“A Knife Will Cut for Anybody” had its genesis in this period, when Hammett was torn between cranking out quick crowd pleasers and struggling to meet his own literary ambitions. The story is set in San Francisco, with reappearances by The Maltese Falcon’s Lieutenant Dundy and Detective-sergeant Polhaus. The scene of the crime, however, closely mirrors the main floor of the building at 133 East Thirty-eighth Street in the Murray Hill district of New York where Hammett lived in a rented apartment. The address appears on headings of both Hammett’s aborted first draft of The Thin Man and an unfinished novella titled “The Darkened Face.” And, in fact, “Knife Will Cut” and “Darkened Face” are two versions of the same tale.
Hammett, it seems, was so pleased with the setup he’d invented for his fourth Spade story that he opted to repurpose the narrative into a more substantial work. He anticipated twenty-five thousand words, replaced Spade with a Continental Detective Agency operative named Fox, changed the nationality of the victim from Argentine to German, and shifted the locale from the West to the East Coast. His draft typescript for “A Knife Will Cut for Anybody” was abandoned and eventually made its way to the antiquarian marketplace and the safekeeping of a savvy collector—a writer and Hammett enthusiast. Hammett’s incomplete novella, in contrast, was cached among his “keepers” and is now preserved in his archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
While Hammett lightly expanded and developed his revised crime narrative, the text of the original draft is offered here. It is both a tribute to Sam Spade as America’s seminal hard-boiled detective and a singular opportunity for readers to enjoy a bittersweet sample of a great, untold story.
A KNIFE WILL CUT FOR ANYBODY
When Samuel Spade knocked on the door it swung open far enough to let him see the mutilated dead face of a woman. She lay on her back on the floor in a lot of blood and a red-stained hunting-knife with a heavy six-inch blade lay in blood beside her. She was tall and slender, her hair was dark, her dress was green: her face and body had been hacked so that little beyond this could be said about her.
Spade breathed out sharply once and his face became wooden except for the alertness of his yellow-grey eyes. He flattened his left hand against the door and slowly pushed it farther back. The fingers of his right hand, held a little away from his side, curved as if they held a ball. He glanced swiftly to right and left, up and down the ground-floor hallway in which he stood, then into as much of the room as was visible from where he stood.
The room was wide, and open double doors made it and the room behind it one long room. Grey and black were the predominant colors and the furniture, modern in design, was obviously new.
Spade went into the room, walking around the dead woman, avoiding the blood on the floor, and saw in the next room a pale grey telephone. He called the San Francisco Police Department’s number and asked for Lieutenant Dundy of the Homicide Detail. He said: “Hello, Dundy, Sam Spade. . . . I’m at 1950 Green Street. There’s a woman here’s been killed.” He listened. “I wouldn’t kid you: somebody’s made hamburger of her . . . Right.” He put down the telephone and made a cigarette.
Lieutenant Dundy turned his short, stocky back to the corpse and addressed Spade: “Well?”
Two of the men—one was small, one very large—who had come in with Dundy were bending over the dead woman. A uniformed policeman stood at attention near one of the front windows.
Spade said: “Well, the Argentine Consul hired me to find a Teresa Moncada, for her family or something.” He nodded at the dead woman. “Looks like I did.”
“This her?”
Spade moved his thick, sloping shoulders a little. “What you can see of her fits the photo and description they gave me. There’s a fellow at the consulate who knows her. I phoned him to come over. He ought to—” He broke off as the men who had been examining the dead woman stood up.
The smaller man—he had a lean dark intelligent face—wiped his hands carefully with a blue-bordered handkerchief and said: “Dead an hour, I’d say. This knife all right.”
Dundy nodded. “You found her?” he asked Spade.
“Yes. The street-door was open, so when nobody answered the bell I came on in and tried this one, and there it was. There wasn’t anybody else here. Looks like there’s nobody else in the house. I rang both upstairs-flat bells, but no luck. Another thing, there’s no clothes here except her hat and coat there on the chair, and there’s nothing in her handbag except about twenty bucks, lipstick, powder, and that kind of stuff. That’s the works.”
