by Nathan Ward
Likewise, Hammett kept his own name off his debut in The Black Mask, using the pseudonym Peter Collinson, and allegedly saving his real name for poetry.** But if he saw publishing in The Black Mask as slumming it, he certainly got over this view with time, writing mostly for lower-paying crime magazines by the mid-twenties.
“The Road Home” had no tricks or acts of genius in its detection, but an American view of crime acquired by the writer as a Pinkerton: A lean “manhunter” named Hagedorn has spent two years tracking his subject to a jungly corner of Burma. Hagedorn intends to bring back his prisoner to New York, but Barnes, who’s claimed a local gem bed worth a criminal fortune, offers Hagedorn a piece of his kingdom if he’ll return home with false proof of the crook’s death. Instead of the detective following clues to snare his man, Hammett begins mid-showdown on a river, Barnes shouting out his bribe offer and Hagedorn quietly considering the criminal’s invitation to take his share of the gems. Barnes escapes ashore, forcing the issue; Hagedorn hesitates, then follows him into the trees, saying, “Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewels of his.” It’s left unclear whether Hagedorn will do the right thing or even survive his trek into the jungle, a challenge to the pieties of the detective story. “The puzzle isn’t so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it,” Hammett would say.
“The Road Home” is flavored with words that its author, who had never been overseas, clearly dug out of the public library (muggar, Mran-ma, jahaz), but the premise derives from his firsthand knowledge of Pinkerton work: The situation resembles a less exotic story Hammett liked to tell of himself, of shadowing a suspicious jewel salesman named Finsterwald from Philadelphia to Savannah, only to have the thief finally approach him in a public park as looking vaguely “familiar” and offer him a share of his swindle. (Hammett turned him in.) This proposition was dramatically interesting, especially if the reader was left unsure of the detective’s answer, a daring step into the jungle for this kind of fiction.
A writer without Hammett’s work experience might have shied away from a two-year manhunt overseas as too bold a plot to be believed. But Hammett would have heard plenty such tales around the detectives’ room: William R. Sayers’s two years spent chasing a man through Europe were hardly the toughest part of a career in which he also rode with the Pinkerton crew that ran down the Wild Bunch gang. (And William Pinkerton himself had worked months in London and Havana to bring back the brilliant English forger Austin Bidwell.)4
Hammett continued to cover all his bases as a struggling freelancer, sending out an ambitious range of apprentice work—poems, essays, sketches. It is probable, though, as the writer Vince Emery suggests, that his researches in the public library led him to create a series character, inspired both by his irritation with the hackneyed detective fiction he saw in the pulps and on the theory that stories with a known character would eventually command a better price.
His next crime story, “Arson Plus,” had a striding confidence that his other work lacked, from its opening sentence in which a detective rolls a cigar across the desk of a fat small-town sheriff to earn his cooperation. The story introduced a savvy little hero whose adventures allowed Hammett to exploit both his detecting experiences and growing knowledge of San Francisco. His narrator was unnamed but spoke in the style of the classic op reports, tracing his days and nights of methodical plugging—interviewing comely nieces and elderly house servants, matching alibis against hotel registers, visiting a dead man’s grocer, and even checking his final laundry ticket. Of all the available ways to write about detecting since Edgar Allan Poe’s Parisian investigator C. Auguste Dupin first appeared in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Hammett opted to do something that grew out of what he had actually been trained for: creating elevated stories from the characters and situations he knew well, instead of adding to the fiction club of gentleman puzzlers or quick-draw artists. This approach would eventually set crime writing on its head.
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Hammett’s nameless Op first appeared in October 1923, when The Black Mask published “Arson Plus” (again by “Peter Collinson”). Its narrator resembles many of the operatives whose dispatches are collected in the Pinkerton archives at the Library of Congress, only unlike most of the standard op reports Hammett knew well, “Arson Plus” begins to make literature out of the tedium of investigation:
Having ruined our shoe-shines, McClump and I got back in our machine and swung off in a circle around the place, calling at all the houses within a mile radius, and getting little besides jolts for our trouble.
