Dashiell Hammett

by Cline, Sally; Penzler, Otto;

  Hammett did more than that: he used his unique method, the double-layer effect.

  In “The Tenth Clew” (January 1924), the Op is called to the home of wealthy industrialist Leopold Gantvoort, whose life has been threatened, and finds Gantvoort absent. Gantvoort’s son hears that his father’s head has been bashed in with a typewriter. A neat writerly touch. Nine clues await the Op. He discovers that one has been faked, and that discovery becomes the tenth clue. Beneath every clue lurks another puzzle. Again, Hammett suggests events are seldom what they seem and people rarely what they appear.

  Gantvoort’s fiancée, the exquisite Creeda Dexter, falls under Hammett’s scrutiny. Characteristically, he fastens on Creeda’s eyes—large, deep, amber, restless—always a key to personality. Those eyes expand, contract, and when Creeda becomes fearful “the restless black pupils spread out abruptly.” The Op, willing but unable to trust Creeda, becomes suspicious. Hammett’s theme of the beautiful woman who exploits a man’s trust recurs frequently.

  In “The House in Turk Street” (April 1924), redheaded gangster Elvira tries to tempt the detective. In “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (June 1924), criminal Jeanne Delano attempts to seduce the Op, who resists and sends her to the gallows.

  Though Hammett wrote about people’s emotional experiences, they were rarely based on his own. One significant exception was the perceptive story “Holiday” (July 1923), written at the end of his first year as a professional author.

  Paul Hetherwick, a tubercular patient at Camp Kearney hospital, was a lonely introvert who took a twelve-hour “holiday” in Tijuana. At the racetrack, he lost most of his pension check. At several seedy bars, he lost self-respect with secondhand girls selling thirdhand sex. The loner returned to the hospital having found neither love nor money. The sentiment Hammett may have shared, though the story’s style is coldly unsentimental. It is a fine story, but the autobiographical elements may have scared him from writing further confessional narratives.

  Hammett preferred to ask abstract questions about the human condition: could one be a good person in an evil world? If shared values had collapsed, what did it mean to be good? Could we live our lives without trust?

  In staking out new territory, Hammett had no mentor, no writer friends, merely a single burning ambition. But he kept it secret. The former loafer son of Richard Hammett senior who had been called stubborn and lazy did not seem ambitious to outsiders. Indeed, in a rare autobiographical outburst in Black Mask in November 1924, Hammett described himself as “very lazy,” adding cautiously, “I have no ambition at all in the usual sense of the word.”

  Hammett’s word was not always to be trusted, though. After a tentative start, the ambition he had concealed achieved an astounding success. By 1930, he would be recognized as an innovator in the hard-boiled school and would be likened to Hemingway.

  While, in retrospect, Hammett was en route to success, privately Sam hedged his bets. If he had changed rapidly and irrevocably, Jose had not.

  Jose wanted Sam to succeed. But she did not understand what writing meant to him. She prayed he would get a steady job. Meanwhile, she nursed him. His health had been on an increasing downward spiral since 1923. That October, he was diagnosed with active pulmonary tuberculosis. His weight was down to 131 pounds, and his disability was reassessed as 50 percent. Sick again in 1924, he was reported by public health nurses to be undernourished. Late in 1924, the doctors advised Hammett to separate from his family. His pulmonary tuberculosis had flared up badly, he was highly contagious, and there was severe danger of infection to his young family.

  Mary and Jose first moved across the bay to Fairfax, California, while Hammett wrote “Ruffian’s Wife” (Sunset Magazine, October 1925) about a devoted wife separated from her husband by San Francisco Bay. Then Jose and Sam decided she should take Mary back to Anaconda, Montana, until Sam had recovered. Mother and daughter stayed in Montana about six months while Hammett remained in the Eddy Street apartment trying to write but usually spending twenty hours a day in bed. In the late spring of 1925, Hammett’s doctor advised him his condition had stabilized, so Jose and Mary moved back to San Francisco.

