bursting with hope sang the “Star-Spangled Banner” out of tune. Maryland’s men were invited to join up and throw in their lot with their countrymen. Every man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five had to register for the draft. Patriotic parades turned the draftees into heroes. Register today, they were told, hold a gun by Christmas. Prison awaited evaders. 1

  America had entered World War I the year before. President Woodrow Wilson had made a slow transition from neutrality to belligerence in the conflict that had wracked Europe for three years. It was, however, belligerence with a high moral purpose. He had told Congress, when asking a special joint session to declare war on Germany in a speech in early April 1917: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” The declaration of war passed on April 6, and two months later, the first registration for the draft was held. The events in Baltimore on September 12, 1918, marked the third registration. Men in Baltimore were edgy, tense, excited.

  One young Baltimore man had already made his patriotic gesture by joining the army three months earlier, in June 1918. He was twenty-four-year-old Sam Hammett, a private detective known as a Pinkerton man.

  Sam was not new to Baltimore. He had lived there since he was a child of seven and understood the city, whose distinctive feature was said to be its “feeling for the hearth,” its homeowners’ pride in their residences. Yet the young Hammett did not consider himself a proud son of the city, unlike thirty-eight-year-old Baltimore writer H. L. Mencken, who would one day publish him. 2

  When America entered the war, Sam, an operative with Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, still lived with his parents, Annie Bond and Richard Thomas Hammett, and Annie’s mother, Mrs. Dashiell, in her rented three-story row house at 212 North Stricker Street near Franklin Square in the western end of Baltimore. Most people on Sam’s street were white. They rented or took in boarders. His grandmother had a boarder named Mrs. Crosswell. Taking in Mrs. Crosswell had improved the family’s poor finances. Black families with poorer finances lived in alleys nearby. Most houses on Stricker Street belonged to hardworking tailors, clerks, or watchmen married to seamstresses, dressmakers, or, at the top end, salesladies. Sam’s grandmother was a saleslady. It was a morning job, and later, in November 1924, Hammett told readers of the mystery magazine Black Mask, edited by that other, older Baltimore writer, H. L. Mencken, that his grandmother went to the movies every afternoon.

  These ordinary people, among whom Hammett grew up, had tawdry ornaments in the crowded parlor. They had a privy in the yard, but little privacy. Six blocks south, on Hollins Street where H. L. Mencken lived, most houses were owned by middle-class residents who had paintings in their front rooms. They had privacy.

  From his bedroom window growing up, Sam could watch the orphan asylum on the opposite side of the cobbled street. He was not an orphan, although later he fell in love with one and married her. He had an older sister, Reba (Aronia Rebecca), born February 8, 1893, and a younger brother, Dick (Richard Thomas, Junior), born September 7, 1896. 3 Sam disliked Dick and tolerated Reba. He saw himself apart from them, apart from everyone, an only child with a single love, a sick and saintly mother who coughed incessantly. Annie Bond Dashiell had married Richard Hammett in 1892. She was a private nurse when she was well enough, but most times she was not. Sam adored her. He tried to help her when she was ill. He watched over his mom and watc
hed out for his dad’s bad temper.

  The older Sam Hammett had been trained to watch. Watching people was his job as a detective. It was a silent, secretive occupation that matched his personality. He was inquisitive, adventurous, quick, and clever. He had been a Pinkerton for three years and thought the job suited him, where nothing else had. He could not count the number of times he had been fired. His father did, though—aloud, in front of the family. His father did not think Sam was either quick or clever. Father and son were not friends.

  Sam was a loner; he was cynical and somewhat antisocial. To his own surprise and his mother’s grief, the young man joined up. It was June 24, 1918. Private Samuel Hammett had taken leave of his parents, taken leave from Pinkerton’s. His father thought the boy had taken leave of his senses.

  Richard Hammett was both wrong and right.