Dundy’s lips worked together under his close-clipped grizzled mustache. He was about to speak when a grey-faced man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat stuck his head in at the door and said: “There’s a fellow says his name’s Sanchez Cornejo here wanting to see Spade.”
“That’s the fellow from the consulate,” Spade told Dundy.
“Send him in.”
The man at the door stepped aside and said, “O.K., come on,” to someone behind him.
A very tall, very thin young man appeared in the doorway. His glossy black hair, parted in the middle, was brushed smooth to his somewhat narrow head. His face was long and dark, his eyes large and dark. He wore dark clothes and carried a black derby hat and a dark walking-stick in his hands.
He dropped his stick when he saw the woman on the floor, his eyes opened to show whites all around the irises, and blood going out of his face left it a dingy yellow. “Virgen santìsima!” He went down on one knee beside her. Then he mumbled something to himself and stood up again. Color began to come back into his face. He bent over to pick up his stick.
Dundy, scowling suspiciously at him, asked, “You’re Sanchez Cornejo?”
Cornejo winced a little, as if at the Lieutenant’s pronunciation of his name, and said, “Yes, sir.”
“You know Teresa Moncada?”
Cornejo began to tremble. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He nodded his reply.
“This her?”
Cornejo dropped his stick again and jumped nervously when it clattered on the floor. His dark eyes were wide with bewilderment. “Si—yes, sir,” he stammered. “Of course.”
“Sure?”
The dark young man had recovered his composure. “Yes, sir, I am,” he said with conviction.
“Right. Come on back here.” Dundy led the way into the next room. He waved a stubby hand at a metal chair and the young man sat down. “Now give me what you’ve got.”
Cornejo stared at the detective. “I do not understand.”
Spade sat on the corner of a table near Cornejo. “What you know about her,” he explained. “I’m Sam Spade, a private detective. Your Consul, Mr. Navarrete, hired me to find her and told me you knew her. That’s how I happened to run into this and call you.”
The young man nodded several times. “I understand. Señor Navarrete had the kindness to tell me.” He smiled at Dundy. “Please excuse my not understanding. I will tell you all I know.”
“All right.” Dundy’s face and voice responded in no way to the young man’s smile. “Do that little thing.”
Cornejo moistened his lips and looked uneasily at the Lieutenant.
Spade’s manner was more friendly. “How long have you known her?”
“Three years. That is I met her three years ago in the house of her uncle and guardian, Doctor Felix Haya de la Torre, in Buenos Ayres, but I have not seen her for quite a year and a half—” he swallowed “—until today.”
“An orphan?”
“Yes, and supposedly the second wealthiest woman in our country.” He frowned earnestly. “That is why her uncle was so afraid—so anxious to find her. You see, she did not like her uncle, and she resented his perhaps too careful guardianship, and so when, on her twenty-first birthday last August, she came into control of her estate and was her own mistress, she left his house.”
“And came to America?” Dundy asked.
“To North America? No, not immediately, but her uncle thought
her too young and inexperienced and too wealthy to be quite safe alone and considered it his duty to continue to watch over her in spite of her objections.” Cornejo shrugged. “As I say, she resented that, and last month she, with a distant cousin, a Camilla Cerro, disappeared, presumably coming here and assuming fictitious names.”
Spade nodded. “This flat was rented under the name of Thelma Magnin.”
“Yes?” Dundy said. “Well, Cornejo, or whatever your name is, who killed her?”
The young man’s voice and eyes were steady. “I do not know.”
“Who’d have reason to?”
“I do not know.”
“Who’d get her dough?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Her heirs?” Spade explained.
“Oh! I don’t know. Her uncle and his sons Federico and Victor are her nearest relatives, but she may have made a will, of course.”
Dundy scowled at Spade. “What do you think?”
“Nothing yet.”
