Dashiell Hammett

by Cline, Sally; Penzler, Otto;

  In his subsequent books, Hammett would continue to investigate how people created their own sense of reality and produced alternative versions of it. In Red Harvest, those versions were linked to characters’ fixations: The Op was obsessed with his job; Elihu blindly believed in control; Dinah was infatuated with money. Characters lived out those compulsions as if they were “truths.” When their versions of reality collapsed, their lives disintegrated. 2

  On February 11, 1928, Hammett sent the typescript, unsolicited, in its four parts to Blanche and Alfred Knopf’s New York publishing house.

  Gentlemen,

  Here with an action-detective novel for your consideration. If you don’t care to publish it, will you kindly return it by express, collect.

  By way of introducing myself: I was a Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency operative . . . more recently, have published fiction, book reviews, verse, sketches . . . in twenty or twenty-five magazines, including the old Smart Set . . . 3

  Blanche Knopf was America’s first female publisher of a major company in Western literary society at a time when women, Jews, and blacks faced major taboos in the publishing world. Her radical flair, energy, and discerning literary taste soon ensured her position as the woman behind some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century across the globe. By her death in 1966, twenty-seven Knopf writers had won Pulitzer prizes for literature and sixteen the Nobel Prize for literature.

  Hammett was unbelievably fortunate to have found such an exciting, innovative house for his work. Blanche decided to take him on when no other literary publisher would touch crime. She took a risk on Hammett and his hard-boiled detectives, and it paid off.

  Her reply came quickly:

  March 12th 1928

  Dear Mr. Hammett:

  We have read POISONVILLE with a great deal of interest.

  I would like to suggest some revisions, and I hope you won’t object to them . . . the violence seems piled on too heavily; so many killings on a page I believe make the reader doubt the story, and instead of the continued suspense and feeling of horror, the interest slackens. One of our readers writes:

  “I think the best way to cut this would be to take Lew Yard out of the story entirely. He never figures personally, but . . . he is responsible for a good deal of violence that could be left out . . .

  “Another episode that could be entirely cut is the dynamiting of the Police Station. . . . The brief shooting episode on page 176 could be cut profitably . . .”

  . . . you may have some ideas of your own regarding all this, and I certainly hope you will not in any way resent our suggestions. There is no question whatever that we are keen about the mss, and with the necessary changes, I think it would have a good chance. 4

  Hammett was stunned. Those words: “There is no question whatever that we are keen about the mss” were in front of him, on paper. Someone, some special person who knew about words, turned words into books, would turn his words into a book! It was a joy like no other.

  Violence, eh? Too much violence? What did he think of that? Hammett had included a great deal of violence, like his fellow crime writers, but unlike them, he made a different use of its effect. 5 Although the exaggeration of the mortality rate made Blanche’s reader numb, Hammett was surprisingly sensitive about bloodletting, and most murders occurred offstage. Even their later reports gave few brutal details. The prose, like Hemingway’s, was drained of emotion. Where brutality arose, it was not from Hammett’s language but from readers’ responses to terrible events.

  Blanche saw this, but she still wanted fewer deaths. Persuasively, she finished her letter on an irresistible question.

  Won’t you tell me something about your ideas for detective stories, and whether you have any more under way?

  Hoping that we will be able to get together on POISONVILLE (a hopeless title by the way) I am,

  Yours faithfully,

  Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf

  Hammett’s new special person wanted to see more. Of course, she was wrong about his title. Hopeless indeed! He tried “Poisonville” out on several retail booksellers. They agreed with Blanche.

  “I’m beginning to suspect which one of us is wrong,” he wrote back wittily on March 20, 1928, enclosing eight alternatives. She chose Red Harvest. He told her he would make the necessary changes; he did not, however, cut Lew Yard but revised the dynamiting of Yard’s house to an offstage shooting.

  Blanche was surprised when he told her that he not only had a new book, The Dain Curse, which would be finished next month, with serial rights already sold to Black Mask, but he had a new goal. He planned to depart from that type of novel. He would try “adapting the stream-of-consciousness method, conveniently modified, to a detective story, carrying the reader along with the detective.”

