by Nathan Ward
Arney’s discovery of the apartment would take him deep inside the Hammett cult as he lived with Sam Spade for fourteen years. “I did not know for sure that it was really Spade’s apartment until I sat in there and read the novel,” Arney recalls. “Now, that was spooky. For the first months, it was incredibly spooky, to the point where it was hard to get to sleep at night.”3
Arney noticed that his apartment had a bend and a small closet in the front passageway, just like Sam’s, and that there was a door between the passageway and the main room, which few other units in the building had. When the cops visit Sam’s place the night of Archer’s murder, Spade hears the elevator cage door rattling open. In those days, the apartment door was glass, therefore less soundproof, like the door between the passageway and the living room/bedroom, which Arney rescued from the basement. The bathroom’s layout also accommodated the famous strip search later in the novel, allowing Brigid to take off her clothes without being between the bathtub and the toilet (where Sam lays the pistols) or between the bathtub and the door. This keeps her discreetly out of sight of Casper Gutman and others in the adjoining room.
Sam’s kitchen has a breakfast nook, which Hammett’s did not (none in the building did), but Arney theorized that Hammett added the nook to the novel to accommodate certain scenes between Sam and Brigid. As he escorts Brigid into the bathroom, Spade warns his other guests, “unless you want a three-story drop, there’s no way out of here except past the bathroom door.” While many of the studio’s features were shared by others on that side of the building, that line put Sam’s place clearly on the fourth floor.
Once he was convinced, Arney began letting Herron bring tours through his place on Sunday afternoons. He now lived inside a novel, a masterpiece, but a novel just the same—with Brigid O’Shaughnessy on his couch and in his bathroom, Sam’s bed in the wall, police detectives in his hallway, the Levantine treasure hunter Joel Cairo worrying in his rocker, and Casper Gutman pontificating on a padded chair. His home became a pilgrimage, and toward the end of his tenure, he was putting himself to sleep listening to old radio recordings of “The Adventures of Sam Spade.” After fourteen years of hosting, Arney got married and moved to a larger place, one less freighted with literary meaning, but he held on to apartment 401 for two more years, hoping to safely hand over the small museum he had built.
The Hammett aficionadoand founder of the Noir City Film Festival, Eddie Muller, got Arney in touch with a writer and philanthropist from Pacific Heights, Robert Mailer Anderson, who acquired the lease and turned a decorator loose in the place. Despite some glamorous touches, if the studio were clouded with a little Fatima smoke, it might seem Hammett had just left the room.
In The Maltese Falcon, Hammett presents Spade whole and unexplained, without a word about his past except the famous “Flitcraft Parable” Sam tells Brigid, about a man he once hunted in the Northwest. Writers have long puzzled over the inclusion of the Flitcraft story in the novel, a kind of extra pearl in an already sparkling necklace, and John Huston understandably left it out of his otherwise faithful movie version. Although every possible meaning has been gleaned from Hammett’s story by scholars, there seems little mystery about where he found this character’s name. During Hammett’s Pinkerton days, detectives working on insurance cases would consult a life insurance manual put out annually by a publisher in Oak Park, Illinois named Allen J. Flitcraft. Hammett, favoring the in-joke, later borrowed Flitcraft’s name for his parable.‡
As Spade tells it to Brigid, a young real estate executive named Charles Flitcraft was on his lunch hour one day in Tacoma in the early 1920s when he was nearly killed by a beam that fell from a construction site and crashed beside him on the sidewalk, a piece of concrete even nicking his face to emphasize how close to death he had come. Shaken by his near miss, Flitcraft spontaneously left his family, drifted to San Francisco, and eventually resettled in Spokane. Five years after the disappearance, Sam Spade, then working out of “one of the big detective agencies in Seattle” (as Hammett had), was hired by Mrs. Flitcraft to find her lost husband, whom she had heard might be in Spokane (where Hammett had also worked). He located the unrepentant Flitcraft in that city, where the missing husband had begun a whole new family and career under a new name. He explained to Sam the reasonableness of his reaction to his close call with the crashing beam:
“He was scared stiff, of course, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”
Flitcraft had left his first family well provided for, he tells Spade,
and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.
