"It's just a little hangover."
"They'll get bigger as time goes on. You say no but I say yes. I know whereof I speak, chum."
"I didn't say anything," Chandler said.
"I thought you were an American," Hammett said, looking sour and argumentative.
"As the Fourth of July," Chandler said. . .
"Then why the hell do you speak like a God damned limey? Next thing you'll be telling me you come from Boston. That won't wash with me, chum. I been to like to think they sound like limeys in Boston, for whatever God damned reason I can't imagine, but they don't"
Chandler said he'd been born in Chicago.
"That's better," Hammett, mellowing slightly as the sour mash took the edge off his frightful hangover [sic]. "Chicago is a tough town, a good tough town. You don't catch much shit flying in Chicago."
And here is Cap Shaw philosophizing about writers and writing to Chandler at the Black Mask offices:
"That blasted fool Hammett! There you have a man who could become one of the greatest American writers, but instead of taking hold of himself he's pissing his talent away, rotting his brain with liquor. Ah," he said—the compleat martinet—"if I could only lock you fellows up somewhere. Chain you to your typewriters and let you get drunk just once a year, on Christmas day. Then you'd see some worthwhile writing."
The plot, such as it may be, concerns the efforts of a New York gangster named Salvatore Tenuto to wreak vengeance on Hammett because Hammett, while working for the Pinks, locked Tenuto up in a Mexican jail on a charge of "running Mexican girls—kids—across the border into L.A. for the whorehouse trade, for the guys that like their meat . . . to be real young and fresh." When Chandler gets wind that somebody is after Hammett, he sets out to foil the attempt. And of course succeeds, with some help from the obligatory cop friend, a sergeant on the New York Homicide Squad whom Chandler had known "for ten years, ever since they both worked together for a failed oil company."
The climax takes place in Hammett's hotel room, where he has been drugged and tied up by two of Tenuto's hoods. When the hoods return, bringing with them a thirteen-year-old girl so they can rape her and frame Hammett for it, Chandler and the police sergeant are waiting for them.
Chandler came out of the closet with the automatic in his hand. This was the real thing, but he wasn't afraid. He was too angry to be afraid. His voice was quiet and cool but there was real menace in it. "Hit that kid and I'll blow your fucking head off," he said. "Put your hands behind your heads and lean against the wall. Don't drop your guns, don't do anything."
"What the fuck!" Joey blurted out in astonishment. Charlie the Dasher's hand started to streak inside his coat. He stopped when the muzzle of the Browning lined up with his heart. "Go on, do it," Chandler said, shaking with the urge to kill the evil bastard while the automatic remained steady in his hand. "Go to it, you wop bastard, you stinking greaseball. Put your hands behind your head or I'll drop you right now. You too, moron."
Sic transit gloria AD.
2. The Eyes Have It
He poured himself a drink and counted the money. It came to ten thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives.
—Brett Halliday,
The Violent World of Michael Shayne
She was as lovely as a girl could be without bludgeoning your endocrines.
—Stephen Marlowe, Killers Are My Meat
The sun [was] shining its ass off .
—Robert B. Parker,
Looking for Rachel Wallace
The private eye as we know and love him today was not born in the pages of twentieth-century pulp magazines, as some people seem to believe. He was not fathered by Dashiell Hammett or Carroll John Daly; they toughened him, taught him to shoot and to fight and to make love to beautiful women, adapted him to the violent American milieu of the twenties and thirties—but they did not create him. He is a hundred years old, not fifty, and his heritage is only half-American, only half-fictional. The fictional half, in fact, is British, and the milieu Victorian England.
The eye's British parent, of course, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes was a private investigator; people came to him with problems, and he proceeded to investigate and to solve them. The focal points of his phenomenal success were certainly his power of observation and his deductive ability, but there is no question that some readers and writers equated his talents with his profession. The self-reliant loner, the white knight, the indefatigable crime fighter with abilities greater and methods less restricted than those of the police—these Ho!mesian characteristics became a central part of the budding mystique of the private detective.
