Dashiell Hammett Read online

  Sam remembered Richard angry, drunk on the farm, trying to involve Sam in farming. Whenever possible, the young boy escaped. This drunken behavior may account for Sam’s desperate search for solitude, space, and silence, which he found fleeing to the woods and immersing himself in nature and wildlife. Young Sam would race to the stream, hide out in the woods teeming with game, until the noise of his quarreling parents was but a faint echo.

  Jo described St. Mary’s County as Tom Sawyer land, isolated on two sides by rivers and the third by Chesapeake Bay. She felt that a deep love of farming, fishing, and hunting infiltrated her father’s blood early. “This intense passion for the outdoors stayed with my father throughout his life.”

  Years later, hurtled into the hysteria of Hollywood, sickened by sounds of celebrity, Dashiell still craved escape, still found it outdoors. Like many Southerners, Hammett felt at home in isolated places where there were animals, birds, and bugs. One year, he invited Mary and Jo to fish in the lake at Hardscrabble Farm, the 130 acres of wooded land in Westchester County, which at that point he shared with the trout, the turtles, and his co-owner, playwright Lillian Hellman. The girls later recalled the rare peace that came over him when he stayed nights alone at the boathouse.

  The rough and restless Richard seemed unwilling to stay in one town or one house. Sam’s earliest memories were of frequent moves, his father unable to stick at jobs or provide for his children. Sam was six when his family left the farm. Richard had failed in a bid for a political post after organizing such an ugly campaign that people in St. Mary’s all but ran him out of town. Richard retreated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1900. When Richard earned slightly more, he moved his family to 2942 Poplar Street, then a year later to 419 North 60th Street, Philadelphia.

  When he failed to find his fortune there, he tried Baltimore in 1901, settling initially in the house rented by Annie’s mother. Richard obtained the first of a series of poorly paid jobs as a salesman, followed by work as a foreman in a lock factory and as a bus conductor. Sam resented the fact that his mother had to work as a nurse to supplement the feckless Richard’s wages.

  As he grew into a tall redhead, Sam, left insecure by so many moves, so many unpaid bills, buried his head in books, often at the West Lexington library. He read voraciously: anything from mystery stories to science manuals, even Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a catholic taste that would continue throughout his life and would focus on abstract philosophy, science, and technical manuals. Constant moves meant an interrupted education. By spring 1908, Sam was enrolled in Public School No. 72. Then that fall, on September 14, aged fourteen, he entered Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, where he might have flowered intellectually, as did H. L. Mencken, had he stayed long enough. Sam took physics, American literature, history, and English composition, the start of his passion for letter writing.

  Sam also studied mechanical drawing, at which he became skilled, and math and technical subjects, which would later absorb him. His transcript showed him to be an average student, but before he could reap any genuine education, on February 9, 1909, Sam was withdrawn, after only one semester. His father needed help with a failing business, but when that business collapsed, the boy became a messenger. From then on, he read constantly and ultimately became a self-taught serious scholar with eclectic academic interests. His analytical intellect was bred from scant schooling. One consequence of his later poor health, which restricted physical activities, was his reliance on the life of the mind.

  Sam’s deep dislike of his father resulted in a weary cynicism about family life, hostility toward the breed of fathers, and by extension, toward those in power. He told young Jo that as a boy he fantasized he was adopted. He hoped one night his real father would come for him. This problem of paternity is pivotal to an understanding of Hammett’s writings. Fatherhood forms the kernel of some stories and provides backbone for others. Conflicts between fathers and sons develop symbolically into conflicts between generations or between those with malevolent authority and those without: the drifters and doubters, the simple, the sensitive.

  In some early stories that reflect Hammett’s later hospital experiences, a young, sick soldier known as “I” or “Slim” rages against other figures of authority: authoritarian orderlies and medics.