“I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was.”
The Sam Spade of the rest of the novel might have hauled the errant husband by his ear back to Seattle to have him explain himself to Mrs. Flitcraft in person. She was the client, after all. In some ways it is a reworking of an earlier missing husband story, the sound-alike Norman Ashcraft in “The Golden Horseshoe,” relentlessly pursued by the Op on the wife’s behalf, even after she is dead.
But Spade’s reaction to the story Flitcraft tells him is muted and surprising; there is something deeper going on. As he wrote this, Hammett had been living apart from his own family off and on for several years, and was considering making the separation complete by moving three thousand miles away, to New York. He had come to the Post Street studio on orders to shield his young children from his TB, and, once living apart, found the solitude and freedom that, among other things, allowed him to become a novelist. As he finished the manuscript of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett had survived a full decade with a disease that might have killed him at anytime, an experi-ence that had certainly lifted the lid off life and showed him the works.
Flitcraft’s is a far colder, cleaner departure than Hammett’s gradual separation, but his story feels mysteriously charged as Spade tells it, because Hammett, a man between lives, is talking to himself through his creation. He had tried living at home, and living away from home, and had adjusted to his new life. The fact that he could not return to his old life might seem unreasonable to others, but there it was.
If tuberculosis laid him low and forced him to find his way to a writing career, its later diminution allowed him a chance to roam. He convinced Jose to move the girls to Los Angeles, where some of her Kelly relatives wintered and where he felt his movie prospects might take him sometime in the future. If Jose took care of the girls, he promised, he would take care of her.
He departed San Francisco altogether in early October 1929, along with a woman named Nell Martin and a generous send-off loan of five hundred dollars from his fond ex-employer Albert Samuels. They arrived in New York just ahead of the great stock market crash. It somehow fits with Hammett’s biography that, having spent much of the Roaring Twenties sick and impoverished, his fate would again zig when the rest of the country zagged.
Nell Martin is sometimes described simply as a widowed music teacher and actress but in fact listed herself as divorced and was, by this time, the author of many stories, light mysteries and satires, including the novels The Mosaic Earring, Lord Byron of Broadway, and The Constant Simp. She was a witty survivor who had held an even wider variety of jobs than Hammett had, including working as a newspaper reporter and migrant worker and driving a taxi in Chicago. She had a movie adaptation of one of her novels in production and shared Hammett’s interest in the new field of screenwriting that the talkies made possible. The pair went to New York, where they stayed in an apartment in the east Thirties, from which he snapped street scenes to send his daughters.§ Hammett worked there to finish his next novel, The Glass Key, which he would gratefully dedicate to Nell Marti
n after they had dissolved as a couple; she returned the gesture with her next book, cheekily titled Lovers Should Marry.
Hammett had arrived in New York just as the first installment of The Maltese Falcon triumphantly ran in Black Mask, announced by editor Cap Shaw as the greatest detective fiction to appear in any magazine he had ever read. When the novel was published by Knopf in February 1930, Gilbert Seldes in the New York Graphic wrote, “The detectives of fiction have been knocked into a cocked hat … by the appearance of Sam Spade in a book called The Maltese Falcon.” “The horsepower of Mr. Hammett’s pen,” said the New York Herald Tribune, “must be sampled to be believed.” The novel would be reprinted seven times in a year. It wasn’t, however, dedicated to Nell Martin but to Josephine Hammett (“To Jose”), the steadfast woman he had left behind, at least for now. As consolation, their daughter Jo Hammett pointed out, her mother got the best book.
* * *
* A falcon statuette used in John Huston’s 1941 movie sold at auction for four million dollars in 2013.