The eye's American parent was Allan Pinkerton, the transplanted Scot who opened the first private investigative agency in Chicago in the 1850s, was a paid Union spy during the Civil War, and achieved something of an international reputation in the late 1800s for his well-publicized battles with train robbers and other Western outlaws. The famous Pinkerton symbol—a wide-open eye, with the words "We Never Sleep" below it—appeared on a number of ghostwritten "case histories" in the 1870s, bearing such titles as The Expressman and the Detective and The Detective and the Somnambulist. These were actually more sensational fiction than fact and contained a number of dubious observations:
We often find that persons who have committed grave offenses will fly to the moors, or to the prairies, or to the vast solitudes of almost impenetrable forests, and there give vent to their feelings. I instanced the case of Eugene Aram, who took up his abode on the bleak and solitary moor, and, removed from the society of his fellowmen, tried to maintain his secret by devoting himself to astronomical observations and musings with nature, but who, nevertheless, felt compelled to relieve his overburdened mind by muttering to himself details of the murder while taking long and dreary walks on the moor. (The Expressman and the Detective)
Pinkerton's books proved enormously popular, went into numerous reprintings, and inspired the dime novelists of the day to invent such Pinkerton-modeled characters as Old Sleuth and Nick Carter. With their talents for disguise, their feats of derring-do, and their continual assault on the organized forces of evil, these fictional operatives added yet another dimension to the mystique and carried it on a new popular wave into the twentieth century.
The heir apparent to the dime-novel sleuths was Fleming Stone, the primary creation of Carolyn Wells—novelist, playwright, poet, anthologist, writer of juveniles and short stories, and author of the genre's first nonfiction work, a combination of how-to and historical overview called The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913). Stone is what Miss Wells describes in Technique as a "transcendant detective"; that is, a detective larger than life, omniscient; a creature of fiction rather than fact. And indeed, Fleming Stone is as unreal an investigator as any of his dime-novel predecessors. In not one of his fifty-seven recorded cases does he come alive as a human being, or as anything more than a two-dimensional silhouette with a penchant for pulling murderers Out of hats on the flimsiest of clues and evidence.
Many of Stone's cases are of the "impossible crime" variety. Carolyn Wells had an inordinate fondness for this type of story and so perpetrated more than a score of them during her career. In The Technique of the Mystery Story, she warns beginning writers to plan their stories with absolute logic and sequence; this is sound advice, which, unfortunately, she seemed disinclined to follow in her own work. Some critics have allowed that she was expert at constructing a mystery, and this may be true; but when it came to constructing a plausible mystery, she was every bit as helpless as Gaston Leroux. It may be said, without fear of contradiction, that she produced the definitive "don't" list of impossible crime plots—that is, everyone's list of unbelievable plot gimmicks that every mystery writer who wishes to write a salable locked-room story should avoid at all cost.
Hidden panels and secret exits were far and away her favorites. Among her impossible-crime novels are ones in which the solution depends on a hidden sliding panel in a closet, a secret
exit behind a sliding panel, a secret passage beneath the floor, a secret entrance into a room through a chimney, a hidden door frame with concealed hinges and lock, a secret elevator, a secret subterranean passage, and a shaft between a chimney and an external wall. Other of her "impossible" solutions include a victim stabbing himself with an icicle which melts before the body is discovered, a victim licking a postage stamp coated with poison, and a door locked from the outside with a duplicate key and inner bolts drawn by means of a thread.