  In Red Harvest (1929), Hammett’s debut novel, based on his experiences as a Pinkerton operative in Butte, Montana, his detective is known only as the Continental Op; he is nameless in the way in which a powerless, newborn baby is nameless. He is metaphorically fathered by the implacable Old Man, who runs the Continental Agency with iron discipline.

  This is a novel of lost values, forgotten faiths, and corrupt institutions, where justice and order cannot be maintained. The city of Personville, where it is set, is so lawless it is known as Poisonville.

  The worst instance of the evil, authoritarian father is Elihu Willsson, a man so obsessed with power that he effectively contrives to get his only son, Donald, killed before the Op, who has been summoned by Donald, can meet him.

  The Glass Key (1931), Hammett’s fourth novel, has some similarities to Red Harvest in its roster of crooked characters and Prohibition setting. Another small, unnamed city harbors a violent, lawless community controlled by evil mobsters and power-mad politicians. Gangster Paul Madvig, who wishes to marry Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry’s daughter, runs the city by supporting two-timing politicians, including the senator. One night the senator’s son, Taylor, is killed. As in Red Harvest, it is the father, Senator Henry, who is revealed as the murderer of his own son.

  These are ruthless books with the same unbearable theme. There is a frenzy of violence and vengeance in which fathers commit terrible acts with the author’s cynical acquiescence.

  Hammett’s fiction, which contains men who become sexual rivals with their sons or men who become predators of their children, shows fatherhood as a frightening concept: fathers maim, fathers kill, the law is unjust, authority is flawed.

  Sam looked at his own father and saw a violent, uneducated man, unfit for gainful work, unfit for a career. Having no role model for reliable, steady employment severely penalized Sam. The bright boy without goals slunk into jobs slowly and shot out of them fast. He found no work that stimulated him, no women who interested him, so he turned to dice and cards, easy bets on horses, then alcohol and whores. The boy who loathed his father’s drinking and womanizing was now addicted to both. Then to his horror, in 1914, he found he had contracted gonorrhea.

  From 1909 to 1915 he could not get a job he liked and he could not keep a job he disliked. He tried and failed at Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where he became a discontented presence before he left. He looked in at Poe and Davies Brokerage House then quickly looked out. He worked for stockbrokers, machine manufacturers, and canners. He became a freight clerk, a timekeeper, a stevedore, a yardman, a laborer, and a nail-machine operator in a box factory. Each job bored him. He abhorred routine, mindless tasks, and time clocks. He was unpunctual, uninterested, and refused to conform to rules. In a typical understatement, he later described himself as an unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee. His employers felt the same.

  A long, lean young man with high intellect but few skills, Sam seemed cold and detached. If disparagement or disapproval got to him, he rarely showed it. He felt superior to the jobs he mishandled, and he did show that. His insubordination or hopelessness meant most employers fired him. Only one manager, his boss at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, viewed him differently.

  During his short stint as messenger boy, he arrived late every day for a week. Angrily, his boss told him to quit. Sam saw it as yet another expected setback from a capricious universe. He shrugged then began to walk out. His boss stopped him: “If you give me your word it won’t happen again, you can keep the job.” Sam hesitated, then shook his head. He knew he would again be late, so he refused to lie. Stunned, his puzzled but admiring boss let him stay. Hammett, unimpressed, soon quit.

  In later years, Hammett
embroidered that story because it illustrated not merely his pride and detachment but also his characteristic authority, which made people, even those superior to him, wish to be thought well of by him. But in the six spendthrift years of 1909 to 1915, with the single exception of his railroad boss, not one person saw Sam as worth deferring to. Only his mother, who recognized his walled-up talents, believed he could succeed when the right chance occurred.

  Sam spotted an advertisement in a Baltimore newspaper for an intelligent person who fancied adventures. He was more than ready for an adventure that might reorder his life and, though he could not know it, turn the disorders of his past into the crime tales of his future.