  Sam took the army exams, scored the second highest IQ of all the men tested, trained for three weeks, and became Private Hammett of the 34th Company, 9th Training Battalion, 154th Depot Brigade. Sam was proud of his service. He was assigned to a motor ambulance company at Camp Mead, Maryland, only fifteen miles from his Stricker Street home and was surprisingly enthusiastic. He was expected to transport wounded soldiers who had returned from service in Europe and who brought with them Spanish influenza, which killed more soldiers during the war years than did bullets.

  Recalling this later as the writer Dashiell Hammett, he says in his most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon: “He knew then that men died at haphazard and like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.” 4

  Within months of enlisting, Sam overturned his ambulance when it was full of wounded men. He was so traumatized by the accident that he resolved never to drive again, a resolve he kept for most of his life. Subsequently stricken by Spanish flu, he lay in an army hospital for three weeks, unable to sit up, wracked with coughing, and shaking with a high fever. His influenza developed into bronchial pneumonia, which, in a hospital rampant with the disease, led to tuberculosis, although in his case the tuberculosis was almost certainly contracted from his beloved mother. It was a crippling illness that he bore until his death.

  His service record is studded with a history of constant chronic respiratory disease. Ironically, every promotion he received in the army was swiftly followed by another bout of illness.

  On Valentine’s Day, 1919, Sam was promoted to private first class. Nine days later, he was back in the hospital. Another diagnosis suggested acute bronchitis, catarrhal bilateral inflammation of the bronchial tubes. Both lungs were affected. The medical staff treated him as best they could. He left the hospital on February 27 and tried to resume his duties with a vigor he did not possess.

  On April 23, 1919, he was promoted to sergeant. He felt dragged down by sickness, and May 29 saw him back in the infirmary. After that, the army finally admitted his disease was untreatable. The verdict: the tuberculosis was disabling. Sam would be forced to leave the service marked as a disabled veteran, although only a young man. In legal terms, he was a mere 25 percent disabled, worthy of a one-off fifty-dollar statutory award. In reality, he was a wreck. He would need considerably more than that, for never again would he be fit for any work that was physically rigorous. At twenty-five, he was an invalid. His immediate discharge was recommended and processed. Doctors offered him no hope that his condition would improve. He weighed barely 140 pounds. He had loved the army, loved being with ordinary men, for, though he had already attracted the attention of girls, it was men he was at home with.

  His sudden disease was not the first time Sam had been struck down by events over which he had no control. Frightening episodes in his childhood had already prepared him, offered him a way of thinking to deal with those events. His daughter Jo Hammett suggests that, “As a boy, he had wanted to find the Ultimate Truth—how the world operated. . . . There was no system except blind chance.” 5

  Hazard scarred Sam’s earliest years as he watched his father, Richard Thomas, fail repeatedly, unable to hold a job, and even resort to taking Sam out of school to pull his weight. Did Richard Hammett think that a boy of fourteen could help repair family finances? He kept moving from one town to another, and his family followed. What else could they do? A farm in Saint Mary’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia lodgings; a stint in Baltimore, worse than before. The three Hammett children never knew where they would live next, how long it would last, what job Pa would do. Pa drank and kept drinking. He abused his wife, found new women, became a tyrant. Sam’s home life was shaped by his mother’s illness, his father’s infidelity, poverty, turbulence, and violence. A boy with low expectations, facing a torpedoed life. He had few friends and felt he needed none. Sam developed a creed of stoical silence. He would need it to combat an unruly world. All he could do was to play at indifference. All he could count on was chaos and chance.

  What was it like on that farm in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, between the Potomac and Patuxent Rivers, where Sam was born and the first life-changing events took place?

  CHAPTER 2

  Chaos, quarrels, crowds, and noise. These were Sam’s first impressions of Hopewell and Aim, his grandfather Samuel Biscoe Hammett’s tobacco farm in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where his parents had lived since their marriage and where he was born on May 27, 1894.