Fleming Stone's two greatest cases are The Broken O (1933) and The Wooden Indian (1935). In the former, a strange death by poison occurs in a locked room, with the subsequent investigation uncovering no apparent means by which the poison could have been induced. Stone deduces that the murderer, a surgeon, implanted a tiny glass bulb into the heart of the victim; inside the bulb was a poisonous gas that slowly destroyed the surrounding tissues, thereby causing sudden death in the locked room more than twenty-four hours later. In The Wooden Indian, a collector of Indian artifacts is found shot to death with an arrow inside a locked room, the arrow having come from a wooden Indian kept inside the room. This was not the result of an accidental discharge, as everyone is supposed to believe, but through the machinations of a typical Wells murderer: while he was a guest in the victim's house some time earlier, the culprit manufactured a trapdoor leading from the attic into a grilled cabinet inside the Indian room; this enabled him to let himself down into the cabinet by means of a rope, from where, being an expert archer, he fired the fatal arrow through one of the grill openings. That the cabinet in question is barely large enough for a man to fit in, and that a considerable amount of space is required to maneuver a bow and arrow, are conveniently ignored by both the author and Fleming Stone.
Miss Wells also created another private detective of note, one Pennington "Penny" Wise, who appears in seven novels, foremost among them The Man Who Fell Through the Earth (1919). Although one of the characters in this book says that Penny Wise is not "the usual Smarty-Cat detective" and has "none of the earmarks of the Transcendental Detective of the story-books," he is and he does. Under all but the closest scrutiny he appears indistinguishable from Fleming Stone.
The Man Who Fell Through the Earth is concerned with a double disappearance from a locked New York office. One of the - men exited the office by means of a secret elevator; the other walked out in front of a not very reliable witness, only to vanish again during a howling blizzard outside. The second man is subsequently found alive in the icy East River, having "fallen through the earth, perhaps all the way from the Arctic." Or so he claims at first, in his delirium. What really happened is this:
"And as I took a step—I went down an open manhole into the sewer.
". . . I fell and fell—down, down,—it seemed for miles; I was whirled dizzily about—but still I fell—on and on—interminably. I felt my consciousness going—at first, abnormally acute, my senses became dulled, and I had only a sensation of falling—ever falling—through the earth!
"There my memory ceases. . . . My realization of falling only lasted until I struck the water in the sewer. That, doubtless, knocked me out for good and all—mentally, I mean. I have to thank my wonderful vitality and strong constitution for the fact that I really lived through the catastrophe. Think what it means! Hurtled through that rushing torrent of a sewer half filled with melted snow and water—flung out into the river, dashed about among the floating cakes of ice, and all with sufficient force to tear off my clothing—and yet to live through it!"
While Fleming Stone and Penny Wise were engaged in such goings-on, the hard-boiled detective as defined by Hammett and Carroll John Daly was beginning to prosper in the pages of Black Mask in the 1920s. Hammett's Continental Op was based on his own experiences with the Pinkerton agency and his intimate knowledge of how twentieth-century private detectives went about their business; and it was his genius that gave the American fictional investigator the one vital element he had been lacking: realism. And it was realism, or the illusion of it, that completed and cemented the mystique of the private eye.
Yet although Hammett is the acknowledged patriarch of the modern tough-detective school, in truth he must share that distinction with Daly. Daly's rough-and-tumble, somewhat sadistic shamus Race Williams first appeared in "Knights of the Open Palm" in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, five months before Hammett's initial Continental Op story was published. (Daly's first story, "The False Burton Combs," a hard-boiled tale about a "gentleman adventurer" who makes his living battling lawbreakers, appeared in Black Mask in 1922; and two weeks before Race Williams made his debut, another Daly private eye, Terry Mack, began shooting folks in a novelette called "Three Gun Terry." Also, Daly's first Race Williams novel, The Snarl of the Beast, was published in 1927, two years prior to the book publication of Red Harvest and The Dam Curse and to Hammett's invention of Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon.)
If Hammett's work can be said to have inspired Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and other of the best practitioners of the private-eye story, then Daly's work can be said to have inspired a number of writers who produced alternative classics. It is in his footsteps and those of Race Williams that Mickey Spillane (a confessed admirer of Daly) and Mike Hammer, Richard S. Prather and Shell Scott, and dozens of other writer-detective teams have walked over the past fifty years.
