The Lost Detective

by Nathan Ward

  15 “House Burglary Poor Trade.”

  Chapter Two

  1 Allan Pinkerton, The Expressman and the Detectives Chicago: W. B. Keen, Cooke and Company, 1874), p. 26.

  2 March 1, 1924, in Hammett, Selected Letters, pp. 24–25.

  3 Pinkerton records, Box 51, Folder 8.

  4 Pinkerton records, Box 51, Folder 11.

  5 Pinkerton records, Box 51, Folder 8.

  6 After completing his own comprehensive life of Hammett, Shadow Man (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), Richard Layman continued to post queries in search of proof of Jimmy Wright, whose existence still seemed probable when he wrote his biography. All other major biographies accept the existence of Wright.

  7 Memo of April 20, 1901, Pinkerton records, Box 178, Folder 9.

  8 Pinkerton records, Box 15, Folder 10.

  9 C.Y.R. report, Aug. 7, 1910, Pinkerton records. The brakeman’s quote “I can see it in my mind’s eye …” comes from an unsigned report in Box 157, Folder 10.

  10 J. V. O’Neill report, Pinkerton records, Box 157, Folder 9.

  11 C. B. Patterson report, Pinkerton records, Box 157. Folder 8.

  12 In reports from the investigation, the missing Sciarrabas are called cousins, and at other times, father and son. Their having the same name, Vincenzo Sciarraba, would seem odd for brothers. In this letter from 1951 (Pinkerton records, Box 87), the discrepancy is more likely a matter of an old man remembering a very old case about suspects he’d never met. See also “The Ambush of William Rice,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sunday, May 4, 1941.

  13 Hammett interview, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 6, 1929.

  Chapter Three

  1 Michael Punke, Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 (New York: Hyperion, 2006). Punke’s fine narrative of the disaster cites 163 miner deaths, while briefer accounts often give 168.

  2 “I.W.W. Strike Chief Lynched at Butte,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1917; and Will Roscoe, “The Murder of Frank Little: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” thesis paper, Sentinel High School, Missoula, MN, 1973. Will Roscoe’s paper remains the most extensive popular account of the Little incident. He also recalled researching the Little incident in a 2006 story for the Montana Standard.

  3 Punke, Fire and Brimstone, p. 209. See also Montana Troopers’ website, http://www.montanatrooper.com.

  4 Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 46.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Jo Hammett, A Daughter Remembers, p. 34. One of Jo Hammett’s collaborators going through these photos was the Hammett historian Don Herron.

  7 Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (New York: Vintage, 1929), pp. 3–4.

  Chapter Four

  1 “World War I: The Ambulance Service,” U.S. Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History, chapter 2, section 40 at http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/HistoryofUSArmyMSC/chapter2.html.

  2 John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 239. Also see the short Stanford University publication by Molly Billings, “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918,” June 1997, at https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/.

  3 Barry, The Great Influenza, p. 187.

  4 Hammett’s initial diagnosis details are from a transcript of his Veterans’ Administration medical file, transcribed by David Fechheimer on June 17, 1976, and provided to me by Richard Layman (hereafter cited as Hammett VA medical file), pp. 1–3. The VA itself was unable to locate an existing copy in its St. Louis (national records), San Francisco, or Oakland facilities.

  5 Hammett’s VA medical file.

  6 Author’s correspondence with the New York pulmonary specialist Dr. Brian D. Gelbman, March 3, 2013. I shared with Dr. Gelbman the initial diagnosis from Hammett’s VA medical file, and described the close-packed hospital setting in which he was cared for during the influenza outbreak. He agreed it was more likely Hammett had contracted TB while in hospital, weakened initially by the influenza. The army doctors at the time agreed. Of course, with as many specialists as Hammett saw over the years, his file seems more expert some years than in others.

  7 Jo Hammett, Hammett: A Daughter Remembers, p. 72.

  8 “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” collected in Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings, p. 909.

