Dashiell Hammett

by Cline, Sally; Penzler, Otto;

  Jose, who had acquaintances but no close friends, was lonely. She would endure years alone until, as Jo said reflectively, age put out the final spark of hope. “Mother’s life was more tragic than Papa’s. He chose his privacy, but Mama just let her isolation happen.”

  But, fearful, Jose was also strong. “The tough thing about Mama was she never chickened out.”

  In 1932, the Hammett family moved around in Southern California. First they stayed in a bungalow court in Hollywood, then in a house in Beverly Hills, with a Swedish live-in maid. “It did not last,” Jo said. “With Papa away, we became even naughtier, crayoning on walls, disobeying the maid, who left quickly. Mother . . . did not replace her. We moved to Burbank Glendale in West LA, where Papa bought Mama a fancy Packard.”

  But Dashiell forgot to keep up payments, so Jose watched a well-paid stranger drive it away.

  By the mid-thirties Jose had settled in Santa Monica. She and Hammett communicated regularly, which temporarily allayed her fears of divorce.

  “It’s hard to remember how disgraceful divorce was, especially for a Catholic,” Jo recalled. “Lillian was the Boogie Man of my childhood. Her name in my mother’s mouth had a cold, scary sound. It was always ‘Lillian,’—not ‘Lillian Hellman’ or ‘Miss Hellman’ . . . but ‘Lillian’ as if she knew her.” 1

  Jose could not believe that she was the object of Lillian’s jealousy, while Dashiell made it clearer than ever to Lillian that his family was out of bounds of her malice. His unique relationship with Jose was his business, not Lillian’s.

  Jo remembered that her father overspent on extravagant gold-link name bracelets for her and her sister and elaborate boxes of European chocolate for their mother. “Mary and I had Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls as large as we were. Another day he sent us a trunk . . . from F. A. O. Schwartz . . . every child’s magical present.”

  Lillian stood by uneasily, but knew better than to comment. Then the reckless father’s money began to run out. By September 1932, Hammett, still at the luxurious Biltmore on Madison, had few resources left. He was so broke he had to leave the Biltmore.

  Needing a cheap base where he could write seriously, he moved with Lillian, but, incomprehensibly, to the equally expensive Hotel Pierre. When the first month’s bill of $1,000 arrived, he sneaked out, wrapped in thick layers of clothes, his cheeks padded with cotton wool to change his gaunt appearance. Pep West, acting as hotel manager at the Sutton Club on 330 East 56th Street while completing his novel Miss Lonelyhearts, offered them refuge there, along with writers Edmund Wilson, Quentin Reynolds, Erskine Caldwell, and James T. Farrell.

  Two separate decisions changed his life. First, he stopped drinking and settled in to writing The Thin Man. Second, he read Bad Companions, a compendium of criminal case histories by William Roughead. He discovered the Great Drumsheugh Case, in which two female teachers were accused of lesbianism by a pupil who hated them. Hammett had wanted to write a play, and this could have been his material, but instead he would hand it over to his lover.

  Lily and Dash had finally found a way to be together—Hammett, writing The Thin Man, which would be his last published novel, and Hellman, mentored by him, soon writing what would be the first of twelve major Broadway plays.

  On September 29, 1932, Hammett warmed up by reworking minor stories. He tackled some published Sam Spade tales, produced two new stories and the novella Woman in the Dark, a mystery without a detective that focused on Luise Fletcher, the usual, exotic woman with the usual brand of brains, betrayals, and bewitchery. After those rehearsals, Hammett worked on his novel without pause. He finished The Thin Man by May 1933.

  He borrowed from his early sixty-five-page fragment, also called “The Thin Man,” its title and two names: Guild, the fragment’s detective, who is now the novel’s policeman; and Wynant, the fragment’s writer, who is now the novel’s inventor. The plot centers on missing scientist Clyde Wynant, who, implicated in a series of crimes, is then discovered dead.

  To Lillian’s surprise, her alcoholic lover stopped drinking, resisted parties, and refused to go for walks in case he lost his creative thread.