  He would show readers everything the detective found as he found it. The reader would receive the Op’s conclusions as he reached them, and the solution would break on both reader and detective together. He told Blanche:

  “I’m one of the few—if there are any more—people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously.”

  He wanted to write crime fiction without sticking to any tradition. He burst with ambition: “Some day somebody’s going to make ‘literature’ of it . . . and I’m selfish enough to have my hopes.” 6

  Blanche already believed in him. Together, they worked toward making this wild statement come true.

  Red Harvest, dedicated to Shaw, appeared the same year as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and was so successful that some contemporary reviewers suggested Hammett’s dialogue outstripped Hemingway’s. Herbert Asbury in Bookman (March 29, 1929) said it was “the liveliest detective story that has been published in a decade.” He added: “It is doubtful if even Ernest Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue.” Walter R. Brooks wrote in Outlook and Independent: “We recommend this one without reservation. We gave it A plus before we’d finished the first chapter” (February 13, 1929). Hammett and Blanche were delighted at the reviews. Later, André Gide wrote in his 1943 journal: “in Red Harvest those dialogues . . . are such as to give pointers to Hemingway or even to Faulkner.” 7

  Over the years, the reviews kept coming in as each generation rediscovered the book. On February 7, 1944, in New Republic magazine, Gide’s admiration still had not dimmed: “Hammett’s dialogues, in which every character is trying to deceive all the others and in which the truth slowly becomes visible through a fog of deception, can be compared only with the best of Hemingway.”

  Hammett’s success as a novelist who wrote clever dialogue came not long after Warner Brothers released the first sound motion picture, The Jazz Singer (October 1927) with Al Jolson, who not only sang but spoke several lines of dialogue. By 1930, almost no silent films would be made. Movie producers wanted writers who could turn out crackling dialogue.

  Early in 1928, Hammett had already begun to explore film possibilities. He sent Fox Studios in Hollywood several stories, including “Poisonville.” By April 1928, he told Blanche Knopf that he would be using filmable plots for his future books. That same April, Fox Studios wrote back to Hammett thanking him for the material he had sent, but too restless to wait, Hammett went to Hollywood in June. He didn’t succeed in getting a deal, but after Knopf had published Red Harvest on February 1, 1929, Paramount secured the movie rights. Paramount subsequently negotiated with him for original film scripts. They released the movie Roadhouse Nights, based on Red Harvest, in February 1930.

  Hammett sent Knopf The Dain Curse (later serialized in Black Mask) on June 25, 1928. Alfred Knopf wrote to accept it on July 10, 1928, but advised Hammett the book needed heavy revisions. Blanche and editor Harry Block suggested he cut some characters and decrease the violence.

  Hammett, hard at work on The Maltese Falcon, was less willing to spend time revising The Dain Curse. But he was not yet in a position to dictate, so he made some lengthy repairs. The plot, though highly complex, was experimental and powerfull
y symbolic.

  He had developed the plot from his short story “The Scorched Face” (May 1925), which focused on a young, wealthy set driven to drugs by a religious sex cult. It featured another dangerous beauty, Gabrielle Leggett, who thought she had inherited the Dain family curse, which, in turn, compelled her to believe she had caused eight deaths. The Op’s mission in the story was to clean up Gabrielle’s morphine addiction.

  In The Dain Curse, set in San Francisco, the Continental Op is called in to investigate what seems to be a theft of diamonds from the well-connected family of Edgar Leggett, a scientist who had the jewels in his possession. As in the story, the plot revolves around an alleged curse on the Dain family said to cause the sudden deaths of people close to them. Both Edgar Leggett’s second wife and his daughter, Gabrielle, are Dains. The novel is divided into three parts; each relates to a different mystery, and each contains a murder. The Op soon realizes that the jewels are merely the starting point for his investigation when it appears as if Edgar Leggett has committed suicide with a pistol in his own laboratory. A note that purports to be a suicide note from Leggett is found by the body. In it Leggett confesses that under his real name of Maurice de Mayenne he had murdered his first wife, Lily, many years ago, had been convicted of that crime, imprisoned, then escaped, and now under his assumed name remains a fugitive from justice. The Op quickly discovers that the apparent suicide was a murder and the note was actually written because Leggett intended to run away again and did not want his second wife, Alice, or his daughter, Gabrielle, implicated in anything.