  9 All discussions of Hammett’s weight and other medical details come from Hammett’s V.A. medical file.

  Chapter Five

  1 The twelve surviving love letters, the so-called green-ink letters, turned up in “an old pasteboard hatbox, faded and dusty,” Julie Rivett has written, while the family was cleaning out the last of her late grandmother Jose Hammett’s things before the house was sold. (“On Finding My Grandfather’s Love Letters,” by Julie Marshall Rivett, which was e-mailed to the author.) The letters appear in Hammett, Selected Letters. I have supplemented the letters and accounts of the romance in the Layman, Johnson, and Symons biographies with other background histories of World War I nursing.

  2 Hammett, Selected Letters, p. 10.

  3 Ibid., p. 20.

  Chapter Six

  1 “Tuberculosis Victims to be Rehabilitated,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 2, 1922.

  2 Oakland Tribune, March 4, 1922, and San Francisco Chronicle, March 6, 1922. This last incident sounds some notes echoed in Hammett’s story “Dead Yellow Women,” in Dead Yellow Women (New York: Lawrence E. Spivak, 1924).

  3 Hammett’s VA medical file.

  4 Author’s lunch with Fechheimer, July 12, 2012. We have had a couple of lunches together in San Francisco, and he has been a generous e-mail correspondent as well about Hammett arcana and, equally important to a civilian writer, the detective life in general.

  5 Fechheimer, “We Never Sleep: The Old Pinkertons Look Back,” interview with Phil Haultain, in City of San Francisco magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975. p. 33.

  6 Dashiell Hammett, “Seven Pages,” in The Hunter and Other Stories (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013), p. 142.

  7 Introduction to Dashiell Hammett, The Big Knockover (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xiii.

  8 David Fechheimer, “We Never Sleep: The Old Pinkertons Look Back,” interview with Phil Haultain, in City of San Francisco magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975, p.33.

  9 I compiled this account of the cable car robbery and its aftermath using mainly contemporary newspaper accounts. On January 4, 1922, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a full map of the thieves’ route, complete with photo insets of the company officials and the gripman and conductor, “Victims of Daylight Robbery on Street Car.” Phil Geauque appears in the January 9 Chronicle follow-up, “Sleuths Shoot at Cable Car Bandit Suspect.” Haultain’s comments are from Fechheimer’s interview with him, “We Never Sleep …” in City of San Francisco magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975.

  10 Hammett’s VA medical file.

  11 David Fechheimer, “Mrs. Hammett is Alive and Well in L.A.” City of San Francisco magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975, p. 36.

  Chapter Seven

  1 William Pinkerton came to San Francisco whenever he could, often for the convention of police chiefs. My portrait of him draws from several long interviews he happily gave to the Chronicle in the teens and early twenties (including “Pinkerton Here to Curb Crooks,” Feb. 8, 1915; and “Fiction Wrong about Sleuths, Moving Pictures Mirror Them Truthfully, Says Pinkerton,” June 21, 1922), and from book-length histories of the Pinkerton organization (Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye, by James MacKay; The Eye That Never Sleeps, by Frank Morn; and Pinkerton’s Great Detective, by Beau Riffenburgh).

  2 “Fiction Wrong about Sleuths,” p. 16.

  3 It is interesting to picture him as a reporter, especially in that combative time of muckraking journalism, which might have appealed to his antiauthority bent and confirmed his violent experiences with corruption.

  4 The William Sayers story appears in “Pinkerton Man Retires: Superintendent Sayers Goes South for His Health,” San Francisc
o Chronicle, Oct. 22, 1902. William Pinkerton’s forger tale is told in “Forger Bidwell: Detective Pinkerton’s Story of his Crime and Arrest,” Minneapolis Tribune, picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 27, 1887.

  5 Carroll John Daly, “Knights of the Open Palm,” from Otto Penzler, ed., The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2010), p. 429.

  6 Hammett, Dead Yellow Women, pp. 94–95.

  7 Hammett, Dead Yellow Women, p. 95.

  8 “House Burglary Poor Trade.” He started with a nameless “type” and “just kept going,” he wrote his Black Mask editor.

  9 Hammett, Selected Letters, p. 22. Berkeley’s chief of police August Vollmer was a favorite of the Bay Area press, using “psychology instead of the Third Degree” and relying on a strange new machine to tell when suspects were lying: William Hamlin, “What Happens When Your Heart Goes Pit-a-Pat,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 1921; “Super Police Trail Thieves By Radio,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 9, 1921; “Greater Study of Crime Urged by Police Head,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 2, 1922.