  “Life changed. . . . The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself.” 2

  While Dash wrote, Lillian made mischief. Pep West was engaged to Alice Shepard, a beautiful model. One evening, when Pep drove Alice to Grand Central Station, Lily decided to join them. She made a play for Pep. Alice recognized the signs but felt paralyzed. When she arrived home, Alice telephoned Pep, but her fiancé, already in bed with Lillian, did not answer.

  What were Lillian’s motives? They were mixed: she felt rejected by Hammett’s concentration on his novel; she was jealous of Alice’s outstanding beauty; and she wanted revenge on Pep as the brother of Laura, who had seduced Dash.

  Hammett dedicated The Thin Man to a delighted Lily and told her his witty protagonist Nora Charles was based on her. Lily was less pleased when he added sardonically she was also the model for his villainess.

  In this witty novel, Nick and Nora are stylish spoofs of Lily and Dash, though Hammett omits their financial problems, his violent streak, and Lily’s insecurities. Nick at forty-one and Nora at twenty-six mirror the ages of Hammett and Hellman, who were forty and twenty-seven on publication day. The clever banter between Nora and Nick reflects Hellman and Hammett’s witty discourse. Nick’s drinking habit and cynical philosophy that life is arbitrary and often bleak are recognizably Hammett’s.

  But there are significant differences. In previous novels, Hammett’s concern was to analyze the way men behave toward men, with a consequent stereotyping of his female characters. Here, in his description of an affectionate marriage, a product of the new sexual freedom of the 1920s and 1930s, Nora is a three-dimensional woman almost equal to her man.

  This time, The Thin Man’s characteristic theme that the nature of reality hidden behind plausible appearances is hollow, worthless, and morally ambiguous is presented with humor. Fake falcons abound under other guises, but the context is a sun-spattered society of party people rather than a tormented world of corruption, cruelty, and vicarious violence. The Thin Man still shows shocking brutality in a universe that is randomly predatory, but the style is ironic. All of the three deaths in the novel take place offstage, so that they can be handled with sleek throwaway lines. Hammett has moved away from the graphic descriptions of several brutal fights in The Glass Key or the dehumanizing corruption of Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Violence in this sophisticated comedy of manners is less grim than in The Maltese Falcon.

  The cast is rich, cultivated, and leisured, and several characters are not related to the case—a big break with hard-boiled fiction convention—and include satirical portraits of popular contemporary entertainers, such as Jack Oakie and Oscar Levant.

  The book opens in 1932. San Franciscans Nick and Nora Charles are Christmas shopping in New York, accompanied by Asta, their whimsical schnauzer. The Thin Man, like The Glass Key, no longer uses a working detective but a hero who does no paid work at all. Nick, a former PI and now a hard-drinking playboy, quit his job six years previously, the year after he married Nora, a wealthy lumber heiress who is as fascinated by detection work as was Lillian. Nora has an orderly, logical attitude toward detection, unlike Nick or Dashiell. The couple’s opposing criteria are revealed when Nick explains they “probably” have enough evidence to convict the murderer. Nora won’t accept the word “probably.” She feels Nick’s solution is “not very neat.” Nick assures her with “It’s neat enough to send him to the chair,” but Nora is dissatisfied. “I always thought detectives waited until they had every little detail fixed in.” When Nick explains that probability in an arbitrary world is the best that can be achieved and that “murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life, except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s,” Nora is still dissatisfied. />
  Hammett starts the novel elegantly, with Nick lazily leaning across the bar in a 52nd Street speakeasy. Nick is softer than Spade, brighter than Beaumont. The attractive Dorothy Wynant introduces herself as the daughter of Clyde Wynant, Nick’s former employer. Dorothy is in New York with her mother, the villainess Mimi, once Nick’s lover, now divorced from Clyde and remarried to Christian Jorgenson. They are hunting for the missing Wynant. Nick suggests they phone Herbert Macaulay, an ex-army pal whose life he once saved and now Wynant’s lawyer. Macaulay later informs Nick that Wynant has vanished purposefully to work on a new invention. Suddenly, Wynant’s secretary and mistress, Julia Wolf, is found murdered. Communications start streaming in, apparently from Wynant, desperate to prove his innocence.