  The advertisement had been placed by Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, the nation’s largest and most prestigious investigative organization, whose slogan was, “We never sleep.” Like all Pinkerton operatives, Hammett was on call twenty-four hours a day for a mere twenty-one dollars a week. The agency founded by Alan Pinkerton in 1850 had formerly solved grand, scandalous, and sordid cases, even foiled assassination plots against presidents. Hammett absorbed not only principles of investigative procedures but also a romantic concept of the work of an investigator. Operatives did not merely crack down on crime, they also forestalled it. By Hammett’s era, Pinkerton’s had twenty offices, including the Continental Building in Baltimore where the Pinks kept watch on private property and supplemented local law enforcement agencies, the police, and even the US Security Service.

  Sam had finally found work that was challenging and exciting. Some cases were routine, of course, others absurd. On one occasion, he shadowed a man who got lost and asked him for directions. Another time, he was assigned to catch a man who had stolen a Ferris wheel. Once, he spent three months in the hospital trying to collect secret information from the patient who shared his room. Such cases swiftly developed his understanding of inexplicable human behavior and increased his sense of irony.

  In an early story that features his Continental Op, “The Gutting of Couffignal” (1925), the Op’s satisfaction with detective work is expressed robustly: “Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays a fair salary, but I could find other jobs that would pay more . . . I like being a detective . . . And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can . . . You can’t weigh that against any sum of money.” 2

  Hammett modeled his Continental Op on James Wright, the short, fat assistant manager of the Baltimore office who taught Sam surveillance skills. “You simply saunter along somewhere within sight of your subject, and, barring bad breaks, the only thing that can make you lose him is over-anxiety . . . Even a clever criminal may be shadowed for weeks without suspecting it.”

  Sam learned not to worry about a suspect’s face. “Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms—all as seen from the rear—are much more important to the shadow than faces.” 3

  Surprisingly, for a conspicuous man of six foot plus, he became an expert shadow. The obligations to become objective, anonymous, invisible, to submerge his emotions beneath a cool investigative façade suited Sam, who was secretive and inscrutable. He adopted a public mask that was soon indistinguishable from his private persona. A reclusive and distant young man, Sam had now fallen into a profession that encouraged and validated those attributes.

  He tailed, he trailed, he tracked, he stalked. Within a few weeks, he was an expert Shadow Man. A long, thin boy trained to avoid looking a man in the eye. The Pinkerton logo, an unblinking eye, became Hammett’s logo, too. Eyes obsessed him. Eyes haunted him.

  Three undated tales in the archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin show that, though his stories might ignore chests or breasts, bums or thumbs, the eyes are there. Vittorio Corregione, the skinny little runt in “Action and the Quiz Kid,” has “snapping black eyes.” In “The Darkened Face,” Fox, the operative from the Continental Detective Agency, stares at a mutilated woman with his “pale eyes—so deep-set and narrow they squinted,” while Rudolph Keupp from the Consulate General stares at Fox with “wide glassy eyes.” In “Faith,” fifty migratory workers in a canning factory have “raised brows over blank eyes” but never publicly express dissatisfaction with their employment. However, Feach, a rebel with “round maroon eyes,” chuckles loudly, implying in the “sparkle of his red-brown eyes” he holds a secret. Later Feach, cowed, dwindles into a little man with “eyes that held fright when they were not blinking and squinting under fat rain-drops.” As a shrunken man, his “eyes were more red than brown and dull except where they burnt with sudden fevers,” until in a final fit of rage he sets fire to the buildings where the other men sleep, after which “the old sparkling ambiguity came back to his eyes.”

  Sam spent months engaging with the wealthy, the bankrupt, the workers, the bosses, the politically acute, the hopelessly naïve. He saw drama everywhere. He made notes, partly for his Pinkerton records, partly for his future. He loved detective work, but sometimes wondered about writing. He knew his adventures were formative and educational; what he did not yet know was that they would be crucial for his artistic development.

  Yet, those seminal experiences provided more than a stock of authentic detective material. They also offered him a way of seeing the world, a philosophical code whose central elements were anonymity, objectivity, and morality.