  Chapter Eight

  1 This quote appears in the preface to J. Anthony Lukas’s Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), a magnificent and forgivably sprawling account of the 1905 murder of Idaho’s former governor and the subsequent trial in which Clarence Darrow defended Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners leadership in a case made largely by the Great Detective, James McParland. The Pinkertons even managed to get one of their own, Operative 21, onto Darrow’s defense team. Lukas’s book has the best portrait of McParland and the Pinkertons of this time that I have read, and he alone suggests (as an aside) that McParland inspired Hammett’s Old Man character. It is one of the few side roads in Lukas’s story that he doesn’t eagerly explore, on the notion that it will eventually wind back around to the great main drama he’s describing. No proper Hammett biography I have seen has followed this thread.

  2 Local newspapers in Seattle or Helena or Portland would interview McParland as a visiting celebrity when he made his occasional rounds, with story headlines such as the one a Seattle paper used in 1903: “Looking After the Criminals.” When McParland’s inspection tour reached Montana later the same year, a Helena paper editorialized that “[A]t his tongue’s end is the history of every train and bank robber who has operated in the West from the cradle to the grave.”

  3 From Pinkerton records, Part A: Administrative File, 1857–1999, Reel 4, Frames 0979–0980.

  4 Allan Pinkerton, The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1877), p. 23. But another memorable account of the Molly Maguires investigation appears in James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett’s The Pinkerton Story (New York: Putnam, 1951). Horan seems to have been on such good terms with the agency that many of its files were kept in his house while he researched this official book, and here and there, his papers and other memos turn up among the folders in the Pinkerton records.

  5 This (and many other McParland stories) appears in the recent full biography, Beau Riffenburgh, Pinkerton’s Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland (New York: Viking, 2013).

  Chapter Nine

  1 Hammett’s VA medical file.

  2 Layman, Shadow Man, p. 58. This assumes a penny-per-word rate, which was average, and his selling two stories per month.

  3 From Hammett, Lost Stories, p. 142.

  4 Hammett, Selected Letters, pp. 26–27.

  5 Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 8.

  6 Layman, ed., Discovering the Maltese Falcon, p. 75. This anecdote is from an interview that Layman had with Gardner.

  Chapter Ten

  1 Albert Samuels, “Just About Ourselves—Eighty of Us” (advertisement), San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 3, 1922.

  2 E. Sherwood, “A Jeweler Pays for Advertising Lost Articles,” Printers’ Ink, May 20, 1920, p. 137.

  3 Ad reproduced in Jo Hammett, A Daughter Remembers, p. 51.

  4 “Seven Pages” (unpublished typescript), reproduced in Layman, ed., Discovering the Maltese Falcon.

  5 Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 14.

  6 Hammett, Selected Letters, p. 30.

  7 Hammett’s VA medical file.

  8 I do not suggest this as the only possible inspiration, but Hammett did love to read crime news. Don Herron has nominated a film from 1920 as the genesis, The Penalty, starring Lon Chaney as a master criminal known as “Blizzard, the cripple from Hell,” and which features a messy street battle and a heist. The idea was certainly in the air. There was a time in the early twenties, before the rise of Hammett and the Black Mask style of writing, when movies were more realistic than novels in their depictions of crime. William Pinkerton commented on this in 1921, finding the cinematic crime stories startlingly accurate, almost instructively so, while detective novels remained preposterous “bunk.”

  Chapter Eleven

  1 Hammett, Red Harvest, pp. 3–4.

  2 The Montana historian Jack Crowley has made a good study of the similarities between Personville and Butte in his 2008 paper “Red Harvest and Dashiell Hammett’s Butte,” in Montana Professor 18, no. 2 (Spring 2008), at http://mtprof.msun.edu. Another good discussion can be found in George Everett’s “The Seeds of Red Harvest: Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville” post in the blog Only in Butte (www.butteamerica.com/hist.htm), and Don Herron paints the strikebreaking scene well in his post, “Hammett: Playing the Sap,” from his Hammett blog Up and Down These Mean Streets (March 5, 2011). Some reviewers have seen the novel as a muckraking work of semi-reportage like The Jungle. André Gide saw it as a Marxist tract.

