The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  In “The Simple Art of Murder”, Raymond Chandler provides the most eloquent assessment of Hammett ever written, and I wish I had room to quote it all. Hammett, he said, took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; he gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for a reason. And, Chandler said,

  “He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements . . . Hammett’s style at its worst was as formalized as a page out of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style . . . can say things he did not know how to say, or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill . . . He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, 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.”

  And why did he burn out so quickly? Why does such an enduring reputation have such a small body of work on which to rest?

  I wonder if an answer might not lurk in the one scene in The Maltese Falcon not to be found in the Huston screenplay. In it, Spade recounts at length the seemingly pointless story of a man named Flitcraft, who left his home and family and disappeared after nearly being killed by a beam falling from a construction site. By the time Spade succeeded in finding him, the man had recreated essentially the same middleclass life in another city with another family. Spade explains:

  “ ‘But that’s the part I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’ ”

  A beam fell and Dashiell Hammett taught himself to be a writer. Then no more beams fell, and he adjusted himself to that.

  But not entirely. In 1957, an interviewer asked him why he kept three typewriters in his home in Katonah, New York. “I keep them,” he said, “to remind myself that I was once a writer.”

  * * *

  In the fall of 2014, an editor at Orion, my longtime publishers in the UK, wondered if I could find a couple of hundred words to say about the durability of crime fiction, by way of an introduction to their forthcoming edition of The Maltese Falcon. Evidently I could:

  Detective stories aren’t supposed to last. They’re genre fiction, like horror and science fiction and Westerns, and everyone knows the chief characteristic of all those genres is impermanence. Oh, they’re entertaining, and they’ll fill an idle hour or provide relaxation at a hard day’s end, but you read them and toss them aside, and you forget them, and so does the rest of the world.

  Guess what? It doesn’t work that way.

  The world does indeed forget most books, generally in short order. The most forgettable, it turns out, are the mainstream bestsellers, those works of popular fiction that ride the zeitgeist until it bucks them off. In terms of sales, they burn brightly but soon burn themselves out.

  And the next to be forgotten, curiously enough, are serious works of fiction, capital-L Literature, perhaps written in the hope of immortality. And some do indeed survive, largely as assigned reading for college students, but now and then actually read for enjoyment. Most, however, vanish as utterly as the pop bestsellers.

  On the other hand, Rex Stout died in 1975 and Agatha Christie the following year, and all of their work is readily available—and eagerly read. Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett—I could go on, and so could you. No end of genre writers, with no higher ambition than that of putting food on their tables while entertaining their readers, have essentially achieved literary immortality. Not just on library shelves, not just in academic halls, but on the night tables of actual human beings. People read them—eagerly, and for pleasure.

  A corner was turned a few years ago in the literary world’s consciousness when the Library of America, a high-minded and not-for-profit enterprise, took a deep breath and brought out a volume of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Chandler, of course, was the perfect choice for such an experiment, having long enjoyed a special position in intellectual circles; donnish types liked his writing and world view so much that they were willing to overlook the fact that his books actually had stories in them, stories that gave one a reason to (shudder!) turn the pages.

  A daring move, no? Well, no one sneered, or canceled a subscription. In fact, the book turned out to be LOA’s sales leader, and by a wide margin. And Chandler is no longer the only genre writer in their catalogue. He’s got plenty of company.

  A word, before I leave you, about The Maltese Falcon. Three films were made from it, though the one you know—the third, with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor and Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet and more names which you or I could reel out at a moment’s notice—quite rightly eclipsed the others. As you may know, John Huston’s shooting script is a line-for-line copy of Dashiell Hammett’s novel.

  What you may not know is that this was very much Hammett’s intention. When he sat down to write it, he’d concluded that film was the medium of the future, and that a novel ought to be written so as to be readily adaptable for the screen. Accordingly, he produced a screenplay in prose form, with not a word in it that a camera could not capture.

  And, while so doing, he wrote an essentially perfect novel that is every bit as praiseworthy—and no less gripping—today. If you’re reading it for the first time, you have a treat in store for you. And if you’ve read it before, yours will be no less of a treat. This is, after all, the best sort of genre fiction, to be read and tossed aside—and picked up and read again. And again.

  * * *

  Hammett and Chandler are so often mentioned in the same breath that one wonders how either of them would feel about it. Each has his partisans; Robert B. Parker idolized Chandler, while Donald E. Westlake had a sky-high opinion of Hammett and a low one of Chandler. I could posit that these two writers, for all their similarities, are poles apart in that Hammett exemplifies Realism while Chandler embodies Romance. (That’s Romance à la Malory, not Georgette Heyer. But you knew that, right?)

