Dashiell Hammett Short Fiction Analysis
Dashiell Hammett’s best-known and most widely read short stories are those in which the Continental Op, a tough, San Francisco-based Continental Detective Agency investigator, serves as the main character and narrator. Unlike the contemporary American private eye, the Continental Op is not a glamorous figure; he is short, somewhat plump, and middle-aged. His name is never revealed in the stories although he uses several false identities for the people he meets during the course of his investigations. He has no home and no personal life apart from his work; his total identity is that of a private detective. Hired by a society which appears on the surface to be real and respectable, the Continental Op moves through all the social strata from the seediest to the most aristocratic and finds in fulfillment of his cynicism that all segments of the society are equally deceitful, dishonest, and violent.
Hammett’s world is one in which society and social relations are permeated by misanthropic suspicion. The criminal world is a mirror image of the respectable side of the society. It is a reflection of the reputable world in that its existence depends on that world, preys on it for its own ends, and, in effect, is really an actual part of it. These worlds—the respectable and the criminal—are intricately connected and interact with each other. The Continental Op, and for that matter all Hammett’s detectives, is the guardian of the official society hired to protect it from the criminal world which is continually threatening to take over. He stands aloof from these worlds in which he must function primarily because he lives by a very stringent “code.” There are no rewards for concluding an investigation other than drawing his salary and expenses from the Agency, so he cannot succumb to temptations to enrich himself. He expects of himself, and others like him, to accept the failures and disappointments, as well as physical beatings, without complaint. His job is an end in itself, and since his existential identity comes only from his work, he is protected from the temptation to align himself with either sector of the society against the other. Even his conscious refusal to use the speech of the reputable society becomes a form of self-insulation and serves to establish him as an individual apart.
Written in the realistic style, Hammett’s works contain a strong strain of Zolaesque naturalism. The Continental Op, as a narrator, makes no moral claims for himself and is dispassionate in his judgment of other people’s actions. The characters of the stories are representative types rather than people. Thefts and killings come naturally out of the forces of the environment. The Continental Op survives in a jungle world in which only the “fittest” can survive. In “The House in Turk Street,” for example, the reader is made aware from the very beginning that this detective is different from the Sherlock Holmes type of detective. In the conventional detective story, the sleuth’s superior intellect is totally directed toward solving the “challenging puzzle” and discovering the identity of the villain. The actual capture of the criminal does not interest him; this is left to the official police and is usually merely alluded to in passing in the final paragraphs of the stories. In addition, the detective in the conventional story is almost always completely in control of the situation; he makes things happen.
“The House in Turk Street”
In “The House in Turk Street,” the Continental Op, acting on a tip from an informant, is searching for a man by going from house to house ringing doorbells. The flat, deliberate...
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tone of the first few paragraphs conveys the sense that most of the work of this private investigator is pure drudgery, a lot of footwork and trial and error. He definitely is not in charge of the situation, and he has no brilliant scheme for finding his man. He is at Turk Street on the advice of his informant, and the events of the story unfold largely by chance rather than because of anything the detective does or plans. The operative is welcomed into the living room of the Turk Street house and given tea, cookies, and a cigar by a harmless-appearing elderly couple. As the Continental Op relaxes and gets comfortable, he is jarred out of his illusions of security by the pressure of a gun on the back of his neck. Even though he is at this house through sheer happenstance, the criminals assume that he is aware of their dishonest activities and has been tracking them down in order to capture them.
In many ways, Hammett uses the reader’s familiarity with the traditional mystery story as a counterbalance for this tale of adventure. What Hammett succeeds in doing in this story and others in the Continental Op series is to introduce a new kind of detective story, one which will replace what the Black Mask writer felt was the contrived and unrealistic classical mystery. In “The House in Turk Street,” the old and new forms are presented in interaction with each other. When the characters in Hammett’s story experience difficulty, it is because they try to apply the rules of the old world of detective fiction in this new world of adventure where the old rules no longer operate.
For example, Hook, one of the thieves, is killed because he still tries to live in a world of sentiment where men are inspired by women to achieve great things in the name of love. Tai, the Chinese mastermind with a British accent, also clings to the illusions of the old mysteries. Defeated at the end of the story, he is convinced that he has been thwarted by superior detective work and refuses to consider the possibility that the Continental Op had merely stumbled upon their criminal lair. As the Continental Op matter-of-factly reports: “He went to the gallows thinking me a lair.” For the master criminal, the possibility that it was all an accident is unthinkable; but in this house in Turk Street, it is not only thinkable—it is what happens. In the world in which the Continental Op does his job, detectives happen upon criminals by chance, criminals such as the young woman in the story escape, the Continental Op survives because he kills in self-defense, and bodies are strewn all around.
Although the “hard-boiled detective” form which Hammett’s writings made famous has undergone some significant changes over the years, every writer of the American detective story is indebted to the creator of the Continental Op.