  3 Punke, Fire and Brimstone, p. 211. Punke does not discuss Hammett’s claims, but the disgraced chief detective Morrissey seems a far likelier suspect in the Little death.

  4 Hammett, Red Harvest, p. 86.

  5 Jo Hammett, A Daughter Remembers, p. 62.

  6 Hammett, Red Harvest, p. 163.

  7 From an e-mail with the author, March 29, 2012.

  8 Date per Layman, Shadow Man, p. 98. Quote about “motion picture dickering” per Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Fawcett/Columbine, 1983), p. 73. Julian Symons also has an excellent account of Hammett’s adventures in Hollywood in Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 73–81.

  Chapter Twelve

  1 Hammett, Maltese Falcon, Modern Library ed., introduction.

  2 Hammett, Maltese Falcon, Vintage ed., p. 90.

  3 Arney was quite generous with my e-mailed questions and even wrote me a definitive account of his life in the apartment, when I was unable to locate a copy of the brochure he’d once written about it. Also see the New York Times travel story “San Francisco Noir” (June 29, 2014), and Don Herron’s blog post “Hammett and Prohibition,” in Up and Down These Mean Streets, Dec. 25, 2014, (see “891 Post,” at http://www.donherron.com/?p=7465), and in the same blog, Herron’s splendid write-ups of all the Hammett apartments, covered individually in “The Tour” (at http://www.donherron.com/?page_id=51).

  Chapter Thirteen

  For Hammett’s years in Hollywood, I consulted Diane Johnson’s Dashiell Hammett, William Nolan’s Hammett: A Life at the Edge, Julian Symons’s Hammett biography, Lillian Hellman’s books, and Layman’s Shadow Man. But Layman’s commentaries in The Hunter and Return of the Thin Man are especially useful.

  1 Layman, Shadow Man, p. 125.

  2 Hammett, Selected Letters, p. 50.

  3 Hammett, The Glass Key, p. 6.

  4 Layman, Shadow Man, p. 125.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman (New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 226. In the account of the meeting in Diane Johnson’s Hammett: A Life, which Johnson wrote with Hellman’s active participation, someone introduced the pair at Musso and Frank, the Hollywood bar and grill on Hollywood Boulevard that’s still
there. Since Hammett was already known to her husband, and the two shared a group of friends, chances are they looked each other over at several gatherings before the extended night of drinking and T. S. Eliot.

  7 Symons, Dashiell Hammett, p. 74.

  8 W. E. Farbstein, “Techniques of Stopping a Run on a Bank,” New York Herald Tribune, April 26, 1931.

  9 Jo Hammet, A Daughter Remembers, p. 70.

  10 Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, p. 103.

  11 The story of the writing of The Thin Man appears in various bios and in Hellman’s Unfinished Woman, and in The Last Laugh: The Final Word from the First Name in Satire, by S. J. Perleman (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2000), whose account of Hammett’s sneaky departure from the Pierre is unrivaled. But the most thorough account of Hammett’s time at the Sutton appears in Marion Meade’s Lonelyhearts: The Screwball Life of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (New York: Mariner/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2010). Meade identifies Hammett’s rooms as the Diplomatic Suite.

  12 Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, p. 270.

  13 Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1933; repr. New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 7.

  14 Hammett, Selected Letters, p. 84.

  Afterword: A Hundred Bucks

  1 Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, p. 126. For an account of the Stein party, see James B. Mellow, Charmed Circle (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1974), pp. 407–8.

  2 Mellow, Charmed Circle, pp. 407–8. Alma Whitaker’s Los Angeles Times column (Sugar & Spice) of April 2, 1935, contains the comparison to Queen Victoria and concludes, “She is either diabolically humorous or completely devoid of that trait. I’m still not sure.” See also Gertrude Stein, “Why I Like Detective Stories,” Harper’s Bazaar, Nov. 1937; and Stein’s own Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 193. For further evidence of Stein’s appreciation of what Hammett could do, see her posthumously published attempt at a detective novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor. Part of her impressions of the homecoming tour ran in the February 1935 Cosmopolitan magazine.