** In fact, he could now date friends from eras of his life by which name they called him.
† Although the city directory has him living at 1155 Leavenworth in 1928-29, he continued to write letters from 891 Post Street right up until he left town in October 1929.
‡ The novelist Joe Gores pointed out (in his introduction to Lost Stories) that the name Flitcraft refers to a book of “actuarial tables” known to all private detectives in Hammett’s time. Pinkerton’s (as well as the fictional Continental Agency) had sizable insurance companies for clients. The A. J. Flitcraft Life Insurance Manual from 1918, which Hammett presumably consulted, has since become available online. It seems more likely that he plucked this name from the manual to amuse himself than that he was referring to obscure philosophers of flux, as some suggest, but the debate over the “Flitcraft Parable” will go on, because it is a mesmerizing piece of writing worth staring into.
§ There is scholarly confusion about their romance: the 1930 federal census lists one Nell Martin, “writer,” at 133 East Thirty-Eighth Street, a “divorced” “head of household” living with two other women as “lodgers.” Hammett would move in with her at Thirty-Eighth Street for a time after he returned to New York from a stint in Hollywood in 1931.
Chapter XIII
BABYLON AND BACK
“I was fascinated by him,” Dorothy said, meaning me, “a real live detective, and used to follow him around making him tell me about his experiences. He told me awful lies, but I believed every word.”
—THE THIN MAN
Things seemed to be happening for him all at once when Hammett arrived in Manhattan: he finally met the Knopfs while overseeing the publication of The Maltese Falcon, and made the circuit sporting the look that would become increasingly familiar, as his reputation grew, of the lean, striking-looking ex-detective seen across the room at parties or nightclubs, with his brush of white hair and flecked mustache, tweed suits, and affecting a cane on the street. He also had a movie option for Red Harvest from Paramount.1 While Hammett’s first residency in New York was action packed, he somehow also completed his superb fourth novel, set largely in a hard city resembling his old Baltimore.
In later years, when he struggled to complete book projects, he would blame his diminished output on the psychic cost of one marathon session of thirty straight hours writing The Glass Key, finishing the last third of the novel in the fall of 1929. Although he credited this binge of creativity for his decline, it was less likely that this writing session had burned it out of him than all the other nights spent bingeing on everything else; or, for that matter, the driving pace at which he had turned out his first four novels, uncertain when the TB might return and take him. If The Maltese Falcon was “the best detective story America has yet produced,” as Alexander Woollcott called it, The Glass Key was Hammett’s last great book. It remained his favorite.
It might have started out as an underworld novel about a gunman. At the end of a list of possible projects he had sent his Knopf editor, Harry Block, back in June, Hammett confided, “I had intended doing the story of a gunman next, but, according to [Herbert] Asbury, Little Caesar was that. So until I’ve read it, I’m holding off.”2 W. R. Burnett’s powerful gangster novel seemed to make quite an impression in the meantime. If The Glass Key began life as an idea for a novel about a gunman, he later elevated the plot and characters to something more complex.
In the book, a lean, tubercular gambler and “politician’s hanger-on” named Ned Beaumont discovers the body of the playboy son of a senator lying in the dark street and alerts his boss and friend, the powerful ward heeler Paul Madvig. On a weeks-long losing gambling streak, Beaumont borrows money from Madvig that he bets on a horse named Peggy O’Toole, and then goes chasing after his winnings when his bookie absconds to New York with his $3,200. Ned’s interest in who killed the senator’s son and the election strategy for Paul Madvig’s slate of candidates are complicated by Madvig’s designs to marry the senator’s daughter—a desire that throws Madvig off his political game as the election nears. Ned finds himself giving Madvig counsel on both political and romantic decisions, and even unsolicited fashion advice against wearing silk socks with tweed. Beneath the surface of the political-crime plot, a love triangle threatens.
Madvig’s political war with the town’s chief bootlegger, Shad O’Rory, has been conducted mostly by proxy, through Madvig’s functionaries on one side and O’Rory’s bought news reporters on the other, until it becomes violently flushed into the open by the murder case. At one point the stoic, Hammettish Ned Beaumont, brushing his mustache with a thumbnail, meets the mobster O’Rory, a slim young man of around thirty-four (Hammett’s own age) with prematurely “sleek white hair.” O’Rory traps Beaumont and hands him over to his apish torturer, who beats him for days. Yet Beaumont is prized not just for his political savvy but also his loyal ability to withstand pain. “I can stand anything I’ve got to stand,”3 he says early on, and his days with O’Rory’s henchmen gruesomely prove it.
When he emerges from the hospital, he joins up with the senator’s daughter, Janet Henry, to solve her brother’s murder, in which the prime suspect has become Paul Madvig, threatening his slate’s reelection, most of whom want to arrest him but lack the guts. Although The Glass Key is an impressive portrait of machine politicians and Prohibition mobsters, Ned Beaumont turns into a very able detective along the way. The end of the novel, perhaps written during that marathon session after Hammett first arrived from San Francisco, has Beaumont packing his bags to move to New York for good. It’s the only solution for him. In an uncommonly hopeful moment in a tough book, Janet Henry goes with him.
During his months in Manhattan, Hammett collected reviews and fans for his work, from Alexander Woollcott to Dorothy Parker. But perhaps most influential for Hammett was a memo David O. Selznick wrote to his boss at Paramount Pictures, B. P. Schulberg, in July 1930. His letter came three weeks after movie rights to The Maltese Falcon had been bought by rival Warner Brothers for $8,500, of which Hammett kept 80 percent.4 Paramount had released its adaptation of Red Harvest, called Roadhouse Nights, in February. Selznick now urged his boss to further “secure” Hammett, whose “vogue is on the rise” and who “might very well prove to be the creator of something new and startlingly original for us.” Selznick recommended signing the former Pinkerton man to write a “police story” for the actor George Bancroft. Hammett, he approvingly noted, “is unspoiled as to money.”5
Hammett had not been pleased with what Paramount did with Red Harvest, his portrait of a Western nightmare town convulsing in violence entirely softened and rewritten and featuring performances by Jimmy Durante. “They changed everything but the title,” Hammett recalled, “and finally they changed that to ‘Roadhouse Nights.”’
Despite this treatment, Hammett may have assumed he would have greater influence by working on his future screenplays himself, in person, or (at three hundred dollars per week wi
th a five-thousand-dollar option for any original story accepted) perhaps the money was simply too tempting. He answered the call to Hollywood, as so many writers were then doing to gather up absurd amounts of promised cash and to hide from the deepening hard times. He could briefly visit his family before starting work for Paramount. While living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker, he corrected proofs for The Glass Key, about which there was some growing film interest as well.
Outwardly, his life seemed to veer out of his control during this first time working in Hollywood, yet Hammett proved surprisingly successful when he could show up in shape to work. He wrote his first assignment (a seven-page treatment titled “After School”) in a weekend, a story that was expanded as “The Kiss-Off” and ultimately produced the next year as a gangster film called City Streets, starring Sylvia Sidney and a young Gary Cooper, for which Hammett received a screen credit. He did various script doctoring projects, meeting William Powell, a charming, hard-drinking actor who would later reunite with Hammett for the Thin Man films, and the German actress Marlene Dietrich, who proved in that year’s Blonde Venus that she could mesmerize even while clad mostly in a gorilla suit. Outside of work, there were dinners with young actresses at the Brown Derby or Chasen’s (with its rack of lamb for two), fights at the Olympic Gardens, music at the Clover Club.
With his chauffeur “Jones” and some friends, Hammett traveled to San Francisco to repay Albert Samuels the loan his former boss had made to finance the move to New York the year before; after a week-long party at the Fairmont Hotel, Hammett found he needed to borrow eight hundred dollars more from Samuels, to settle up and make the return trip to Los Angeles.