well: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 by-stander, or client.

Hammett’s Continental Op is distinctly unglamorous and unintellectual. The Op is pushing forty, is about five feet, six or seven inches tall, weighs one hundred and ninety pounds, and works as a modestly paid operative of the Continental Detective Agency, a fictional firm loosely modeled on the Pinkerton organization. Although certainly not stupid, the Op relies on routine police procedures and direct, often violent action rather than elaborate chains of logic to track down criminals. The colorful amateur detective is replaced by the professional, anonymous, and colorless Op, who has no history, no family, no hobbies or interests outside his work, and no social life beyond an occasional poker game with police officers or other detectives. In a 1925 short story, “The Gutting of Couffingal,” the Op gives his most extensive discussion of his ideas about his work:Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. . . . I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. . . . You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it. You might as well expect a hound to play tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught.

Hammett humorously underscored the difference in methods in a 1924 short story, “The Tenth Clew,” which parodies the classical detective plot with a set of nine bewildering clues, including a victim missing his left shoe and collar buttons, a mysterious list of names, a bizarre murder weapon (the victim was beaten to death with a typewriter), and so on. The solution, the “tenth clue,” is to ignore all nine of these confusing and, as it turns out, phony clues and to use standard methods such as the surveillance of suspects to find the killer. The Op relies on methodical routine, long hours, and action to get results, not on reasoning alone. Rather than presenting a brilliant alternative to unimaginative police methods, the Op often follows their standard procedures.

Just as the detective is different in Hammett’s model, so are the crimes and criminals. The world of the traditional mystery is one of security and regularity, disrupted temporarily by the aberrant event of the crime. Once the detective solves the crime through the application of reason, normalcy is restored. The worldview implicit in this plot was obviously comforting for a largely middle-class English readership at the turn of the twentieth century but was remote from the experience of the generation of American readers who had just survived World War I. The world of the hard-boiled detective, as conceived by an author who had been through the horrors of that war, is one in which criminal behavior is the norm rather than the exception. There are usually several crimes and several criminals, and the society is not an orderly one temporarily disrupted but a deeply corrupt one that will not be redeemed or even much changed after the particular set of crimes being investigated is solved.

Red Harvest

First published: 1927-1928 (serial), 1929

Type of work: Novel

The Continental Op resorts to desperate methods to clean up organized crime and political corruption in a small mining town.

Red Harvest, Hammett’s first novel, is now generally regarded as one of his best. The case begins when the Continental Op is sent to the small Montana mining town of Personville (called “Poisonville” by those who know it) at the request of Donald Willsson, the publisher of the town’s newspapers. Willsson, who had been using the newspapers as a platform from which to fight civic corruption, is murdered before the Op can meet him and find out what he was hired to do. The Op manages to persuade Elihu Willsson, Donald’s father and the owner of most of the property in the town, including the newspapers and the mines, to hire him to investigate crime and political corruption in Personville.

As it turns out, Donald Willsson’s murder was at the hands of a jealous bank teller who mistakenly believed that Willsson was having an affair with the teller’s former girlfriend, Dinah Brand. When Elihu Willsson learns that his son’s death was entirely unrelated to the organized crime in the town, he tries to call the Op off the case; in fact, Willsson himself is deeply involved in the corruption and could be caught up in the investigation. By this time, however, there is no turning back; the Op has become too deeply enmeshed in the web of power and corruption that includes not only his own client but also the local bootleggers, gamblers, hired gunmen, and even the chief of police.

As the title suggests, this is the most violent of the novels; the twenty-first of its twenty-seven chapters is entitled “The Seventeenth Murder” (in its original serial publication in the pulp magazine Black Mask, it had been the nineteenth), and the series of killings has by no means ended at that point. The difference between the neat puzzles to be solved by deduction in the classical model and the confusing multiplicity of crimes and criminals in the hard-boiled novel of detection is underscored when Dinah Brand, who becomes the Op’s ally and, the text implies, romantic interest, comments directly on the Op’s methods:“So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My God! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled pig-headed guy you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.” “Plans are all right sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes up to the top.”

The moral corruption that permeates the town seems to be contagious, eventually affecting even the Op, who arranges several murders himself by playing off the rival factions against each other, largely by misinforming them about each other’s intentions. Indeed, it is only at the end of the novel that the reader, along with the Op, learns that he did not commit the seventeenth murder (of Dinah Brand) while under the influence of a mixture of laudanum and gin. This type of suspense is possible because of Hammett’s decision to use a severely restricted first-person narration by the Op to tell the story; the reader sees and hears only as much as the Op does and knows far less. The story is told almost entirely through terse, objective descriptions and dialogue. The Op seldom reveals his thoughts directly and only occasionally discusses them with other characters.

The reader’s task of interpretation is complicated by the fact that most of the dialogue in the novel is between characters who are intentionally trying to mislead and confuse each other. The reader’s limitation to and identification with the Op’s point of view creates much of the book’s interest, especially when the Op appears to be falling under the contagion of corruption himself, becoming poisoned morally by “Poisonville” and turning into a bloodthirsty killer not much different from the criminals he is supposed to be combating.

At the book’s close, most of the major characters have been murdered. Rather than emphasizing a tidy solution to the case—recall that the murder he was originally hired to investigate is solved quite early in the book and has little to do with the main plot—the ending clearly suggests that the pattern of pervasive corruption will continue relatively unchanged. Elihu Willsson is still in control of the local government, and the town is “all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again.” Political corruption, fueled by the rich industrialist, is the norm, not the aberration. Many critics have seen evidence of Hammett’s Marxist views even in this early work because of this implicit critique of capitalist society. This morally evil, or at best neutral, world within which the hard-boiled detective lives and works and the patent corruption of the public legal system place added importance on his private code of ethics, the only standard of behavior to which he holds himself.

The Maltese Falcon

First published: 1929-1930 (serial), 1930

Type of work: Novel

Sam Spade, investigating the murder of his partner, becomes involved in the search for the priceless jeweled statue of a falcon.

Although he appeared only in The Maltese Falcon and three short stories, Sam Spade has become Hammett’s best-known creation, largely as a result of Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of him in John Huston’s scrupulously faithful film version (the third made of the book). After writing a second and somewhat weaker Continental Op novel, The Dam Curse (1929), Hammett turned to an entirely objective third-person narration for his next two novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key (1931). In these works, he describes details of gesture and expression from the outside, as with a camera-eye point of view but never reveals characters’ thoughts or motives. This shift removes even the few traces of interpretation and analysis that had been provided by the taciturn Op and makes the analysis of the character of the detective himself the central concern of critics. The question that readers of The Maltese Falcon must work to answer is not “Who committed the crime?” but “What sort of man is Sam Spade?”

The story begins when a beautiful woman calling herself Miss Wonderly hires private detective Sam Spade and his partner, Miles Archer, to follow a man named Floyd Thursby, ostensibly to help her find her missing sister, who has run away with Thursby. Archer is murdered that night, and shortly afterward Thursby is murdered as well. Miss Wonderly, whose real name is Brigid O’Shaughnessy, turns out to be involved in a complicated plot to steal a priceless jeweled statue of a falcon, and Thursby was her accomplice. Other parties pursuing the falcon appear as the narrative progresses, chief among them the colorful figures of Joel Cairo, one of the first homosexual characters portrayed in an American novel, and Caspar Gutman, the unforgettable Fat Man, who is the mastermind behind the search for the falcon.

Unlike Hammett’s first two novels, The Maltese Falcon contains comparatively little violence (the sixteenth of the twenty chapters is titled “The Third Murder,” in distinct contrast to the excesses of Red Harvest), and most of that occurs “offstage,” reported rather than directly depicted. The emphasis is on Spade’s gradual uncovering of the complex relations among the various criminals rather than on simply determining who killed Thursby (the police and the rest of the interested parties draw the obvious conclusion early in the book that Thursby killed Archer), and also on the criminals’ and police department’s (as well as the reader’s) attempts to determine Spade’s motives and intentions. Hammett’s objective narration limits the reader’s knowledge to the same set of lies and half-truths that the characters must sift through themselves to learn the facts of the story.

In fact, Archer’s death, the initial crime to be solved, is probably dismissed as of little concern by most readers once the story gets under way—until it is revealed at the end that he was really murdered by Brigid O’Shaughnessy, with whom Spade has since apparently fallen in love. In the novel’s dramatic conclusion, Spade turns his lover over to the police as Archer’s murderer. The reasoning that leads Spade to solve the crime is based upon clues available from the start, suggesting that he may have known of her guilt all along, even before they became lovers. The question remains open as to whether he has really fallen in love but is forced by his rigid personal code of ethics to turn her in or whether he has been coldbloodedly manipulating her throughout in order to solve the case. The evidence of the text suggests paradoxically that both hypotheses may be partially true.

Spade’s long delay in solving the case raises other questions: Is he crooked himself, hoping to get rich by helping the gang of thieves recover the falcon, or is he merely playing along with them to further his investigation? After all, it is only after the falcon proves worthless and the offers of vast sums of money that have been made to him for its recovery have been withdrawn that Spade turns in the criminals. Add to these disquieting concerns the points that he was having an affair with his partner’s wife, Ida (and that he liked neither of them), and that he purposely obstructs the police investigation at every stage until he is ready to reveal his solution, and the result is that the mystery of the novel resides far more in understanding the character of the protagonist than in resolving the plot. This interest in exploring character rather than in finding the killer is extended in Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, which does not even have a detective, featuring instead a gambler, Ned Beaumont, as its protagonist; it is as much a psychological novel as a mystery.

The Thin Man

First published: 1933 (serial), 1934

Type of work: Novel

Nick Charles, a retired private detective, and his wife, Nora, become caught up in the investigation of the disappearance of a wealthy scientist.

Hammett’s fifth and final novel, The Thin Man, is a return to first-person narration, as Nick Charles narrates the story of a case he unwillingly takes on while vacationing. Charles retired from the Trans-American Detective Agency six years before the action of the book begins in order to manage the businesses that his young wife, Nora, inherited from her father. The couple is spending the Christmas holidays in New York City, primarily to avoid spending them with Nora’s family on the West Coast. While Charles is, in many respects, another example of the hard-boiled detective, the novel is unique in its light comic tone, which fitted it for popular adaptations in a series of “Thin Man” films. In the book, the thin man of the title is actually the missing inventor Clyde Wynant, not the detective. The description that Charles gives of Wynant (“Tall—over six feet—and one of the thinnest men I’ve ever seen. He must be about fifty now, and his hair was almost white when I knew him.”) fits Hammett himself, except for his age, and he posed for the picture on the jacket of the first edition of the book, perhaps furthering the popular misconception that the title refers to the detective.

In other respects, the author and his protagonist are quite similar, sharing the same age and the same background as detectives. Their personal lives are also similar: The centerpiece of the book is the relationship between the worldly and jaded Charles and his young and enthusiastic wife Nora, one of the few happy marriages depicted in modern fiction. Their relationship is clearly based on that between Hammett and Lillian Hellman, to whom the book is dedicated. Gertrude Stein once remarked that Hammett was the only American novelist who wrote well about women, and Nora is one more example of the series of interesting and complex women characters featured in Hammett’s fiction, extending from Dinah Brand in Red Harvest through Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon.

Wynant’s disappearance is ascribed at first to his well-known eccentricity but becomes ominous when his secretary and former lover, Julia Wolf, is found murdered. Charles had previously done some detective work for Wynant and his lawyer, Herbert Macaulay. Charles’s past association with the other members of the Wynant family (Wynant’s ex-wife, Mimi, and his children, Dorothy and Gilbert) leads them to consult him about the case. One of the book’s comic motifs is Charles’s continuing and unsuccessful attempt to convince people that he really has retired and has no interest in working on the murder or disappearance. Eventually, he is drawn into the investigation against his will and solves the case. As in Hammett’s earlier novels, suspense is created by the use of a deadpan first-person narrator, who reports all the relevant facts but seldom reveals to the reader what he thinks about them except in conversation with other characters (from whom he is often withholding his conclusions as well).