  On May 24, 1926, their second child, Josephine Rebecca, was born at St. Francis Hospital. They were confidently expecting a boy, to be called Richard Thomas.

  When I was about eighteen or twenty, Papa told me that before my birth he hoped I would be a boy. He didn’t say it in a mean way, just kind of wistfully: “Oh, I really thought you were going to be a boy. Sorry about that!” What did I feel? I guess mad and resentful!

  Years later, Hammett reassured Jo that a few minutes after she was born his heart swelled with love.

  By 1926, he was still not able to earn enough to keep his family going despite the fact that between October 1922 and March 1926 he had published forty-two stories in thirty-nine months.

  Frustrated at his inability to earn sufficient money in the pulp market, he had decided to quit writing fiction and look for a full-time job. In March, he put an ad seeking work in the San Francisco Chronicle, listing all his previous jobs from warehouseman to private detective and adding the words “and I can write.” 1 Albert Samuels took him on full-time to write advertising copy for Samuels Jewelers. The pay was $350 a month, which was more than he had earned from pulp fiction. According to Samuels, he did a fine job, writing ads that were romantic yet astute, but the pressure of full-time work sent him back to drink. With his initial paycheck, he rented a second apartment at 408 Turk Street to use as a studio, where he would work, often late at night, on ad designs and layout.

  His health could not keep pace with his energetic new interests, and he came down with hepatitis. Still at Samuels but becoming increasingly sicker, on July 20, 1926, he was found near to death, lying in a pool of blood from his lungs, and was forced to resign. The doctors at the Veterans Bureau advised him, yet again, to send away his children for fear of infection. While living in a furnished room at 20 Monroe Street, Hammett wrote regularly to Mary, who, with her sister and mother, was living in an apartment at 1309 Hyde Street. He enjoyed drawing rabbits, turtles, and elephants and pictures of himself at his desk. After eight weeks away from his job, Hammett reluctantly accepted he was not strong enough to work as a full-time advertising manager. On September 23, 1926, Samuels sent an affidavit in support of his claim to the Veterans Bureau, averring these sad facts. They finally agreed that Hammett was totally disabled. Grudgingly, they granted him $90 a month.

  His relationship with Jose drifted, seeped at the edges, though his delight in his two daughters grew. This, however, was not helped when his illness returned and their family reunion was curtailed. The doctors again urged Sam to live separately, so although he moved with them on October 4, 1926, to 1309 Hyde Street, he was unable to stay more than a few weeks. Jose and the children continued to reside at 1309 Hyde Street until 1927, and while they remained there Sam lived alone within walking distance, at 891 Post Street.

  During this and subsequent absences, Sam wrote regularly and fondly. The following letter, from October 4, 1926, is typical.

  Dearest,

  I did like the pictures very much: you look quite intellectual, or maybe it’s artistic, with the bob . . .

  Here’s the customary portrait for the nitwit [Mary]. Ask her what kind of dumbbell she is, and tell her to kiss Josephine Rebecca for me. I imagine the youngster is a darling by now. . . . And don’t be worrying about my financial affairs. God knows we always staggered through somehow in the past, and I still can. I haven’t missed any meals.

  Yesterday I wrote four poems, and I think maybe one of them is some good.

  Love

  D. 2

  As Sam slowly recovered, Joseph Shaw, Black Mask’s new editor, who took over in November 1926, lured him back to writing. Shaw would increase circulation to 92,000 copies per issue by 1929, but Black Mask was still not in the same league as the Saturday Evening Post. While the Post paid Scott Fitzgerald $4,000 for a story, Shaw paid
Hammett $200. His first story in eleven months, “The Big Knock-Over,” appeared in Black Mask in February 1927.

