Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  The cynic and the idealist were combined in Hammett’s protagonists: their carefully preserved toughness allowed them to survive. Nobody could bluff them or buy them off. They learned to keep themselves under tight control, moving warily through a dark landscape (Melville’s “appalling ocean”) in which sudden death, duplicity, and corruption were part of the scenery. Nevertheless, they idealistically hoped for a better world and worked toward it. Hammett gave these characters organic life.

  Critic Graham McInnes finds that “Hammett’s prose…has the polish and meat of an essay by Bacon or a poem by Donne, both of whom also lived in an age of violence and transition.”

  The theme of a corrupt society runs like a dark thread through much of Hammett’s work. The title story of this collection, which details a “nightmare” town in which every citizen—from policeman to businessman—is crooked, foreshadows his gangster-ridden saga of Poisonville in Red Harvest. (The actual setting for his novel was Butte, Montana, and reflects the corruption Hammett had found there with Frank Little’s death in 1917.)

  Hammett saw the world around him as chaotic, without form or design. By the mid-1930s he had convinced himself that radical politics could provide a sense of order, and that perhaps an ideal “people’s world” was possible. Communism seemed to promise such a world, but he eventually discovered that it was an illusion. In his last years, Hammett realized that there was no apparent solution to world chaos.

  Much has been written on the typical “Hammett hero.”

  Critic John Paterson claims that he “is, in the final analysis, the apotheosis of every man of good will who, alienated by the values of his time, seeks desperately and mournfully to live without shame, to live without compromise to his integrity.”

  Philip Durham, who wrote the first biography of Raymond Chandler, traces Hammett’s hero back to

  a tradition that began on the frontier in the early part of the nineteenth century. This American literary hero appeared constantly in the dime novels of the period, and was ready-made for such Western writers of the twentieth century as Owen Wister and Zane Grey. By the time Hammett picked him up in the pages of Black Mask, his heroic characteristics were clearly established: courage, physical strength, indestructibility, indifference to danger and death, a knightly attitude, celibacy, a measure of violence, and a sense of justice.

  Hammett’s most sustained character, the Continental Op (who is featured here in seven stories), reflects the author’s dark world view, but he’s not overtly political, nor is he knightly. He’s a hard-working detective trying to get a job done. The Op describes himself as having a face that is “truthful witness to a life that hasn’t been overwhelmed with refinement and gentility,” adding that he is “short, middle-aged, and thick-waisted,” and stubborn enough to be called “pig-headed.”

  Hammett claimed to have based the Op on the man who had trained him to be a detective, the Pinkerton Agency’s Jimmy Wright of Baltimore. Wright taught young Hammett a basic code: Don’t cheat your client. Stay anonymous. Avoid undue physical risks. Be objective. Don’t become emotionally involved with a client. And never violate your integrity. This code stayed with Hammett; it not only served him while he was a working detective, but it also gave him a set of personal rules that shaped his actions throughout his life.

  Of course, despite his age and physical appearance, the Op is Hammett himself in fictional guise. Told in the first person, many of the Op’s adventures are fictionalized versions of actual cases that Hammett worked on during his sporadic years as a detective. When young Hammett first joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the headquarters were in the Continental Building—clearly the source for the Op’s fictitious agency.

  Hammett deliberately kept his character’s biographical background to a minimum. As critic Peter Wolfe notes, “he tells us nothing of [the Op’s] family, education, or religious beliefs.” Of course the Op has no religion in any traditional sense of the term; his religion is the always dangerous game of manhunting, a trade he pursues with near-sacred zeal.

  If one sifts carefully through the canon (some three dozen stories), it is revealed that the Op joined Continental as “a young sprout of twenty” (Hammett’s age when he became a Pinkerton operative), that he held a captain’s commission in wartime military intelligence, that he speaks some French and German, eats all his meals out, smokes Fatima cigarettes, enjoys poker and prizefights, and avoids romantic entanglements (“They don’t go with the job”). Pragmatic, hard-souled, and tenacious, he resorts to physical violence when necessary and uses a gun when he has to, but prefers using his wits. He is as close to an actual working detective as Hammett could make him.

  Hammett featured the Op in his earlier long works, Blood Money (also known as The Big Knockover), Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse, all of which were revised from Black Mask novellas.

  His next major fictional creation was San Francisco private eye Samuel Spade, to whom Hammett gave his first name. (As a Pinkerton, he had always been called Sam. When he turned to writing, he became simply Dashiell Hammett.) Spade made his debut in “The Maltese Falcon,” a five-part Black Mask serial that Hammett carefully reworked for book publication by Alfred A. Knopf. Most critics rate this “saga of a private detective” as the finest crime novel written in this century. Describing his character for a Modern Library edition of Falcon, Hammett stated:

  Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them, in their cockier moments, thought they approached. For your private detective does not…want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.

