Dashiell Hammett Read online

  By the second trial, Hammett had quit Pinkerton’s, yet in his fragment “Seven Pages,” he claimed he saw Arbuckle in the St. Francis Hotel lobby the day before the trial opened. “I was working for his [Arbuckle’s] attorneys at the time, gathering information for his defense.”

  Though Sam was probably not on the case, he could not let go of the sexual absurdity. Fat crooks obsessed him. His triumph was Caspar Gutman, the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon.

  Hammett’s second apocryphal detection was the 1921 Nicky Arnstein bond theft case. Arnstein was a gambler charged with organizing a $1.5 million securities theft and the theft of an additional $5 million from a Wall Street brokerage. Sam claimed he shadowed Arnstein, but both the thefts and the trials took place on the East Coast at a time when there is no evidence that Sam ever left the West Coast.

  Hammett was similarly absent from his third infamous case, that of jewel thief Gloomy Gus Schaefer, accused of robbing the Shapiro Jewel Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, of $130,000 then fleeing to a roadhouse. Some Pinkertons found the roadhouse but no loot. No evidence supported Hammett’s first implausible story about the case, which was that when alone on the roadhouse roof, he overheard Schaefer’s gang discussing plans, fell through the roof, twisted his ankle, and allowed the gang to escape with the money. Hammett’s second unlikely tale about this, set in a Vallejo street in 1922, had him shadowing Schaefer, who led him to some of the loot.

  The fourth case concerned the robbery of gold coins from the freighter Sonoma. Hammett insisted this was his last case and his reason for leaving detection. According to him, he had been posing as an undercover agent on the Sonoma, and he quit the Pinkertons because he discovered the $200,000 gold coins just before the ship set sail, depriving himself of a trip to Hawaii to search for them while solving the crime.

  However, the Sonoma case was solved on the very day that Hammett did finally quit the Pinkertons, making it unlikely that he had done the solving. That was one day after Arnstein’s trial for conspiracy, three days before the first Arbuckle trial ended, and well before Schaefer committed his robbery. By the time Schaefer was arrested, the second Arbuckle trial was under way, and when the Arnstein case went to trial, Hammett was severely ill in bed.

  The truth is, Hammett quit detection because he was desperately ill, with constant chest pains and dizzy spells. He weighed only 126 pounds. He was again an invalid who would die if he attempted to sail anywhere. He could no longer stagger four blocks to the library and needed a line of chairs between his bedroom and bathroom so he could rest on his way. The Bureau of War Risk Insurance Review returned his disability rating to 100 percent.

  But this sick image did not suit Hammett. Better a false macho anecdote than the truth.

  The Hammetts’ daughter, Mary Jane, was born at St. Francis Hospital on October 15, 1921. 13 Jose budgeted, and Hammett was well enough to cook. The baby delighted him. He and Jose happily shared their child’s care, until the doctor advised Sam to limit physical contact with Mary to avoid infecting her. Sam started sleeping on a Murphy bed in the hall, worrying about finances. Writing fiction seemed the only solution. In desperation, he wrote to his father, explaining his ambition, asking for money. His father refused, and Hammett never forgot it. When his beloved mother, Annie, died on August 3, 1922, he felt orphaned, like Jose. He was Nobody’s Son, so he wrote four hours a day, signing eight stories Peter Collinson, the offspring of Peter Collins, the underworld name for Nobody.

  In February 1922, he entered Munson’s Business College as part of his vocational rehabilitation to train as a reporter, finishing May 23, 1923. He continued negotiating unsuccessfully with government agencies, resenting their authority and their indifference to the conflict between his bright aims and sick body. This resentment snaked through his first stories and cemented his hardening attitude of suffering blows and expecting nothing in the way of aid. Hammett’s daughters remembered the terrifying rows their sick, scribbling father had with the Veterans Bureau. In October 1922, after several frustrating letters to Allan Carter, his enemy at the bureau, Hammett received “additional compensation” for Jose of $2.50 a month. The total disability payment was now $16.21.

  A few months after the additional compensation in October 1922, the bureau said that once Sam finished vocational college, all compensation would stop. Sam, fuming, pointed out to Enemy Carter that he was so ill he could hardly walk, and his writings could not support his family. Carter referred Hammett’s file to the District Board of Appeals, who kept Sam waiting without money for months. Carter consistently thwarted him. In October 1923, he even made Hammett resend his marriage credentials, in case he had recently become divorced! In April 1924, the District Board of Appeals awarded him retroactively $51.68 as a one-off additional payment, but then the vengeful Carter told him his last check would be May. Sam’s angry protests won him $9 in June before sickness overcame him. He could no longer fight or write. For the remainder of his life, he continued an angry correspondence with the obstructive Veterans Bureau.

  With enormous difficulty, he finished the journalism course, then, as his health broke down again, he took on a part-time advertising job with Samuels Jewelers, the oldest jewelry business in San Francisco. 14 Al (Albert) Samuels became the only loving father figure in his life. He learned his new trade fast, while he continued scribbling stories. Pulp magazines became an obvious market for him to earn extra income, since he could claim that his Pinkerton experiences gave his fiction authenticity. The pay was only one or two pennies a word, but if he exerted himself he could make thirty or forty dollars a month. (Pulps were cheaply printed gray-paper, book-length publications. In the 1920s, more than seventy pulps existed in various genres: crime, mystery, romance, adventure, and Westerns. Slicks were mass-circulation magazines printed on slick, or glossy, paper—for example, The Smart Set, Redbook, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, and Cosmopolitan.)

  In October 1922, the first story he would publish, “The Parthian Shot,” was accepted by editors H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan for their prestigious magazine, The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, which paid almost the lowest rates in magazine publishing.

  The tiny plot features Paulette Key, who dislikes her domineering husband mainly for his stupidity and obstinacy. The baby also makes obstinate demands for food and toys. Before Paulette leaves her family, she delivers her Parthian shot by having him christened Don. The reader can work out that the boy would grow up as Don Key.

  Mencken and Nathan bought this one-hundred-word anecdote, for which they paid him only a penny a word, because they liked the narrative double twist.

  Hammett was too ill to go to a restaurant to celebrate, but he and Jose had dinner sent in.

  PART TWO

  EARLY WRITINGS, 1922–1927

  CHAPTER 4

  Hammett burned with a new fever. Not sickness but success. The Smart Set showed him the way. It was sophisticated, ironic, iconoclastic. It had published Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, whose work he knew well. Mencken and Nathan believed in the talent of unknown scribblers, too, and the unknown Hammett thought his own burlesques, epigrams, poems, and stories might appeal to their taste.

  Dedicated and determined, he slogged on an Underwood typewriter on the Eddy Street kitchen table. Real writers had desks. He moved to a larger apartment and built a desk. He made pencil notes, handwrote drafts, then typed clean copies on the typewriter. By one year later, October 1923, The Smart Set had accepted four more ironic short fictions.

  Sam also tried nonfiction. In March 1923, The Smart Set published “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” which consisted of twenty-nine satirical observations from Hammett’s Pinkerton exploits that marked out his subsequent fictional territory. The cutting prose, similar to Hemingway’s early experiments, had a bold, authoritative clip.

  I know a man who will forge the impression of any set of fingers in the world for $50.

  A man whom I was shadowing
went out into the country for a walk one Sunday afternoon and lost his bearings completely. I had to direct him back to the city.

  The chief of police of a Southern city once gave me a description of a man, complete even to a mole on his neck, but neglected to mention that he had only one arm.

  In mid-1923, Hammett dramatically changed style and market. He began to write almost exclusively for the pulps: crime, adventure, and mystery. Surprisingly, he retained the same editors, because two years earlier Mencken and Nathan had started the pulp story magazine Black Mask to subsidize their clever slick.

  Already a Mask reader, Hammett, who later disparaged his “Blackmasking” to others, was nevertheless attracted by its earthy vigor. Feeling he could do better than their regular writers, he carefully studied the career of Carroll John Daly, whose hard-boiled detective, Race Williams, had appeared in Black Mask four months earlier, in December 1922. Daly’s stories had a surface realism but no depth. His hero was unpolished, unintelligent, and unreal.

  When Hammett began writing for Black Mask, his heroes were hard-boiled in a different sense. They were realistic but not insensitive. They had self-awareness rare in fictional detectives. They learned to accept criminality without showing their feelings. Their underlying fear was that constant immersion in an immoral society would render them emotionless.

  Daly was a hack whose violence was gratuitous, plots were implausible, and dialogue lacked accuracy. Hammett’s detective experience had given him not only authenticity but original ideas. When Daly later fell from fame, he blamed Hammett.

  Hammett was already familiar with the literature and conventions of the so-called Golden Age of Detection, which started in April 1841 when the analytic Auguste Dupin solved Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Fifty years later, Sherlock Holmes sprang from Conan Doyle’s elegant pen to popularize classical detection. In 1913, E. C. Bentley established long detective novels with Trent’s Last Case. He was followed by G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. In the UK, Agatha Christie, A. A. Milne, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy Sayers added complex characterization to crime, while in the United States, S. S. Van Dine presented erudite investigator Philo Vance, who discussed philosophical issues with drawing-room facility.

  Hammett saw Golden Age detection as a literary game with fixed formal rules. Authors never lied. Plots provided readers with a puzzle, clues, and a solution. Disguised clues were presented. However improbable the solution, physical laws were respected, and geographical settings and judicial procedures were rendered faithfully. Criminal motives gradually became clear. Police were seen as bumblers. Crime methodology must seem plausible, even if impractical or coincidental. Detectives were eccentric, intelligent, and middle or upper class. They were always in control. Faced with inadequate or false information, they would track clues to establish accurately “who did it” and to decide “the truth.”

  But in his stories, Hammett would break with the Golden Age tradition in several significant ways. He knew detection did not work like that. Sleuths did not sit in salons solving murders from clues on paper. In his experience, many investigators were working class; crimes were sordid; detection was rough, footslogging, arbitrary, and surprising. Hammett knew nothing was predictable. A successful detective had to be tough enough to peel away each layer of deceit and cynical enough to remain detached when he discovered beneath it another layer of pretense.

  Before Hammett, the goal had been solving the crime. After Hammett, the detective himself would become a central subject. Hammett’s experimental premise was that the biggest mystery was the self. Candid realism became his signature. He would invent the modern urban detective story, with street-smart dialogue, cadences, and rhythms and set crimes in dirty city streets, not in bright country houses. His knowledge of this territory meant that each detail was accurate.

  “Zigzags of Treachery” (March 1924) turned on the way the detective, or operative, known as the Op, cleared a doctor’s innocent wife of a murder charge. It was so realistic that it included the four rules of shadowing: stay behind your man as much as possible, never look him in the eye, act naturally, and don’t ever try to hide from him. In walked a man shadowing a blackmailer who broke every one of the rules. Naturally, he got his neck broken.

  An expert on chases, Hammett planted pursuits in dingy locations. In “The Gatewood Caper” (1923), his first story signed “Dashiell Hammett,” he depicted a sinister alleyway where a male kidnapper on the run hid out to get rid of his female disguise.

  Today, we see how Hammett’s torrid tales crackle with credible characters and understated irony. Sophisticated plots have breathless actions, though sporadically he overdoes the whirlwind plotting. His narration is detached, objective, wry. His endings have sardonic twists.

  Hammett’s prose is muscular. Sometimes it throbs, sometimes there are flat, underplayed statements. In “The Scorched Face” (1925), horror is evoked indirectly. A female corpse has been eaten by birds. Hammett’s skill is to make much by saying little: “At the base of a tree, on her side, her knees drawn up close to her body, a girl was dead. She wasn’t nice to see. Birds had been at her.”

  Even much later, in “Fly Paper” (1929), he uses a similar technique in his held-in sentences to convey male menace: “Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that.”

  In these stories written in the twenties, Hammett’s fictitious underworld of Prohibition-era gangsters and molls was extremely filmic, so it is little wonder that Hollywood would ultimately make a dozen movies from his novels. We see authentic-seeming organized crime as he counts the bodies in “Bodies Piled Up” (December 1923). The Op is “hotel-coppering” at San Francisco’s Montgomery Hotel. The maid alerts the staff that “there’s something wrong up in 906.” Back inside 906, the maid stares goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes press. From underneath it, “a snake-shaped ribbon of blood” moves toward them. The Op opens the door. “Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms . . . there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.” A second corpse suddenly pitches out “with a dark, distorted face”; then out tumbles a third dead man. A soft hat lies in the center of an unruffled bed, while in a puddle of blood on the closet floor lie two more hats. “Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men,” sums up the laconic author. What an eye for detail. What an image for a movie.

  Black Mask published Hammett’s first hard-boiled Continental Op story, “Arson Plus,” on October 1, 1923. The nameless operative with the Continental Detective Agency (who would front twenty-six stories, two novelettes, and two novels) looked utterly unlike his creator: he was short, fat, balding, and middle aged.

  Hammett told his Mask editor on October 10, 1923, that he hadn’t deliberately kept his hero nameless. But as the Op had got through two stories without needing a name, he would let him continue. Certainly, the namelessness was related to Hammett’s own desire for privacy.

  The Op is a strange hero-detective. He has no home, no interests except his job, no goal except to get the job done, no motive except loyalty to his boss. His work code has two rules laid down by the agency: he must accept no rewards for solving cases, and honest work must be an end in itself.

  The Op lives a bleak existence in an indifferent universe, epitomizing Hammett’s belief that life is inscrutable, arbitrary, and does not match up to the orderly, ethical way people behave. Though the Op’s job requires him to proceed in a methodical manner, he knows there is no order.

  The Op is not always moral. Though he may do some good, his method is to use whatever tools come to hand, including violence or treachery. He can be as callous as the criminals. This paradoxical conflict between means and ends grows out of a similar conflict between the morality of the Op’s employers and those he is employed to apprehend.

  He appears to be the hired official of a respectable society, paid to clean up after criminals who operate in a crooked world, but—and this is where Hammett diffe
rs from other crime writers of the time—the society is itself deceitful, malignant, and vicious.

  “Arson Plus” is the first of many tales that would have a similar structure, where the Op inspects the crime scene, interviews suspects, cooperates with local police, and uncovers not one truth but layers of truths.

  Here the Op is called to a burnt-out house that had been doused with gasoline, where a man named Thornburgh is supposed to have died. Central to the plot is the fact that $200,000 worth of insurance on the deceased has recently been purchased. A niece will benefit. The witnesses are Thornburgh’s live-in servants, the Coomses, and Henderson, a traveling salesman. The Op discovers there is no niece, only a woman named Evelyn Towbridge impersonating her; there is no Thornburgh, only Henderson risen from the dead, impersonating him. There are no live-in servants, only the Coomses fabricating the movements of their supposed dead master. There was a fire, but it was started to defraud the insurance company. When the Op uncovers the “truth,” it is the fabricated death of an imaginary man. The witnesses’ story exists within the Op’s story within Hammett’s story.

  Though the Op’s methods parallel those of Hammett’s successor Raymond Chandler’s detectives, their underlying philosophies differed. Chandler would offer clues that led to “real” answers. Hammett’s Op knew reality peeled away like an onion to reveal more plausibilities.

  Chandler summed up Hammett’s achievements in a December 1944 article in Atlantic Monthly:

  Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. . . . Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. . . . Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse. . . . He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.