  Gabrielle Leggett believes she has inherited the family curse, and that, as a four-year-old child, she herself had murdered her mother, Lily. The Op later learns that Alice, Leggett’s second wife, was Lily’s sister. Alice loved Leggett too, and it was she who had arranged Lily’s murder. She had taught her young niece to play a game with guns so the child would be seen as the murderer, but Leggett took the blame. After he escaped from Devil’s Island, he was found hiding out in San Francisco by Alice and Gabrielle, who had been searching for him. Alice then forced Leggett into marriage with her.

  At the start of the novel, Gabrielle is addicted to morphine and involved in a religious cult. When she runs away from the cult, the Op protects her and helps her recover from her addiction. She later marries her fiancé, Eric Collinson. The Op confides his views on the case to his writer acquaintance, Owen Fitzstephan, who plays an important role in the plot. Fitzstephan is also a Dain and Gabrielle’s second cousin.

  The novel’s first line, “It was a diamond all right,” establishes a conflict between appearances and reality at the outset that the author continues to probe. Diamonds are set into the novel’s fabric. Diamonds were a subject Hammett knew about from his years with Samuels, the jeweler, to whom he dedicated the book. 8

  The first trick in the story is that the scientist, Leggett, has used artificial coloring to make imperfect diamonds that he has borrowed from a diamond company look perfect, thereby disguising them. He tells the Op that a burglar has stolen them from the cabinet he kept them in, but the diamonds are in fact not missing, merely disguised. The apparently stolen diamonds are thus only a facet of Leggett’s “robbery.” This theme of “knowing what is real” pervades all Hammett’s fiction. The Op becomes the sole arbiter of reality. Yet, each time the Op destroys one fiction produced by a character, he realizes there is another fiction behind the one he just destroyed.

  Unlike the Op’s role in Red Harvest, where he was an active participant in the action throughout, here he is largely a bystander, analyst, interpreter. Yet, even as he interprets the disorderly events, he is honest enough to say that any order and clarity he brings to the chaotic situation may only be one possible version of reality. At one point, the Op tells Fitzstephan that “one guess at the truth is about as good as another.” 9

  The Op has to force himself not to seduce Gabrielle before he is able to cure her addiction. He discovers that the murderer is Owen Fitzstephan, who is revealed as a psychopath who has fallen obsessively in love with his cousin. It turns out Fitzstephan had persuaded Gabrielle to join the dangerous cult. He tries to persuade her stepmother, Alice, to murder Leggett, and when Alice refuses he kills him himself. He then murders Alice; Gabrielle’s doctor, when the doctor learns of his connection to the cult; and Gabrielle’s husband.

  The writer Fitzstephan may be the murderer, but his symbolic role is also as a fellow novelist. He and Hammett both engaged in the creation of a reality. Both were dedicated to the pursuit of what was truth to them. Fitzstephan, like Hammett, discovered that we could make sense only of what we knew, and yet that knowledge was always limited and changeable.

  Each section of The Dain Curse presents readers with a puzzle and ends with an apparent solution. But just as in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (where each of its three novellas also proposes a puzzle and concludes with a solution that changes the previous ending), in The Dain Curse each solution in turn alters the meaning and answer to the previous riddle.

  In the legend of the Holy Grail, innocence and purity in the figure of a heroic knight are set against evil forces. The Dain Curse is a twisted Holy Grail allegory, and it was the first American novel to paint an accurate picture of Californian mysticism. At that time, there existed approximately four hundred cults in Southern California alone, according to one estimate. But the fact that there are no final answers in this Op inquiry made it a literary work that developed Hammett’s central theme: the arbitrary basis of truth.