A skinny near-convalescent writing about his little man of action, Hammett had created a streetwise yet incorruptible hero who is devoted to the job at hand, however unsavory the client, a code Hammett had absorbed from Pinkerton’s:
“Next morning, at the address McClump had given me—a rather elaborate apartment building on California Street—I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress.” In ordinary circumstances, Mrs. Trowbridge’s appearance would have made it well worth the wait, explains the Op, “But I was a busy, middle-aged detective, who was fuming over having his time wasted; and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty. However, I smothered my grouch, apologized for disturbing her at such an early hour, and got down to business.” The detective must smother all kinds of distracting feelings to keep his eye on the job.
These lines mark one of many times Hammett’s Op declines to name himself—though he does describe himself as portly, around forty, and five foot six—while slogging his way through twenty-six stories, two linked novellas, and two full-length novels.
In May of that year, The Black Mask had published the first story about a “tough guy” private investigator, Terry Mack. Chronologically, Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” ran weeks ahead of Hammett’s debut of his Continental Op that fall. But beyond being set inside a detective’s office, the two stories had very little in common. Daly’s “Three Gun” Terry character was the flashy, sharpshooting opposite of the Op, while another of Daly’s heroes, Race Williams, debuted in the June 1 issue in a timely story about an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, “Knights of the Open Palm.” It was just the kind of thing Hammett was trying to correct in detective fiction, unrealistic action delivered in an unconvincing vernacular: “I’m what you might call a middleman—just a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks. Oh, there ain’t no doubt that both the cops and the crooks take me for a gun, but I ain’t—not rightly speaking.”5
By comparison, Hammett’s Op had wrung some handy knowledge from his rough life of sleuthing: Abductions rarely occur at night or in cities, and those that do more likely are staged by the victim for ransom; no one can strangle you from the front if your arms are free to reach up and snap his pinkies; when a “Chinese” starts shooting, he always empties his gun; you can shadow anyone pretty naturally if you don’t meet the subject’s eye; it’s best to stand aside of the door during “unannounced” visits in case bullets burst through it; even a light tap to the head with a metal revolver has a surprisingly concussive effect; you can often draw good information or even a confession “out of a feeble nature” by putting your face close to the subject’s and talking loudly; people talk more freely in a room with a closed door; and any hop head who tells you his name is “John Ryan” is not to be trusted (“it’s the John Smith of yeggdom”).
Hammett’s Op is suspicious of brilliance and puts his faith in doing the basic parts of his job well and hoping for occasional “flashes of intelligence.” Though he is hard or congenial as the situation requires, this “little block of a man” sometimes surprises himself with what he’ll do for the job, such as shooting a woman criminal in the leg who had gambled that gallantry would leave him unable to fire as she fled. (“I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.”) If he goes home, he is often interrupted while changing into his pajamas or is jang
led awake by a call from his chilly master at the agency, known only as the Old Man. The Op knows his crooks, and strikes the balance of criminal expertise, anonymity, and loyalty to the client that Allan Pinkerton had prescribed.