  The large cast begins to lie, deceive, and distort. Dorothy’s childhood crush on Nick develops into adult passion, and she tells him her mother beats her and her stepfather abuses her. The strange sadistic teenager Gilbert, Clyde’s son, also becomes infatuated with Nick, while Nick himself has to fend off moves from manipulative Mimi.

  Hammett’s own streak of sexual sadism shows when Nick watches Mimi slash Dorothy across the mouth with the back of her hand, then says lightly to her: “You must come over to our place sometime and bring your little white whips.”

  But his determination to refuse romance with anyone except Nora gives him a different role in Hammett’s oeuvre from previous detectives.

  Reluctantly, Nick agrees to take on the case. Hammett returns to the first-person viewpoint but uses it in the old-fashioned English classic style of keeping the reader in the dark about information Nick possesses. Nick, more flippant than previous investigators, also conceals clues from the police, a method of which Hammett had previously disapproved in other crime writers. In earlier novels, Hammett’s detectives hunt hungrily for evidence; in this novel, the evidence arrives lazily at Nick’s desk.

  As in The Maltese Falcon, there is a sudden curious interruption to the narrative. Hammett writes a two-thousand-word nonfiction account of cannibalism, taken from Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, which focuses on the case of Alfred G. Packer, a prospector who murdered and ate his companions. When Gilbert tells Nick he is fascinated by cannibalism, Nick points him to the Packer case. Nick has already noticed that the teenage boy with sadomasochist feelings is also a sly voyeur with incest fantasies about his mother.

  The cannibal episode, though less successful than Flitcraft, probably stems from a similar thematic motive. It highlights people-eating qualities of several characters: Mimi, Dorothy, Gilbert, Jorgensen, and Macaulay. Certainly, cannibalism has an appeal to Hammett, whose own interest in sadistic sexual activities is evident in this novel. The motif of destruction for the pleasure of doing it is similar to that seen in previous novels, except here the context is social rather than criminal.

  Considered risqué at the time, this was Hammett’s most commercially successful novel. Yet critics debated its artistic merits. Some thought it the weakest of the five; others thought it nearest to serious literary fiction.

  In the thirties, Nick and Nora’s open marriage was viewed as scandalous. Several characters were visibly lecherous. The sadism was satirized, not contained. Several lines of dialogue drew protests. These included phrases by women about going to the can; Nick’s flat-voiced comment that Mimi hated men more than any woman who wasn’t a lesbian; and Nora’s advice to Nick that he should keep his legs crossed when he saw Mimi. Most controversial was the discussion between Nick and Nora after Nick had physically restrained Mimi. Nora asked him: “Tell me the truth, when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?” Nick replied “Oh, a little.” Nora found this funny and said tartly: “If you aren’t a disgusting old lecher.” 3

  Redbook, the women’s magazine, was anxious to publish The Thin Man but only in an expurgated condensed edition. In their December 1933 issue, they cut the offending lines. Knopf cleverly used the censored dialogue in a New York Times advertisement on January 30, 1934: “I don’t believe the question on page 192 of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man has had the slightest influence upon the sale of the book. It takes more than that to make a best seller these days. Twenty thousand don’t buy a book within three weeks to read a five word question.”

  Despite this, the Canadian government banned the novel. The first English edition censored the offending passage. Knopf brought out the unexpurgated US edition on January 8, 1934, and it sold 20,000 copies in the first three weeks and more than 30,000 in the first year. Hammett wrote his own jacket copy and included a self-portrait in an elegant tweed suit and wide-brimmed hat, casually carrying a cane. Though the title The Thin Man referred to Wynant, Hammett’s photo on the cover led people to label the author and/or the hero Nick as the Thin Man.

  Interestingly, in every publicity blurb Hammett described himself as married with two children. On January 22, he was thankful that he could at last write from the Lombardy Hotel to tell Jose their financial troubles were over. He said if God did not intervene, they would be out of debt and on the road to security.