  Indeed, this was precisely the way Hammett wrote Spade in The Maltese Falcon—able to match wits with the crafty fat man, Casper Gutman, in tracking down the fabled bird of the title; able to handle the intrusive police; and able to fend off the advances of seductive Brigid O’Shaughnessy in solving the murder of his partner, Miles Archer.

  Hammett never intended to make Spade a continuing character; in completing The Maltese Falcon he was “done with him.” Yet he had not foreseen the book’s wide and lasting popularity, nor that it would become a supremely successful radio series, nor that no less than three motion pictures would be produced based on the published novel.

  The public demanded more Spade stories, and Hammett’s literary agent pleaded with the author to come up with new adventures. Hammett was reluctant, but he was also short of money. He made vast sums in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, but he squandered every dollar as quickly as he earned it. Money was for spending and Hammett always felt that more of it would magically appear as needed. Finally, he sat down to rap out three new Spade stories, placing two of them with The American Magazine and the final one with Collier’s.

  All three are in the present collection: “A Man Called Spade,” “Too Many Have Lived,” and “They Can Only Hang You Once.” The tales are crisp, efficient, and swift-moving.

  The other stories assembled here demonstrate Hammett’s bold experimentation with language and viewpoint. Compare the fussy, ornate narration in “A Man Named Thin” (featuring a poet-detective) with the crude, uneducated narration of the young boxer in “His Brother’s Keeper.” Both are told first-person, but they are leagues apart. Hammett tackles a female point of view in the superbly written “Ruffian’s Wife,” and brings off a neat twist ending in “The Second-Story Angel” (note the understated humor in this one).

  Both “Afraid of a Gun” and “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams” are set far from his usual San Francisco locale and demonstrate the wide range of Hammett’s fiction. “Gun” takes place in the high mountain country, and “Dan Odams” is a semimodern Western set in Montana. They represent Hammett in top form.

  W
hile the majority of pulp writers in the twenties and thirties were grinding out stories for money, Hammett worked as a dedicated artist. He gave each story the best of himself, laboring over each sentence, each turn of phrase. And he was constantly seeking new ideas and new characters. His protagonist in “The Assistant Murderer” is a prime example. With Alec Rush, the author created a detective described as incredibly ugly, a radical departure from the usual magazine hero. Hammett was striking out in a fresh direction with this story, which involves a complex case solved not by Rush but by the killer’s confession.

  “The Assistant Murderer” was written just before Hammett temporarily left Black Mask for his unsuccessful attempt at a career in advertising. One feels that had he remained with the magazine, Hammett might well have written more stories featuring this offbeat detective.

  During the pulp era, editors constantly called for “Action! More action!” Hammett decided to see just how much action he could pack into a single novella. Originally printed in Argosy All-Story Weekly, the title story of this collection, “Nightmare Town,” is a tour de force in sustained violence. The hero wields an ebony walking stick with devastating effectiveness, cracking skulls and breaking bones in the finest pulp tradition.

  An important contribution in Nightmare Town is “The First Thin Man,” which here achieves its first book printing. This early version of 1930 stands in sharp contrast to the novel Hammett eventually finished for Alfred A. Knopf three years later, with vast differences in basic approach, mood, plot, and tone. A call from Hollywood and the promise of substantial film money had caused Hammett to abandon the original manuscript at sixty-five typed pages. When he returned to it three years later, John Guild, the Op-like working detective—dedicated, stoic, close-mouthed—was replaced by Nick Charles, a hard-drinking, party-loving cynic, an ex-crime solver with no desire to solve more crimes; he just wanted another martini. It was Nick’s wife, Nora (modeled directly on Lillian Hellman), who badgered him into becoming a detective again to solve the case of the missing thin man.

  Dashiell Hammett had undergone a major life change between 1930 and 1933, and Nick Charles marked the end of Hammett’s career as a novelist. He had written himself into a blind corner and no longer believed that the criminal ills of society could be dealt with on a one-to-one basis. In Hammett’s view, a lone detective (such as Sam Spade or John Guild) could do nothing to stem the mounting tide of societal corruption. The detective’s code of personal honor could have no effect on a dishonorable world. Hammett’s core bitterness and cynicism, reflected in a less obvious form in his earlier work, had now taken center stage. He was no longer able to believe in heroes. Even plainspoken, down-to-earth, working heroes.

  In 1951, after he was sentenced for contempt because he refused to name names before a federal judge in New York, Hammett spent five months in jail in defense of his political beliefs. But he never believed in political violence and had been shocked when Senator Joseph McCarthy asked him if he had ever engaged in an act of sabotage against the United States. Having served his country in two world wars as an enlisted soldier, he loved America, even as he despised its capitalist politics.