  At birth, baby Sam weighed eleven pounds. At age thirty, Hammett, who had been stick-thin for years, looked back in wonder at the chunky child. He gave Jo, his younger daughter, a photo of her papa aged about nine months, so sturdy, so large that his delicate white nightgown with the prissy Peter Pan collar looked absurd. The rosy, robust infant’s sharp eyes stared wide-eyed at the camera without a hint of the frailty to follow. He was chubby but not always cheerful. He did not like loud sounds or noisy people. As he grew older, he became reclusive and sensitive, and the household’s disorder deeply affected him.

  His father, Richard Thomas Hammett, drank to excess and womanized blatantly. His Kentucky mother, Annie Bond Dashiell, a minister’s daughter, suffered severely but would not stay quiet. She told her children, friends, and neighbors that all men had strong lusts and weak morals. When Annie could not moderate Richard’s sexual behavior, she shocked neighbors by saying if you can’t hold a man with love then you must hold him with sex. She even told Sam not to waste his time on a woman who couldn’t cook, as she was not likely to be any good in the other rooms of the house, either! Sometimes, Annie’s seductive behavior won, and Richard came home. Most times he did not.

  Sam, who felt passionately protective of her, was dislocated (Jo’s term) by Richard’s drunken outbursts, casual sex, and brutal behavior, but of course he could not pit his small boy’s strength against a father who was six foot three and two hundred pounds. Sam vowed that he would never abuse a woman the way his father abused his mother.

  Sam’s grandfather provoked local gossip by taking a young bride when his first wife died early. Though well over fifty, grandfather Samuel swept up twenty-three-year-old Lucy E. Dyer, who rapidly produced two sons, George and Samuel, and a daughter, Lucy, who shared the overcrowded house with Sam, Reba, and Dick and their parents. Sam, who shrank from their neighbors’ disapproval, watched his grandfather’s children rough-and-tumble with his siblings, all a similar age. This was yet one more disruptive element in his childhood.

  Sam turned inward, hardly talking, except to Annie, whom he later saw as a strong survivor. Annie came from a family of French Huguenots who fled during the religious wars, emigrating first to Scotland, then, in 1653, to Virginia. She radiated an aloof superiority toward the uncouth Hammetts. Annie’s relatives, descended from the De Chiels (later Dashiells), still lived in Baltimore where she was born, 1 and were proud of their ancestors’ gold-shield coat of arms. The fact that Annie’s ancestors had resided in the United States since the eighteenth century encouraged Sam’s strong sense of self as an American.

  The loutish Hammetts called her son “boy,” but Annie, sure that Sam had inherited the romantic char
acter of his French ancestors, had decided when he was born that his middle name would be “Dashiell.” The unromantic boy remained “Sam” at school and later “Dash” to his buddies. In 1924, when he used Dashiell as his literary name, he told Black Mask readers that the only remarkable thing about his family was that there were on his mother’s side sixteen French soldiers who never saw a battle.

  The Hammetts by contrast were traders. The first Hammetts, small farmers, busy shopkeepers, tobacco growers, had reached St. Mary’s County from England in the seventeenth century and had stayed. They were vigorous fighters in the Revolution and bitter survivors of the Civil War, which had ended only thirty years before Sam’s birth. He grew up among kin whose farmlands and towns were occupied by Northern troops while their sympathies silently swung to the South. Though Maryland is a border state, Jo Hammett said her father felt “more like a Southerner than a Northerner, knowing he came from ancestors with solid roots in American history.” This knowledge substantiated Hammett’s unshakable belief that he was rock-bottom American, a boy raised as a Catholic who later elected not to side with God.

  In interviews, Jo Hammett reported the sour effects of her father’s childhood. “Papa gave such bitter accounts to me and my sister, Mary, about his pa’s destructive behavior. He found what his father did hard to bear.” In front of his wide-eyed daughter, Hammett had curtly ticked off Richard’s excesses. “A womanizer, an alcoholic, a fancy dresser, Papa hated him for these things. He told us the smart outfits were to catch the attention of the ‘lady friends’ he consorted with when his wife was ill in bed. She was often ill, and Richard’s behavior made her worse.”