  Hammett allowed himself to be seduced back to short fiction. By January 15, 1927, he also began to review mystery books for the prestigious Saturday Review of Literature. Joseph Shaw soon encouraged him to write book-length fiction. Hammett needed no persuasion. He had made a promise to Jose:

  “[T]his time I’ll do enough of the murder-and-so-on to make a book. It’s time we were trying prosperity. . . . Pray God I can keep my thoughts on it!” 3

  In some stories, he used plots similar to those in earlier tales (such as “The Tenth Clew” and “Corkscrew”), but he moved from plot-based fictions to character-driven narratives. For books, he would need a consistent theme. He began his search in the social forces that challenged contemporary detectives: political corruption and brazen criminality.

  During spring 1927, Jose took the children to the countryside at Anselmo. She hoped they would all live together in the fall. But in their absence, Sam began an affair with the recently widowed musician/writer Nell Martin. He continued to love and respect Jose, but Nell offered him intellectual energy. It was she who had encouraged him to write reviews of detective novels for the Saturday Review of Literature.

  To Jose, the biggest mystery about Sam was his divided self. She admired him when he was ascetic, disciplined, hardworking. She reluctantly accepted his second self: drinker and womanizer. They lived separately, loved each other and their children, but he no longer bothered to be faithful.

  Jose felt as much resignation as distress. She knew what men were like. What she needed was his company and sense of family. He still tried, while, according to Jo, her mother continued to love him steadfastly. She remained true to Sam even when eventually he lived another life in another place.

  “Probably too true for her own good,” said Jo reflectively. “She was still young and lovely and could easily have divorced and remarried, but it never crossed her mind.”

  Sam approved of Jose, valued her kindness, compassion, reliability, and dedication. He would never entirely discard his first love, his nurse, the sensitive lover who became his only wife. Jose would never quite accept that Sam had left her. He, in turn, never quite left her. He returned—infrequently, but he did return. Even during the middle years of his stormy relationship with Hellman, Jose earthed him with her naturalness, loyalty, and care.

  “He could escape the tensions and madness of Manhattan and Hollywood by returning to us,” said Jo. “She always welcomed him home. If he came home ill or tired, she stayed around to look after him until he was well enough to go away again.”

  As late as 1950, Hammett bought Jose a house in western Los Angeles, and during a six-month period he spent a great deal of time living with her and the children in that house. She would remain poor; he would remain sick; she would hold on to their children; he would hold on to his writing. Neither of them would entirely let go.

  PART THREE

  PROFESSIONAL WRITER, 1927–1934

  CHAPTER 5

  Warren Harding, elected president in 1920, allowed cronyism, vice, and scandal to stain his administration. Key officials, including cabinet members, were accused of corruption while in office. His secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, was later convicted of accepting bribes from wealthy businessmen in what became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. His attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, was accused of accepting bribes from bootleggers and tried twice, with both trials ending in hung juries. His director of Veterans Affairs, charged with the care of wounded veterans from World War I, went on “joy-rides” visiting hospital construction sites across the country, took bribes from local contractors, and sold off stockpiled hospital supplies for personal profit. When Harding died in 1923, his successor, Calvin Coolidge, restored some public confidence by his determination to achieve prosperity, but he whitewashed the previous government by not demanding the resignation of Harding’s sleaze-tainted appointees. This was the era of Prohibition (1920–1933), when the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol were banned through an amendment to the Constitution, but even ordinary people broke the law. Bootlegging gangs made cities into war zones. Organized crime grew strong and terrorized the public, who, at the same time, were fed the notion by newspapers and films that there was something romantic about gangsters like Al Capone.

  Against this context of corruption at all levels of American society, Hammett set the stories that he wrote in the 1920s and would also set his four great novels, on which he was now about to embark. 1

  Hammett continued to provide for Jose and his girls and to see them every weekend, but from 1927 onward he acted more often like a single man. He drank gin and whisky, often heavily. He had a brief fling with his former secretary at Samuels and began to see more of Nell Martin. She, like his editor, Joseph Shaw, was someone with whom he could talk about his plans for his first long fiction, which started life as a four-part serialization in Black Mask in November 1927 entitled “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” but which soon became the novel Red Harvest.