  Hammett’s final years, following his release from prison, were sad ones. His name was removed from a film based on one of his characters; his radio shows were canceled; and a scheduled collection of his fiction was dropped by the publisher. He spent most of his last decade isolated in a small gatekeeper’s cottage in Katonah, New York. On two occasions shots were fired through his front windows, but Hammett bore his exile with stoic acceptance.

  Sick and frail, blacklisted as a political pariah, unable to write, and hounded by the IRS for taxes on money he no longer earned, Samuel Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer in 1961, at the age of sixty-six.

  He considered himself a literary failure, but, as this book helps prove, he was anything but that. No other writer since Edgar Allan Poe has exerted a greater influence on mystery fiction. His art was timeless and his work has not dated. In the genre of detective fiction, he was a master.

  That mastery is evident in Nightmare Town, the largest collection of his shorter works and by far the most comprehensive.

  WILLIAM F. NOLAN

  West Hills, California

  1999

  NIGHTMARE TOWN

  A Ford—whitened by desert travel until it was almost indistinguishable from the dust-clouds that swirled around it—came down Izzard’s Main Street. Like the dust, it came swiftly, erratically, zigzagging the breadth of the roadway.

  A small woman—a girl of twenty in tan flannel—stepped into the street. The wavering Ford missed her by inches, missing her at all only because her backward jump was bird-quick. She caught her lower lip between white teeth, dark eyes flashed annoyance at the rear of the passing machine, and she essayed the street again.

  Near the opposite curb the Ford charged down upon her once more. But turning had taken some of its speed. She escaped it this time by scampering the few feet between her and the sidewalk ahead.

  Out of the moving automobile a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his gray eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.

  The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face—a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.

  “I beg y’r par’ on,” he said. “ ’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ’S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi—eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”

  The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.

  He stared after her with stupid surprise in his eyes until she had vanished through a doorway in the middle of the block. Then he scratched his head, shrugged, and turned to look across the street, where his machine had pushed its nose into the red-brick side wall of the Bank of Izzard and now shook and clattered as if in panic at finding itself masterless.

  “Look at the son-of-a-gun,” he exclaimed.

  A hand fastened upon his arm. He turned his head, and then, though he stood a good six feet himself, had to look up to meet the eyes of the giant who held his arm.

  “We’ll take a little walk,” the giant said.

  The man in bleached khaki examined the other from the tips of his broad-toed shoes to the creased crown of his black hat, examined him with a whole-hearted admiration that was unmistakable in his red-rimmed eyes. There were nearly seven massive feet of the speaker. Legs like pillars held up a great hogshead of a body, with wide shoulders that sagged a little, as if with their own excessive weight. He was a man of perhaps forty-five, and his face was thick-featured, phlegmatic, with sunlines around small light eyes—the face of a deliberate man.

  “My God, you’re big!” the man in khaki exclaimed when he had finished his examination; and then his eyes brightened. “Let’s wrestle. Bet you ten bucks against fifteen I can throw you. Come on!”

  The giant chuckled deep in his heavy chest, took the man in khaki by the nape of the neck and an arm, and walked down the street with him.

  —

  STEVE THREEFALL awakened without undue surprise at the unfamiliarity of his surroundings as one who has awakened in strange places before. Before his eyes were well open he knew the essentials of his position. The feel of the shelf-bunk on which he lay and the sharp smell of disinfectant in his nostrils told him that he was in jail. His head and his mouth told him that he had been drunk; and the three-day growth of beard on his face told him he had been very drunk. />
  As he sat up and swung his feet down to the floor details came back to him. The two days of steady drinking in Whitetufts on the other side of the Nevada-California line, with Harris, the hotel proprietor, and Whiting, an irrigation engineer. The boisterous arguing over desert travel, with his own Gobi experience matched against the American experiences of the others. The bet that he could drive from Whitetufts to Izzard in daylight with nothing to drink but the especially bitter white liquor they were drinking at the time. The start in the grayness of imminent dawn, in Whiting’s Ford, with Whiting and Harris staggering down the street after him, waking the town with their drunken shouts and roared-out mocking advice, until he had reached the desert’s edge. Then the drive through the desert, along the road that was hotter than the rest of the desert, with— He chose not to think of the ride. He had made it, though—had won the bet. He couldn’t remember the amount of the latter.

  “So you’ve come out of it at last?” a rumbling voice inquired.

  The steel-slatted door swung open and a man filled the cell’s door. Steve grinned up at him. This was the giant who would not wrestle. He was coatless and vestless now, and loomed larger than before. One suspender strap was decorated with a shiny badge that said MARSHAL.

  “Feel like breakfast?” he asked.

  “I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted.