The Lost Detective

by Nathan Ward

† While originally a schnauzer in the novel, Asta became a white terrier in the Thin Man films.

  ‡ The last of the six Thin Man films came out in 1947.

  AFTERWORD: A HUNDRED BUCKS

  “Don’t you ever think you’d like to go back to detecting once in a while just for the fun of it?”

  —NORA TO NICK, IN THE THIN MAN

  On April 1, 1935, Hammett was staying in a plush suite at his favorite Los Angeles hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, when he received a curious telegram he thought was an April Fool’s hoax. It came from a Beverly Hills socialite named Lillian Ehrman, who was giving a Hollywood party that night honoring the visiting writer Gertrude Stein. Despite a guest list that already included Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and a number of Hollywood producers, Stein especially wanted to meet Hammett, whom she admired as the master of the modern detective story.

  Stein’s affection for detective novels was well known to friends. “I never try to guess who has done the crime,” she wrote, “… but I like somebody being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more.”1 Months into a well-publicized homecoming lecture tour of America, Stein’s interest in crime had already led her to spend a rainy night touring Chicago in the back of a squad car, searching for homicides with her companion, Alice B. Toklas. She had been disappointed when the only killing her police guides could turn up nearby was “a family affair,” she noted, and so was “not interesting.”

  Despite his first suspicions about the Ehrmans’ party, Hammett decided to attend. Gertrude Stein looked, according to one columnist that spring, like Queen Victoria, but with gray, mannish hair. She was listening to Charlie Chaplin hold forth on the use of rhythm in film before she turned to ask Hammett about something she found historically “puzzling.” In the nineteenth century, she argued, men wrote very inventively about all varieties of men, while female novelists largely “made the women be themselves seen splendidly or sadly or beautifully or despairingly.” She continued: “Now in the twentieth century it is the men who do it … [T]hey are always themselves as strong or weak or mysterious or passionate or drunk or controlled but always themselves as the women used to do in the nineteenth century. Now you yourself always do it now why is it.”2

  According to Stein, who remembered things in her own rhythms, Hammett agreed with her observation and told her the answer was that nineteenth-century men had been confident, and the women were not, but twentieth-century men “have no confidence and so they have to make themselves as you say more beautiful more intriguing more everything and they cannot make any other man because they have to hold on to themselves not having any confidence.”3 In fact, having posed for the cover of his latest novel, Hammett fleshed out Stein’s point quite well.

  That spring night, he told Stein he was working on a new novel about fathers and sons. But he would not finish it or the many others he announced—as if to force himself to focus on his growing struggle at the typewriter—to friends, drinking partners, family, and gossip columnists over the coming years. The book projects had titles such as “There Was a Young Man,” “My Brother Felix,” “Toward Z,” “The Valley Sheep Are Fatter,” “December 1,” “The Hunting Boy,” and “Tulip,” the last a twelve-thousand-word autobiographical fragment told by a tubercular old writer who is blocked.4

  He was often cheered by the hope of new projects, “the pre-writing period when all is grand and vast and majestic.”5 But more and more in the 1930s, he retreated to Hollywood, which he knew would be crowded with many other distractions—all of them more pleasurable than sitting in a room trying to write novels. Writing movie dialogue at least still came easily to him, and paid quite well. “Yellow fellow that I am,” he wrote Alfred Knopf after one of his escapes west, in June 1935. “I turned tail before the difficulties the new book was presenting and scurried back here to comparative ease and safety.” But even if he had never written another line, what he had achieved with the stories and five published novels had unleashed a generation of crime writers, and with the third adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, John Huston’s faithful movie version starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade in 1941, would inspire the hard-edged, fatalistic cinema style the French named “film noir.” Scores of later radio and TV detectives were streetwise echoes of the Op Hammett had created during Prohibition.

  One of those writers who followed him out of the pulps was the novelist Raymond Chandler, for whom Hammett had “made the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues.” Chandler may have met him only once, at a photographed West Coast gathering of Black Mask contributors in January 1936, but in 1944, in the Atlantic Monthly, Chandler wrote the most famous and eloquent tribute to Hammett ever published, a passionate brief for the accomplishments of the realist crime school, “The Simple Art of Murder.”

  Chandler saw Hammett as part of a larger triumph of the American language, a “revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction” that had its roots as far back as Walt Whitman. Hammett, though, had “applied it to the detective story, and this, because of its heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudogentility, was pretty hard to get moving.” Once he got it moving, however, Hammett moved murder out of the drawing room and into the alley and “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” While accomplishing this, “he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

  Chandler concluded that while Hammett “did not wreck the formal detective story,” he showed that “the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not ‘by hypothesis’ incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better.”6 Chandler set his Philip Marlowe novels all over Los Angeles and had written quite successfully for Hollywood by 1944, yet apparently he never encountered Hammett again after their one recorded meeting. A casual reader of his Atlantic essay might be pardoned for assuming that the writer Chandler was lionizing was dead.

  * * *

  One night in the thirties, Hammett was eating dinner with Lillian Hellman at the Brown Derby, on Wilshire Boulevard. It was a place he liked for its convenience to his favorite hotel across the street, and was dependably filled with movie people seated beneath rows of charcoal drawings of Hollywood stars. On the night Hellman remembered, a neighborhood figure known to locals as the Indian pushed through the Brown Derby’s revolving door to sell his postcards, evaded the maître d’, and worked his way through the maze of booths to stop beside Hammett’s. He launched into his familiar noble pitch: “My grandfather was chief of the Sioux, my great-grandfather was killed by—”

  “How much do you want?’ Hammett demanded.

  “Nothing from you,” Hellman recalled the Indian’s reply. “You told me you once arrested an Indian for murder.” When Hammett opened his wallet, the Indian reached in to claim five twenties, but insisted, “I take it as a loan. You are better than most, but you—”

  “Arrested an Indian for murder. That’s right.”

  When the man had gone, after kissing Hellman’s hand, she noted aloud how proud he had been to insist on a loan of the money rather than a gift. “No,” Hammett corrected her. “He’s a Negro pretending to be an Indian. He’s a no-good stinker.” When Hellman asked why, then, had he given him one hundred dollars, Hammett answered, “Because no-good stinkers get hungry too.”7

  He had come a long way from shadowing on Baltimore street corners to this room of banquettes filled with press agents, starlets, producers, and knights of the keyboard in Beverly Hills. But it was probably nice to have a stranger remind him once in a while that he used to be a detective, and a pretty good one at that. There’s Dashiell Hammett. He once arrested an Indian fo
r murder. That was worth a hundred bucks at least.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project began for the best of reasons: I wanted to read a book that did not exist on Dashiell Hammett’s years as a real detective, and about exactly how he had made his famous transformation from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story. No such work existed devoted to this hazy but important period in his life, but many of the experienced Hammett chasers helped me attempt it. Mike Humbert posted my original call for materials on his superb website on Dashiell Hammett (http://www.mikehumbert.com/Dashiell_Hammett_01_Short_Bio.html), which helped get things going. My fellow writer and Hammett fan Mike Rogers then made introductions to Rick Layman, Hammett’s biographer, who assured me that to understand how a man could actually go from Pinkerton op to world-beating writer, I needed to reread Hammett’s stories in the order he wrote them. Layman was right. Over the decades since his 1981 landmark life Shadow Man, Layman has continued to produce books that deepen people’s readings of the novels and stories, and with Hammett’s granddaughter Julie M. Rivett, he has edited Hammett’s letters and brought out collections of his screenplays and unpublished stories that challenge the limited view of Hammett left us by Lillian Hellman.

  Julie Rivett was also patient with my occasional odd questions, starting with my first, highly specific query: which of Hammett’s hands bore the famous imbedded knifepoint? (The exact location was never specified in the biographies.) Julie relayed the question to her mother, Hammett’s younger daughter, Jo, author of Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. When Jo answered that she was pretty certain the knifepoint had been on his left hand, the confirmation brought the scar out of the realm of legend for me, as if she had pulled a smoke ring from the air.

  A number of Hammett experts I met through the generosity of Don Herron, who is best known as the Fedora’d host of the long-running Dashiell Hammett Tour, but whose lively blog, Up and Down These Mean Streets, functions as a kind of hot-stove league for Hammett fans, featuring occasional guest lecturers such as the literary researcher Terry Zobeck. In 2012, Terry typed Hammett’s name into a Brooklyn historical search engine called Fultonhistory.com, which surprised him by hiccupping up a long-forgotten interview Hammett did with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Magazine in October 1929, just after he had moved to New York. This interview was unknown to recent biographers, and I have made generous use of it here.

  Don Herron took me around San Francisco, even got me into the 891 Post Street studio where The Maltese Falcon was written, and shared his network of similarly helpful Hammett fans, including Bill Arney, who described his experience living with the spirit of Hammett’s novel in the Maltese Falcon apartment; and Mitch Soekland, who gave me the tour on behalf of its gracious current renter, the writer Robert Mailer Anderson. Vince Emery, who has devoted an entire publishing company to the study and enjoyment of Hammett (Vince Emery Productions/Ace Performer Collection) gave me some helpful advice on researching tuberculosis in Hammett’s time and information on his op career in general.

  I am extremely grateful to the San Francisco detective and Hammett scholar David Fechheimer for his continuing insights into his elusive hero, and for his original interviews, which have proved so essential to anyone’s idea of Hammett. The Hammett medical file, now missing from every possible branch of the Veterans’ Administration, was fortunately copied by Fechheimer in the summer of 1976, after he was loaned it by a contact who brought it to dinner one night. Fechheimer read the whole filched document into his tape recorder, and then, after abandoning plans for his own Hammett book, sent the tape and transcript off to Richard Layman, who graciously shared it with me. So much that appears in each Hammett biography of the last four decades comes from the sleuthing of Fechheimer published in the Hammett-themed November 4, 1975 issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s City of San Francisco magazine. I hope that if he ever retires from detecting, Fechheimer will finally write his own book.

  My friend Allen Barra, a writer whose deep pockets of expertise run from gunslingers and gangsters to Alabama football and Albert Camus, is also a longtime Hammett man, and supplied his short, helpful history of the various film incarnations of Red Harvest—from Roadhouse Nights to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Miller’s Crossing (which splits the difference between Red Harvest and The Glass Key); and Deadwood.

  This project had many pleasures, chiefly the reading of the books themselves and touring Hammett’s San Francisco, but also my time spent at the Pinkerton archive of the Library of Congress in Washington, where for days at a time I was happily surrounded by boxes of detecting paraphernalia: crumbling codebooks, posters for missing outlaws, and op reports of nineteenth-century violence captured in disconcertingly beautiful script.

  Ellen Crain, archives director at the handsome Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, was expertly helpful with research about the Frank Little killing, local miner history, and Hammett’s possible experiences in that fascinating town. The people at Second Edition Books in Butte were also helpful, and patient with my questions; they recommended a few useful works of Montana history. Laura Wellen and Paul A. Gansky assisted with my research queries at the Harry Ransom archives at the University of Texas, Austin. New York University’s Bobst Library offered its microfilmed collection of newspapers and some old detectives’ books in its Special Collections department, while the Brooklyn Historical Society luckily had a copy of the family history of the Dashiells.

  Dashiell Hammett seemed to lay around our house like a visiting uncle during the last few years, and it is no small tribute to my wonderful kids how they cheerfully carried on despite the heaps of books my worldly guest left about the place, only occasionally asking how much longer he would be with us. I thank my children, Nick and Nina, for their support, and I am ever grateful to my wife, Katie Calhoun, for her love and patience and for bringing me into her family, the Calhouns, who introduced me to Montana. Katie’s oldest sister, Patty Calhoun, ambassador to all things Western, also deserves special thanks for several Hammett-related excursions we made to Butte and Anaconda.

  This book started with a lunch that my agent and friend Ed Breslin arranged with George Gibson, publisher at Bloomsbury USA. George immediately saw the potential in the idea of a Hammett-as-detective book, and the proposal followed from the lunch group’s excited discussion. My profound thanks go to these two literary men for the book’s civilized beginnings, and to George for his patience, sharp edits, and enthusiastic counsel as it took shape.

  NOTES

  Prelude: Scars

  1 Dashiell Hammett, Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921–1960, ed. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2001), p. 146.

  2 Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers, ed. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2001), p. 74. If there is a wiser, more beautiful book on Hammett than this one by his daughter Jo, I have not found it.

  3 David Fechheimer, “Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco,” special issue of City of San Francisco, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975, p. 38.

  4 James H. S. Moynahan, “Dashiell Hammett Confesses!” 1934, reproduced in Richard Layman, ed., Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade (San Francisco, CA: Vince Emery Productions, 2005), p. 60.

  5 Dashiell Hammett, Lost Stories, ed. Vince Emery (Vince Emery Productions, 2005), p. 79.

  6 Hammett, Selected Letters, p. 24.

  7 “Suggestions to Detective Story Writers,” in Dashiell Hammett, Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 914.

  8 Dashiell Hammett, “The Scorched Face,” in Hammett, Crime Stories and Other Writings, p. 356.

  9 Dashiell Hammett, introduction to The Maltese Falcon (New York: Modern Library, 1934), pp. viii–ix.

  10 Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1930), p. 4.

  11 Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records, 1853–1999 (hereafter cited as Pinkerton records), Box 178, Folder 9, Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  12 “House Burglary Poor Trade,” Hammett interview with Helen Herbert Foster in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 6 1929, p. 94, found on Fultonhistory.com.

  13 David Fechheimer, “Mrs. Hammett is Alive and Well in L.A.,” special issue of City of San Francisco magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975, p. 38.

  Chapter One

  1 The detective Josiah Thompson interviewed Yowaiski on David Fechheimer’s behalf in August 1977. Richard Hammett was a widower by the 1930s, but it’s hard to believe he had changed radically from the man Sam Hammett grew up with. The interview (in the form of an operative’s report) is reproduced in Thompson’s book Gumshoe (New York: Fawcett, 1988).

  2 Hammett’s 1924 biographical statement reproduced in Layman, ed., Discovering the Maltese Falcon, p. 12.

  3 “House Burglary Poor Trade,” p. 94.

  4 Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy (New York: Wilshire Book Company, 1907), p. 11.

  5 Ibid., p. 5.

  6 Dashiell Hammett, “Zigzags of Treachery,” in Hammett, Crime Stories & Other Writings, p. 92.

  7 Charlie Siringo, A Cowboy Detective (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, 1912).

  8 Allan Pinkerton, Thirty Years a Detective (Warwick, NY: 1500 Books, 2007), pp. 12–13.

  9 James MacKay, Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), p. 59.

  10 Pinkerton, Thirty Years a Detective, p. 12.

  11 Allan Pinkerton, The Model Town and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1890), preface.

  12 T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 257.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Charles A. Siringo, Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism (Chicago, IL: C. A. Siringo, 1915), p. 105, Box 172, available at Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. “I had started out with the big agency to see the world and learn human nature,” p. 93.