Both Daly and Williams were amazingly popular during the twenties and early thirties, in particular among the readers of Black Mask. In a poll conducted by editor Shaw in 1930, Daly was judged the magazine's favorite writer; Erie Stanley Gardner was the runner-up, with Hammett a somewhat distant third in the voting. The reason for Williams's popularity, it may be supposed, is that he was a man of action, with no compunctions and no real vulnerabilities (not even women, whose company he eschewed in favor of his own pair of .44s). He didn't mind killing people if it was in the public interest; in fact, he rather enjoyed it. He was the classic fantasy figure of that type of individual who believes violence is best fought with violence—the Charles Bronson figure in the film version of Brian Gar-field's Death Wish, the kind of "hero" such a person would be himself if only he had the courage. Besides which, Williams was forever taking the reader into his confidence, talking to him in personal asides, as if the two of them were confidants.
This is Race Williams:
For once my control of myself seemed to desert me.
I tried to sleep—but I couldn't. I just lay there and planned, while Gregory smoked and watched me. But all my plans were grim and strange. There was the burning desire to strike and maim—and kill. Kill! That was it. I never felt like that before. (The Tag Murders)
I'm not much on the sex stuff, nor the lithe slenderness and gracefulness of women. Still, there was a suppleness to her body that made her seem to creep in and out of my arms without actually ever doing it. Get what I mean? The best way I can describe it is, that she clung to me like a wet sock. (The Tag Murders)
. . . The Flame had many admirers. Many men had loved her. Some there were who had held her in their arms. And—those men were dead—even to the last one.
I'm not saying that The Flame had anything to do with it. I'm not even trying to judge her. But there is no discounting the fact that they were dead. With me, then, although I've always denied I had any, but I guess it was just plain superstition. Ashamed of it? Of course I am. But it was there, just the same. I had an overpowering belief—almost an obsession—that to hold The Flame in my arms—that to crush that wondrous, beautiful body to me spelled death. Yes—laugh if you want. We all have our weaknesses, I suppose. That was one of mine. To love The Flame meant my death. And that's that. Foolish! Childish! Ridiculous! Sure, but truth is truth, just the same. (Tainted Power)
"You're Williams?" he chirped, through the side of his mouth as he spat on my new rug. I frowned slightly. I felt that we were not going to get along—decidedly, I did not get that psychological impression that here was the beginning of a lifelong friendshi
p.
"Name of Little—Paul Little." He pounded himself on the chest. "From Chi—want to know more?".
I leaned back slightly and laughed. An ordinary gunman, this. Real cheap stuff.
"Ya needn't laugh it off." Thick lips curled. "You've bluffed it out with the New York boys, maybe—but I'm a different lad again. I ain't aimin' to harm ya none, and perhaps I'll even slip ya a little change—though that part weren't my thought. But—you raise one hand . . . an' I'll cop ya through the noodle." (The Tag Murders)
Nearly all Daly's novels and short stories deal with bootlegging, gang warfare, crooked politics, blackmail and mayhem among the corrupt upper classes, and lunatics bent on domination of organizations, cities, and, in one instance, the world (the villain in Murder from the East is a Eurasian megalomaniac of Fu Manchu dimensions). Daly's one obsessive theme is the evil wrought by a lust for power. In Tainted Power (1931), Williams himself almost succumbs to this lust when, after wiping out a blackmail ring and coming into possession of all its documentation, he is tempted by The Flame, "the Girl with the Criminal Mind," to join in the foundation of a criminal empire. Williams, however, comes to his senses just in time: "Let's be charitable, even to ourselves. Maybe my brain cleared then, and I was a sane man again. Maybe it had been greed. Maybe it was only loss of blood." And he would have thrown The Flame over, too, just as Sam Spade does with Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, if she hadn't managed to flee down a convenient fire escape.
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