Dundy looked at Cornejo thoughtfully, surveyed him deliberately from head to foot, and turned to Spade again. “I guess we’re safe in calling it a spick job. They like knives.”
Cornejo’s face flushed. He said stiffly: “A knife will cut for anybody, I believe. That knife is not—”
Spade, grinning wolfishly, interrupted the young man. “How do you know she was killed with that knife?”
Cornejo stared blankly at Spade.
Dundy growled: “All right. What does this other girl, this Camilla Cerro, look like?”
Spade, still grinning, said softly: “I bet she looks more like that girl lying in there on the floor than Teresa Moncada does.”
Dundy said: “What?”
Cornejo opened his mouth as if he were trying to say something, but no sound came out. His face was ghastly with fear.
Spade said: “Though they must look something alike or he wouldn’t’ve tried to pass one off as the other when he found we’d guessed wrong.”
The young man could speak now and did, very rapidly, so that his accent, barely noticeable before, became more pronounced. “It is true. It is true that they look somewhat alike, I mean, and I may have made a mistake. It may be Camilla Cerro and not Señorita Moncada who was killed. I have not seen them since a year and a half ago and—”
Spade said, “Tch, tch, tch,” reprovingly and asked: “How do you suppose I found this place?”
“I don’t know.”
“By shadowing you.”
The young man lowered his head and stared miserably at the floor.
Detective-sergeant Polhaus—a burly carelessly shaven florid man—appeared in the doorway. “All through with the body. Want it anymore?”
Dundy’s attention did not waver from Cornejo. Only a corner of his mouth moved slightly. “No.”
Polhaus left the doorway and his cheerful voice came in from the other room. “All right, boys, pack it out.”
AFTERWORD
Dear Reader,
It seems we’ve now seen the last of Dashiell Hammett’s original Sam Spade stories (albeit unfinished) and almost certainly the last “new” collection to be pulled from his typewriter and rescued from his archives. Are you surprised? Are the stories what you expected? I hope in some ways they are surprising, that they suggest images of my grandfather that you wouldn’t have anticipated based on previous publications or biographies or popular conceptions of the father of hard-boiled detective fiction.
My grandfather was sixty-three when he told a Washington Daily News reporter that he’d stopped writing when he discovered he was repeating himself. “It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style,” he claimed. But that was a throwaway line as much as a genuine reflection on his experience. As this collection—and his body of work as a whole—demonstrates, Hammett had both exploited and resisted stylistic expectations since his earliest days as a writer.
He is best remembered by way of his five crime novels, but even there his protagonists range widely. The Continental Op was a no-nonsense gumshoe who went blood simple in Montana and chased clues, cons, and ghosts in California; Sam Spade juggled love, lust, pragmatics, and justice in his City by the Bay; Ned Beaumont tested the bounds of camaraderie and family in an ersatz Baltimore; and Nick Charles drank and partied and solved for problems in New York City and beyond. Hammett created all those characters, their supporting casts, and conflicts out his own pied life experience. It would be a mistake, however, to constrain my grandfather’s story to the familiar. The Hunter’s rare works offer fresh glimpses into Hammett and his shifting worldview—as a reflective, enigmatic man who toggled between poverty and wealth, west and east coasts, and pulp-, book-, and film-writing careers.
Both as Hammett scholar and granddaughter, I’m fascinated by the glimmers of biography that surface in this collection. “Faith” is set north of Baltimore, not too far from where Hammett spent his youth, in the kind of riverside terrain where he would have enjoyed fishing or hunting. The half-dozen or so San Francisco stories reflect his early married life, laced with familiar place names from the 1920s: Ellis Street, where John’s Grill and my grandparents’ first apartment was located; Larkin, the site of the all-important public library; Market Street, home to Samuels Jewelers and the Flood Building, with the Pinkerton’s offices in suite 314; Polk, running between city hall and the Civic Center; the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building, both critical to San Francisco’s waterfront mischief. “On the Make” and “On the Way” come later, with echoes from Hammett’s experiences in the Los Angeles basin in the early 1930s, where he worked for Hollywood’s studios and met Lillian Hellman. Life and relationships were complicated there. Places, then, evoke life history, tie fiction to fact, and provide an essential baseline.