  “Poisonville” appeared monthly between November 1927 and February 1928 to enthusiastic promotion from Shaw. He told readers that the concluding story of the serial was one of the most startling developments ever placed inside detective fiction. In his biographical note about the author, he also upgraded Hammett’s role at Pinkerton’s to being “head of a large detective agency,” thus creating for Hammett the persona of the only writer of contemporary crime fiction who had the inside story on the criminal world.

  “Poisonville” is a savage tale of shameless sleaze in high places, and like The Great Gatsby, it exposes corruption at the center of American life. Its plot juxtaposes real terror and fake romance, and when the hard-boiled Op is summoned to investigate a murder, he stays to clean up the city and save his own soul.

  The western mining city Personville, whose name symbolizes humanity, is called by the locals Poisonville, symbolizing a source of death. Four thugs—the bootlegger Pete the Finn, the gambler Whisper Thaler, the thief and fence Lew Yard, and the crooked police chief Noonan—run Poisonville, which Hammett based on Butte, Montana. Judging from his depiction, in Butte at the time it was hard to distinguish the rule of law from the rule of the mob.

  The violent labor disputes in Butte between Frank Little’s union, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the mining companies, which Hammett had observed between 1917 and 1920, serve as a starting point for Red Harvest. Elihu Willsson, business baron, owner of banks, industry, and in particular the Personville Mining Company, has ruled the town for forty years. To defend his business interests against militant unions like the IWW, he brings in the four thugs to set up a protection racket. However, when the unions are broken, the thugs stay to terrorize the citizens and Elihu’s family. Donald Willsson, Elihu’s son, a newspaper magnate, summons the Op, but before he arrives, Elihu sees his son gunned down. Terrified, Elihu asks for the Op’s help.

  The detective’s strategy is to provoke antagonism between the rival gangs so that ultimately, through about thirty killings, they destroy each other. In this way, the Op starts to replicate the violence he sees, turning it against itself. The poisoned city is a lawless place. The walls of the city are built on lies; truth is impossible to determine. Good and evil are not clearly defined, and though the gang leaders go, the corrupt Willsson remains. The Op’s duty is to restore order in a place with no stable government, no organized religion, no social or moral standards. He is appalled to find that fighting arbitrary chaotic events means he becomes as duplicitous and violent as the crooks.

  He confesses to Dinah Brand, hustler and gold digger, that he has gone “blood simple.” Dinah is the most brazen of Hammett’s heroines who use sex as a weapon of control. Each Hammett detective falls for such a woman, then has to choose between acting out his sexual desires and acting on his moral code.

  The infatuated Op gets drunk with Dinah before she gives him laud
anum to relax him. Instantly, he falls into a hallucinatory coma. When he awakens, Dinah is dead and his hand holds the ice pick plunged into her breast. The horrified Op moves from role of investigator to that of murder suspect.

  Under the guise of crime fiction, Hammett has created an American existential novel. Like a bleak Kafka hero, the Op has to define himself. Hammett’s sparse language, set off against the poisonous blossoms spattered throughout Red Harvest, is similar to Kafka’s clinically controlled style in a story like “Description of a Struggle,” which contrasts with the decadent, overwrought images of Kafka’s peers in the Prague literary world. Both Hammett and Kafka use curt phrases to depict confusion and excess. In 1904, Kafka and his antiheroes do not know where they fit in their worlds. In 1928, Hammett’s Op is as unsure of his place in society as Hammett is of his. Red Harvest investigates this moral and existential uncertainty.

  By 1928, the effects of such uncertainty in Hammett’s personal experience had solidified into a belief that existence was irrational and the world was unintelligible, yet even when arbitrary contingencies guided people’s conduct, they saw their behavior as orderly and meaningful. Hammett translated this belief system into consistent literary themes from Red Harvest onward, and this, too, would help propel him to the forefront of American writing. Red Harvest would be published in book form on February 1, 1929, not long before the Wall Street Crash in late October of that year shook the foundations of the American Dream. The timing was singularly appropriate for a novel that exposed the gaps between how American political justice and social order were expected to work and how they did work.