  Knopf published The Dain Curse on July 19, 1929. The critics were highly complimentary. They called the plot gripping, the dialogue cutting, and the revelation of the novelist as the criminal surprising yet explicable. The first review, in The New York Times, was favorable. The New York Herald Tribune praised the book for its astonishing speed and weird characters. In Outlook and Independent (July 31, 1929), Walter R. Brooks wrote: “We can think of only one story of this kind better than the second book of Mr. Hammett’s and that is his first book.”

  The sales of The Dain Curse were better than for Red Harvest, and it was the first Hammett novel to be published by Knopf in England as well, where it would appear in January 1930. British reviewers would call Hammett fresh and inspired.

  Happily, he reviewed his life.

  In Jose, he had a nurse for his fragile body. In Blanche, he had a mentor for his writing. What he lacked was a companion he respected intellectually, who would stimulate his mind and challenge his views.

  His final brief stab at family life as a young San Francisco–based writer was in the fall of 1929 at 1155 Leavenworth Avenue. But he wavered. He knew New York was the center of publishing. Ambitious and enthusiastic, he was certain the only way to establish his identity as a writer and obtain material success was to move to Manhattan.

  Nell Martin, Hammett’s part-time lover, was already in New York and had invited him to stay with her. Did she believe that she was the draw? That his writing would last and so would their affair? Certainly, she dedicated her novel Lovers Should Marry to Hammett. He admired her radical ideas but privately thought she wrote fluffy fiction. He did not respect her work as she did his.

  Hammett’s reliance on Jose’s trust meant that he told her about Nell’s invitation. Jose was not bothered. She knew Nell would not last. She was right.

  By October 18, 1929, Hammett had left for New York and got an apartment at 155 East 30th Street. Intellectually, he had left several years before, and Jose knew it. Yet, ambivalences remained. Though he left Jose in 1929, when The Maltese Falcon was published on Valentine’s Day, 1930, his dedication was “To Jose.”

  She did not feel Sam was deserting her but was following his ambition. Jo recalls: “Mother took Mary and me by train to Los Angeles. I don’t think she felt that she was being abandoned or that it was the end of the marriage. There was sort of a celebration before we left. My father bought her a big steamer trunk and sent out for a Chinese dinner. From the tone of his letters you
can feel the mood—he’d made it big, and their money problems were over.”

  Jose looked forward to the move to Los Angeles. Her Montana relatives visited there in winter, and she had the chance to have a house and yard. Jo’s mother had never been a city girl. As Jose prepared to depart, she proudly labeled her luggage “Mrs. D. Hammett,” the name crucial to her.

  As Sam packed his smaller case, his new name, Dashiell Hammett, was now crucial to him, too. When Sam had signed his early stories Nobody’s Son, after his mother Annie’s death, that label had reflected not only grief but feelings of isolation in a writers’ world he was not yet part of. Now it was his world.

  CHAPTER 6

  Blanche Knopf knew that, in publishing Dashiell Hammett, she had discovered the real thing, a genuine new man of letters, an eccentric who was a streetwise litterateur, some said the equal of Hemingway. Eagerly, on the brink of summer 1929, Blanche awaited the manuscript of The Maltese Falcon.

  But when on June 14, 1929, Hammett posted her the final draft from San Francisco, she was abroad. He wanted Blanche to admire his new racy title (certainly not “hopeless”) and to appreciate his growing artistic mastery. He had to make do with the words “swell title” from editor Harry Block. Hammett told Block on June 16 he was “fairly confident that it was by far the best thing that I have done.”

  Confident, yes, but also financially stretched. Humorously, he told his savior publishers in his cover letter “I am . . . desperately in need of all the money I can scrape up. If there is any truth in these rumors . . . about advances against royalties, will you do the best you can for me?”

  He felt excited enough to ask Block to “go a little easy on the editing.”

  Block agreed on only minor revisions. He said the new detective Sam Spade’s desire for the dangerous Brigid was described too bluntly, and he objected fiercely to some homosexual parts. He told Hammett that, whereas they might have been acceptable in an “ordinary novel,” they did not fit the detective genre. Hammett was having none of this.