  At the expense of the company, Sam succeeded in his dream of going west. Pinkerton’s provided money for train tickets, money for boarding houses. Sam loved journeys. He packed neatly, he was patient, punctual, alert, self-reliant, made do with little sleep, and became invisible on the streets. His trade fed into a philosophy that nothing is permanent, nothing is what it seems. If “honest” operatives could disobey conventional rules, could lie and steal in pursuit of their personal morality, which was to protect decent people from exploitation by evildoers, then in a conventional sense morality was questionable. Hammett’s later politicization began at Pinkerton’s.

  Several extraordinary adventures are attributed to Hammett, though evidence leads a biographer to suspect that either he invented many of the most infamous tales or the stories are real but his participation dubious. The most imaginative tale is about Frank Little, retold here because it has significant implications for Hammett’s philosophy and his politics.

  In Butte, Montana, in August 1917, the radical labor union the Industrial Workers of the World (known as the Wobblies) was stirring up trouble among Butte miners, and their leader, Frank Little, was viciously murdered. Men with guns broke into Nora Byrne’s boarding house at night, demanding to be shown the agitator’s bedroom. They carried out a sleeping man with a broken leg. In the morning, Little was discovered hung from a trestle. Some said vigilantes had cut off his balls. A warning note to other radicals was pinned to the corpse’s underwear. Hammett, said to be in the area at the time, always maintained that men came to him and other Pinks hired to prevent strikes in the mines, offering him $5,000 to kill Frank Little. Years later, Hammett told his companion Lillian Hellman he declined. Whether or not the vigilantes were ops, what was clear to Sam was that the actions of the strikebreakers were remarkably similar to those of the strikers. The agency’s role in union strikebreaking eventually disillusioned him.

  Sam caught gonorrhea again in 1917 but remained at Pinkerton’s until he resigned in 1918 to join the army. While in military service, he fell ill to influenza, which left him vulnerable to the terrible series of lung diseases that would shadow his life. Still ill when he left the army, he went first to his parents’ house to recover, then in May 1920 traveled to Spokane, Washington and the surrounding mining country, where Pinkerton’s promised him more work. From October 15, 1921, he was reenergized as a Pink, then to his chagrin severe illness struck again. He quit detective work finally and irrevocably in February 1922.

  When, at twenty-one, he had joined the Pinks with high hopes, did he imagine poor health would force him out in le
ss than seven years? As he always earthed his imagination on stony ground and had such a poor work history, he probably did. But he never let on.

  As he faced his young manhood stricken by tuberculosis, his two key strategies for coping with the disease were downplaying it and rarely referring to it. He deprecated his tuberculosis and fended off well-wishers with wit. Sometimes, he felt the need to wipe out every sign of illness.

  When he wrote an account of his early army life for the mystery magazine Black Mask in November 1924, he omitted its most significant feature: contracting tuberculosis. “I spent an uneventful while in the army during the war, becoming a sergeant; and acquired a wife and daughter.” When he mentioned Pinkerton’s again he rewrote the script: “An enigmatic want-ad took me into the employ of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, and I stuck at that until early 1922, when I chucked it to see what I could do with fiction writing.” 4

  The truth was that fiction had become the only work he could do lying down.

  Sam’s response to all haphazard happenings was pragmatic. He fatalistically accepted indiscriminate disorder as if he expected nothing better. When he considered his childhood and adolescent traumas—frequent house moves, chronically ill mother, drunken father, his own binge drinking, removal from school, his string of jobs, constant quitting, and frightening disease—he concluded humans lived by chance, and died the same way. Every knock-back confirmed his view that life had no meaning. He packed this philosophy into his suitcase for his travels into manhood. It became his prevailing attitude and permeated his fiction. There was one curious difference in tone between his philosophical attitude to life and to literature. In life, his perspective was one of cool resignation, an unreachable detachment. But in his fiction, there is also heat, venom, and an occasional splinter of resentment.