  The best observation about the two that I’ve yet come across is James Ellroy’s, writing in 2007 in The Guardian:

  “Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be—gallant and with a lively satirist’s wit. Hammett wrote the man he feared he might be—tenuous and skeptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue.”

  Gar Haywood

  * * *

  I’ve known Gar Haywood for years, though we’ve never been able to spend a great deal of time in one another’s company. I like him, and I like his work, and thus I was glad for the chance to write this introduction to Jim Seels’s handsome edition of Gar’s short fiction. As you’ll see, it turned into a discourse on the changing role of the short story in the literary marketplace:

  It is my pleasure to introduce you to Lyrics for the Blues, a collection of five excellent short stories by Gar Anthony Haywood.

  That they are excellent came as no surprise to me, and should come as no surprise to you, either. Gar Haywood is a very fine writer indeed. I’ve read several of his novels over the years, and a couple of short stories, too, and I’ve never read anything of his that I haven’t enjoyed. The wonder, then, is not that these stories were written well, but that they were written at all.

  Because, you see, there are not many professional writers who put much time or effort into short fiction these days. In the crime fiction vineyard, where Gar and I do the greater part of our laboring, the opportunities for the short story writer are severely limited. There are two leading magazines, Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, and they are venerable institutions indeed, and play an essential role in the field of crime fiction. But the economics of the business are such, alas, that their role does not include putting a lot of money in the pockets of those who write for them.

  Original anthologies constitute another opportunity for short-story writers. One is invited to contribute, and, while again the compensation rarely amounts to very m
uch, the invitation is a fair guarantee of acceptance. But who do you suppose gets invited to contribute to these anthologies? Writers with established reputations and proven records, writers who can be counted on to deliver a good story and whose name on the cover will draw readers.

  That’s just the way it is, and no one’s to blame for it. The fact of the matter is that there’s precious little demand from the reading public for short fiction. The magazines that once published it in great quantity have either abandoned that policy or gone out of business—or, more often than not, both. You can attribute this to the emergence of paperback fiction in the aftermath of World War II, or to the rise of television a few years later; more recently, you might point to video games and the Internet as drawing readers away from all prose fiction, long or short.

  But it’s instructive to realize that it was not ever thus.

  I’m more than ordinarily aware of the changing role of the short story just now because I’m busy putting together an anthology for Akashic Books. They’ve developed a virtual franchise that began with an anthology of original stories, all set in the borough of Brooklyn, with the volume called Brooklyn Noir. Other volumes have followed, including Baltimore Noir and Los Angeles Noir and D.C. Noir and, remarkably, Twin Cities Noir. (I suppose it’s just a question of time before someone pulls together a collection of dark stories set in New York’s Westchester County, for which the title Pleasantville Noir would seem inevitable.)

  In the course of things I was enlisted to edit Manhattan Noir, and I was somehow able to persuade a slew of superb writers to turn out original Manhattan-based stories, all for precious little in the way of money and glory. The book garnered fine reviews and did reasonably well, and it occurred at about the same time to me and to Akashic’s Johnny Temple that a companion volume (Manhattan Noir 2? Son of Manhattan Noir? Manhattan Tres Noir?), itself composed not of originals but of reprints, might not be the worst idea we’d ever had.

  And what a wealth of published fiction we found to draw upon! I sat down and began jotting down names: O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Damon Runyon, Cornell Woolrich, Ring Lardner, Jerome Weidman, and many more, not to mention more contemporary writers like Donald E. Westlake and Clark Howard and . . .

  Never mind. You’ll be able to see the whole list when the book comes out. But here’s the point: several of those early writers made their reputations writing short stories, and some of them wrote nothing but short stories, and managed to make a more than decent living at it.

  Consider William Sidney Porter, whom the world knows as O. Henry. In 1898 he began serving a little over three years for embezzlement, and in his Ohio prison he began writing short stories, set mostly in the Southwest and Central America. He sold them to magazines, and after his release he moved to New York, where in 1903 he agreed to provide a weekly short story for the New York World, for $100 per story.

  Bear in mind, if you will, that this was at a time when a dollar a day was a living wage for a workingman. I don’t know what multiplier to use to determine what O. Henry’s stories were worth in today’s dollars, but I think we can safely say that no magazine today pays anywhere near as much for short fiction as the old World paid O. Henry, and this for short-shorts that ran to somewhere around 1500 words.

  The man never wrote a novel. Why should he?

  More recently, consider Damon Runyon, who’d already distinguished himself as a newspaperman when he began making up stories about the horseplayers and rumrunners and assorted underworld types who were his companions of choice, and upon whom he so imposed his personal stamp that we now label such Broadway guys and dolls Runyonesque. Runyon wrote most of his stories during the Depression years of the 1930s, and sold them quite readily to Cosmopolitan and Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, and received on average $5000 a story.