“Monk and Johnny Fox” and “Action and the Quiz Kid” go on to suggest some of Hammett’s lesser-known interests, as well as the more disreputable sections of New York that would have attracted Hammett during his Manhattan stays. My grandfather was a boxing enthusiast of long standing, who respected the kind of toughness required to train for and participate in orchestrated slugfests. Years after he invented Monk and the Kid, he was thrilled to meet Joe Louis, who visited Anchorage as part of a USO program. “I like him,” Hammett said. “He doesn’t have a lot to say, but he is far from being anybody’s dope.” We know, too, that Hammett enjoyed baseball and listening to games on the radio—so perhaps he followed the career of young Joe DiMaggio, who’d played ball in San Francisco before moving up to the Yankees in 1936. Certainly DiMaggio’s honorable mention in “Action” was no accident. And, like Action, Hammett would have been tempted to put some money on the game. My grandfather liked to test his luck on sports, cards, and the ponies, to his occasional misfortune. In sum, he wrote what he knew, as an ex-detective and as an engaged and observant human adventurer.
It’s a rare privilege and opportunity to look backward into Hammett’s life by way of his unpublished and little-known works. He, who rarely saved anything, saved these, which survive as both fiction and artifact. The files at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin are a mother lode for Hammett scholar-detectives. They preserve the real deal—smudges and chips dating back to the mid-1920s, drafts on the backs of old letters or on both sides of cheap brown paper. Money was tight in those days. Chapter outlines and character descriptions. Penciled edits in Hammett’s careful rounded script. Whole sections crossed out or reworked. Headings that list addresses, sometimes revised as he moved from apartment to apartment, the earliest ones earnest and complete as he tested the marketplace, the later ones just a title—or not even that—with little concern for impressing future editors. Shifts in typewriters and formatting and from pulpy pages to good, hard stationery. Hellman’s hand in places. And, if you look carefully, clues to Hammett’s ambitions.
For researchers, editors, biographer, and granddaughter, archival visits are irreplaceable, near-religious experiences, ripe with potential for new disc
overies. “Faith” is a case in point. The typescript is twelve letter-sized pages, produced in Hammett’s characteristic tidy manner, with only a smattering of autograph emendations. Page eight seems at first glance the same size as the others, though the text runs a little farther down the page than its mates. A second look reveals roughly an inch of the sheet folded back at the bottom. Closer examination turns up Hammett’s paste job, so neatly worked that it’s nearly imperceptible. He’d added exactly three lines to the middle of the page: “That’s when I began to know for sure that it was God after me. I had sort of suspected it once or twice before—just from queer things I’d noticed—but I hadn’t been certain. But now I knew what was what, and I wasn’t wrong either!” Feach’s declaration doesn’t move the plot forward or change the trajectory of the narrative, but it illuminates a driving tension between truth and delusion, rationality and religion, a thematic point important enough to Hammett that he’d fit it precisely into the existing tale. It was a tell, an indicator, a clue.
Careful readers of Hammett’s fiction can almost always find a line or two keyed to each story’s central concern—a job or duty, a choice, or a question of human nature. Sometimes, perhaps, he himself pointed to them. Along the edges of his typescripts there are occasional markers, scratched in at critical points. In “The Cure” it runs alongside a line about courage not being a “damned thing but a habit of not dodging things because you’re afraid of them.” In “Nelson Redline” it accompanies a passage about men who refuse to conduct themselves according to acceptable and predictable rules. Were these Hammett’s marks? Was he consciously developing a grand literary or epistemological scheme? There is no proof, of course, but the idea makes sense in the light of Hammett’s biography and bibliography.
The Hunter and Other Stories Page 28