  He gave Jose three exciting pieces of information. First, his swell book had fine reviews. He sent her the clippings. The previous week, it had sold better than any other in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Secondly, he told her MGM was buying the movie rights for $21,000. He promised to send her a thousand as soon as the money arrived, then more each week, regularly. His third piece of news amazed her. He was to write the story for a cartoon strip for Hearst’s syndicate. That would bring him in a regular income. 4 In its first eighteen months, The Thin Man sold 34,000 copies at $2 each.

  The following week, on January 29, King Features, owned by William Randolph Hearst, launched Secret Agent X-9, a daily comic strip with words by Hammett and drawings by Alex Raymond. We are out of the woods, he told Jose. He promised her this time he would stay out.

  As he wrote his letter, the Thin Man was rich again.

  Many other writers, clerks, and tradespeople in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world were not faring so well. Many thousands were still suffering dire unemployment and unbearably low wages.

  The previous year, 1933, when Adolf Hitler, the forty-three-year-old leader of the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party had become chancellor of Germany, in Hammett’s America, Franklin D. Roosevelt had become the thirty-second president of the United States. Roosevelt had immediately set into motion his New Deal to alleviate the Depression. He focused on three areas that have become known as the three Rs: relief for the unemployed and the poor, recovery of the economy to pre-Depression levels, and reform of the financial system, so that a repeat of the disastrous situation could not occur.

  In his first hundred days, he sent bills to Congress and set out a number of optimistic programs that included cutting pay of government workers; cutting government spending by 15 percent; insuring people’s deposits in banks against losses to restore their confidence in the banking system; an Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), which paid farmers to limit the amount of crops they grew, or to dig back into the ground crops already grown; and an act that forced employers to deal with trade unions and allowed workers to take part in collective bargaining. He signed an act in March that permitted sale of 3.2 beer and wine—thus effectively ending Prohibition before the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it at the end of 1933, while generating tax revenue for the government and allowing the community to feel better about drinking.

  But his programs to restore the economy worked slowly, and by 1939, there were still ten million unemployed.

  In his fiction, Hammett rarely depicts the effects of the Depression directly. The world of Nick and Nora in The Thin Man is complete escapism, perhaps necessary for his readers. Hammett and a princely group of well-paid artists and writers stood apart from their fellow men and women and appeared to barely comprehend their hardships.

  Between 1933 and 1950, Hammett’s total earnings from the novel, its spin-offs,
and its characters used in movies produced in the thirties and forties amounted to almost a million dollars. MGM made a successful film of The Thin Man starring Myrna Loy, released in June 1934, for which the screenplay was written in a mere three weeks by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who became Hammett’s good friends.

  Five successes behind him, Hammett turned his attention to Lily’s career. He had been saving powerful material for a play that he wanted to write himself but which he saw as perfect for Hellman’s first drama.

  During winter 1933–34, Dashiell and Lillian left the Sutton Club Hotel for Homestead, Florida, to work on it. They got drunk for a few weeks in Miami, then moved to a primitive fishing camp in Key Largo, where they stayed through the spring and summer, fishing by day, reading at night, and working on the play. Hellman decided it was one of their finest years, because they discovered they got along best in the country and without people.

  In Homestead, Hellman feverishly drafted The Children’s Hour, the play based on the plot Hammett had found for her. Hammett read and reread every draft, criticizing, mentoring, editing, judging, making her write, rewrite, rewrite the rewrites, over and over. He was determined that she would achieve his own goal of meticulous perfection.

  They put money down on a small lot and planned to build a house there. When they eventually returned to New York City, they missed Homestead so much that in spring 1934 they returned for a few weeks.

  On March 24, 1934, Hammett’s last short story, “This Little Pig,” a satirical tale about the movie industry, was published by Collier’s. Later in the year, on September 27, Universal would buy his screen story “On the Make,” which they would release under the title Mister Dynamite in May 1935, but Hammett’s output was now quite sparse. As Hammett’s writing life wound down, Hellman’s began to take fire.