  Five thousand 1930’s dollars for a short story! And then, of course, the stories were published in book form, and the books stayed in print for years. Did the man ever write a novel? Of course not. Why would he bother?

  Although his stories have outlasted almost all of the more avowedly literary fiction of his day, Damon Runyon was quite insistent that his sole objective in writing was to make as much money as possible from the pursuit. “My measure of success,” he wrote, “is money. I have no interest in artistic triumphs that are financial losers. I would like to have an artistic success that also made money, of course, but if I had to make a choice between the two, I would take the dough.”

  If he were around nowadays, Damon Runyon wouldn’t be wasting his time with short stories. If he wrote prose at all, he’d be busy populating full-length novels with the likes of Harry the Horse and Regret and Brandy Bottle Bates. More likely, he’d be pitching features and miniseries about them to studio guys and network execs.

  I could go on, but I figure you get the idea. The nature of the business is such that most writers who begin by writing short fiction move on to the novel, while a great many others go directly to novel-writing and never try short stories at all. Periodically writers with established names are invited to contribute a short story to an anthology, and many of them beg off with the excuse that they’ve never written anything shorter than a hundred thousand words, and that they wouldn’t know where to begin. Others make the effort, and sometimes it works out very well indeed, and other times the results are an embarrassment all around.

  With the exception of the astonishing Edward D. Hoch, who has been producing upwards of two dozen commendable short stories a year ever since the invention of movable type, no one these days makes a career of short fiction. (Ed can write novels, and on a couple of occasions has, but realized early on that both his talent and his temperament are better suited to shorter work.) For most of us, short stories are a sideline, and one we pursue because of the creative satisfactions it provides.

  Gar Haywood’s stories, which you are about to read, must have been uncommonly satisfying to write. I certainly found them a treat to read. And so will you.

  Evan Hunter

  * * *

  I had a lot to say about Evan. This first piece was for Mystery Scene’s tribute issue:

  Evan Hunter Was My Hero

  In 1953, when I was fifteen years old, I realized for the first time that I wanted to be a writer. I had recently taken to reading serious literature, and was working my way through twentieth century American realism—Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara. And I was finding a voice of my own in the compositions I was writing for eleventh-grade English class, and enjoying the approval I got from my teacher, Miss May Jepson. In one essay, a presumably humorous look at the various career choices I’d entertained since kindergarten, I concluded by observing that a review of what I’d written made one thing abundantly clear—I could never be a writer.

  “I’m not too sure about that!” was Miss Jepson’s response.

  God bless the woman. I took one look at what she’d written on my paper and made a career choice then and there, and I’ve never changed my mind in all the intervening years.

  That same year, The Blackboard Jungle was published, making its young author an overnight success. I didn’t read it right away, but I was aware of it—some of the kids in school, of the handful that ever read anything, were talking about it. When I did read it, sometime the following year, I thought it was good, certainly, and I was deeply grateful that my high school was nothing like the one in the book. Aside from that, I don’t recall that the book had much impact upon me.

  Two other things did.

  One was an article in Writer’s Yearbook, an annual publication of Writer’s Digest. I seem to recall that my father brought the thing home for me—he was always entirely supportive of my writing ambitions. I read it cover to cover—of course!—and was especially impressed with an article written by Scott Meredith, who was a literary agent, whatever that was. I don’t recall the details, but in essence Meredith discussed his client Evan Hunter’s great success
with The Blackboard Jungle. I particularly remember a box at the end of the article that detailed the book’s earnings from various sources—advance, royalties, film, etc. Evan Hunter, I was staggered to learn, had made $100,000 from the book.

  Now I have no idea if that number bears any relationship to reality, and I can’t offhand think of anything for which I’d be inclined to take Scott Meredith’s word, but all that’s beside the point. A lightbulb formed in the air above my young head, and there was a dollar sign in it. You could, I suddenly realized, make a lot of money doing this. Somehow this fact had hitherto escaped my awareness.

  I don’t know that I had all that much interest in making a lot of money, not in my idealistic youth. I was more interested, I seem to recall, in making my parents proud of me, and in impressing girls and maybe, God willing, actually getting laid. But I certainly wanted to be able to support myself by writing, if only to avoid having to do anything else. It was nice to know that you could.

  It may have been Scott’s article that led me to buy The Jungle Kids. I had just graduated from high school, and was still reading great writers, still planning on becoming one myself, but clueless as to how this was going to happen. I spotted this paperback on a drugstore rack, recognized the author’s name, and found when I picked it up that it was a collection of short stories about what we then called juvenile delinquents. (Now we just call them young people.)

  The book was a paperback original, designed to capitalize on the success of The Blackboard Jungle, and consisting of stories Hunter had written in the several years preceding the novel. They had been published in a variety of magazines I’d never heard of, a majority having appeared in Manhunt.