The idea that he was modeled on a particular Pinkerton drawn from life comes mainly from Hammett, as relayed by one half of the writing team of Ellery Queen, Frederic Dannay, who later edited a number of Hammett paperback collections. Sometime in the late thirties, Dannay had dined with Hammett at Lüchow’s, the cavernous, celebrated German restaurant on Fourteenth Street in New York City known for its house band and beer garden specialties.6 After talking about many subjects and sampling “various liquids ranging from pale yellow to dark brown,” Dannay remembered, the “amber fluids” at last loosened Hammett’s tongue and he gave up “the lowdown” about his character. The Op was based “on a real-life person—James (Jimmy) Wright, Assistant Superintendent, in the good old days, of Pinkerton’s Baltimore agency, under whom Dashiell Hammett actually worked.”7
The key to this story might be the amber fluids drunk by the diners and a bit of detective’s whimsy on Hammett’s part, since the name he cited went back decades as a Pinkerton alias. As explained earlier, the existence of a genuine Jimmy Wright is difficult to confirm. If anyone, the Op better resembles Hammett’s real San Francisco boss Phil Geauque, still working as an active Secret Service agent in the thirties. It’s most likely, though, that the Op was a composite or “type,” as Hammett described his character in 1929:
I’ve worked with half a dozen men who might be he with few changes. Though he may be “different” in fiction, he is almost pure “type” in life. I’ve always tried to hold him as close to the “type” as possible because what I see in him is a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit—as callous and brutal and cynical as is necessary—towards a dim goal, with nothing to push or pull him towards it except that he’d been hired to reach it—a sort of Manuel whose saying is: “The job’s got to be done.”8
All Pinkertons signed an agreement against disclosure, and the fate of the cowboy detective Charlie Siringo had shown that even the most sanitized detective memoir could be punished by the Pinkertons. So Hammett had to create his own mythical agency, as lawyers had forced poor Siringo to do. A fan of inside jokes to amuse himself, Hammett named the firm that employed his Op the Continental Detective Agency, after the Continental Building in Baltimore, where he had first been hired by Pinkerton’s, and he gave it a location that is clearly modeled on the Flood Building in San Francisco. A later story in True Detective magazine was even credited “By Dashiell Hammett of the Continental Detective Agency.” In a sense, Hammett worked there the rest of his life.
Following “Arson Plus,” a second Op story, “Slippery Fingers,” ran in the October 15 issue of The Black Mask, also attributed to “Peter Collinson.” “Slippery Fingers” does not rank with Hammett’s best, but it is significant for another reason. The murderer in the tale schemes with an expert to make counterfeit gelatin fingerprints, which he wears after leaving his real bloody prints all over the death scene. This kind of forgery seemed plausible to many in 1923, as the criminal science of fingerprint identification was taking hold with the public, but not to Berkeley’s police chief August Vollmer, a champion of fingerprint identification and of the emerging lie detector technology. Vollmer was a highly successful and gentlemanly crime fighter with a national reputation, recently elected president of the International Organization of Chiefs of Police, whose new techniques William Pinkerton himself had approved the year before.
Transferring genuine prints from one crime scene to another might be possible, Vollmer told the Chronicle that fall, but “Close inspection of any forged finger-print will soon cause detection.” This was alarming news to the young author of a new story featuring such forgery. Clearly worried over possible challenges to his story and his knowledge as an ex-detective, Hammett wrote to the editor at The Black Mask:
It may be that what Farr does in my story would be considered by Mr. Vollmer a transference rather than a forgery. But whichever it is, I think there is no longer reasonable room for doubt that fingerprints can be successfully forged. I have seen forged prints that to me seemed perfect, but, not being even an amateur in that line, my opinion isn’t worth much.9
Hammett contradicts the only expert he has named, August Vollmer,† and then concludes that “quite a number of those qualified to speak on the subject will agree with me,” and while claiming to have seen forged prints, he admits he would be unable to recognize them, a shrewd dodge. Both The Black Mask and a competitor, Detective Story Magazine, had started their own fingerprint departments the year before, and Hammett may have particularly feared a challenge to his forensics knowledge from a house specialist. “I found I could sell the stories easily when it became known I had been a Pinkerton man,” he remembered. “People thought my stuff was authentic.” This letter is a rare example of Hammett defending his authenticity, which was so important to the reception of what he wrote and the writer he became.
Having now published at the high and lower ends of the magazine spectrum, he brought his worldly detective voice to the cultured readers of The Smart Set, where he had broken in with his short, droll “The Parthian Shot” the year before and published two other sketches since. “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” a deadpan teaser of twenty-nine authentic-sounding snippets and scenes from his former profession, appeared in the March 1923 issue. In it, he carefully never mentioned Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency but wrote as “Dashiell Hammett” in the role he would play the rest of his life, of the literate ex-detective.
He began:
Wishing to get some information from some members of the W.C.T.U. in an Oregon city, I introduced myself as the secretary of the Butte Civic Purity League. One of them read me a long discourse on the erotic effects of cigarettes on young girls. Subsequent experiments proved this tip worthless.
Hammett knew the Smart Set audience well. Aiming to entertain but not offend, he recalled nothing as ugly as strikebreaking, but his selections highlighted the kind of quirky jobs Pinkerton’s might have asked of its operatives, without naming the agency or its clients—discharging a woman’s housekeeper for her; circulating among unimpressive forgers, pickpockets, and embezzlers scattered among cities and countryside. Most house burglars “live on their women,” he observed, while “Of all the men embezzling from their employers with whom I have had contact, I can’t remember a dozen who smoked, drank, or had any of the vices in which bonding companies are so interested.” A forger he knew left his wife because she had learned to smoke cigarettes while he was in prison. As biography, “Memoirs” is sadly slim, but anything more specific might have been unpublishable, drawing the quick wrath of Pinkerton’s, and wouldn’t have fit Smart Set’s high tone.
True or even partially true, these tales certainly went down more easily the way Hammett told them, but there was a limit. “I once knew a man who stole a Ferris wheel,” he reported, a claim for only the truest believers. (A decade later he would add that he had found the giant stolen ride at a competing amusement park and resented reports since made that he had “stolen” it himself, as if rescuing the enormous wheel were more believable than stealing it.)
“I was a pretty good sleuth,” Hammett boasted in 1929, “but a bit overrated because of the plausibility with which I could explain away my failures, proving them inevitable and no fault of mine.” In fact, plausibility would be a key part of his art.
While his first writing sales were a boost to his spirits, they did not add up to a living. As a satirist or poet he might not have distinguished himself from the pack, but the credibly gritty feel of his crime writings was already setting them apart from the more lurid and fanciful stuff found in detective magazines.
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* To further cloud the issue of his employment, Hammett listed himself in the 1923 City Directory as “broker,” a poss
ible lingering cover for sleuthing work.
** “Peter Collins” was an old carnival term for “Nobody” that Hammett might have learned as an operative. “Peter Collinson” therefore meant “Son of Nobody.” In publishing this first detective story, he might also have feared repercussions from the Agency, although he also used the “Collinson” byline for such harmless early efforts as “The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody.”
† Despite his pronouncements on the subject, Vollmer was pranked himself by one of his Berkeley officers, who claimed to have successfully transferred Vollmer’s own prints to a crime scene, stoking the debate about fingerprint forgery/transference and outraging his boss.
Chapter VIII
THE OLD MAN
We who worked under him were proud of his cold-bloodedness.
—THE BIG KNOCKOVER (1924)*
Down the years, Hammett must have wondered what might have happened had he gone on chasing crooks for the agency; whether, once he had run out his string as an operative, he could have settled into a desk job bossing younger detectives. His Continental Op certainly speculates about the mental toll of such a life from time to time, still huffing after grifters though he is old enough to leave the field to the kids. The Op fears few things, but one of them is clearly his boss at the Continental’s San Francisco branch, known only as the Old Man, a pitiless, white-haired picture of what “fifty years of crook-hunting” can do to a human being. The Old Man is the Op’s cold-blooded future if he stays on, emptied of “everything except brains and a soft-spoken, gently smiling politeness” that is the same no matter how things turn out. Whatever the Op does in the service of his job, he must answer for in his reports to the Old Man, or skirt the truth and risk catching “merry hell.” Pontius Pilate, the ops call the Old Man privately, because he smiles sending them out on dicey missions to be “crucified.”