SOURCE: "The Short Stories," in his Dashiell Hammett, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 19-46.

[Marling is an American educator and poet whose books include William Carlos Williams and the Painters (1982) and Raymond Chandler (1986). In the following excerpt, Marling presents a detailed analysis of the author's short fiction, emphasizing the allegorical aspects of the stories.]

Hammett's Early Short Stories

Hammett's stories rise above the efforts of his fellow Black Mask writers because they are framed by Hammett's own almost insupportable tensions. On the one hand, writing afforded him a way of maintaining his aloofness and pride, of identifying and rejecting the inauthenticities he had seen. Working for the Pinkertons, he found most people false, most emotion to be tactical fabrication. The inauthenticity extended, in Hammett's view, to innocent parties, such as Fatty Arbuckle, whom Hammett found guilty on other counts. These other counts are deviations from an ideal character, of which James Wright or Natty Bumppo stand as examples. Hammett's inner duty was to turn up the lie, to speak for the little man.

On the other hand, Hammett, the writer, dealt in the inauthenticities of fiction. Better than most, he could mislead his readers, or suddenly reverse field; under this cloak he remade a world that had not treated him kindly. At the end of a Hammett story, the reality the hero uncovers is no more plausible than the alibi of his suspect. "What happens in Hammett," writes Steven Marcus [in the introduction to The Continental Op, 1974; see excerpt dated 1974], "is that what is revealed as 'reality' is a still further fictionmaking activity. . . the consciousness present in many of the Op stories and all the novels is that Dashiell Hammett, the writer, is continually doing the same thing as the Op." This consciousness that the process of discovery is a fiction—that the hero's ability to find hidden, latent, and unseen clues in the fictional world gives him superhuman powers—endows Hammett's best work with the external appearance of realism and the internal tensions of the quest or the allegory.

That part of the Hammett hero that puzzles readers, because it is so closely guarded, is the heart of Hammett, at once proud and disengaged yet moved by an unquenchable sense of injustice. Like Jack London and other realists, Hammett in his earliest stories uses an unseen ballast of social concern to mitigate the apparently ruthless or uncouth action of the hero. Hammett began, in fact, with an extraordinary insight into the lives of the office worker, the laborer, the underdog, and the misfit. These first uncollected stories are not detective stories at all.

The narrator of "Nelson Redline" condones his fellow office workers' laziness: "each day's task equalled each other day's task, with no allowance for our becoming more expert with practice, so that toward the end of our term, by carefully concealing our increased proficiency, we had rather an easy time of it." But sympathy never becomes sentiment. This narrator notes, when a co-worker breaks the office code, how the clerks "nurse that momentary speechlessness into deliberate ostracism." When the shunned character flees, the narrator adds, "there was the undeniable fact that all philosophic justification is with him who runs. So, in justice, I couldn't condemn him."

The story "An Inch and a Half of Glory" explores the rise and demise of an office worker whose rescue of a child from a burning building leads him to believe that "desk jobs were well enough for a man who could not rise above them. But nowadays there was a scarcity of—hence there must be a demand for—men whose ancestral courage had not been distilled out of their veins."

Hammett's understanding of the emotions of these working class characters, who were to be his readers, was exceptional. One of his narrators told the audience: "I don't know exactly why I went to his room with him. I knew it was going to be an uncomfortable, even a painful, hour—that he was going to say things that having to listen to would embarrass me. But I went with him to give him an opportunity to explain, to defend himself. My former casual liking for him had, I think, nothing to do with it. That was gone now. I felt sorry for him, in a vague way that made me try to conceal from him my present repugnance." This embarrassment at and aloofness from personal emotion limits Hammett's development in the proletarian direction, and is clearly Hammett's own feeling, as acquaintances have testified. It is also the deep uneasiness from which both his rejection of the unauthentic and his fictionalizing arise. Hammett felt uncertain about emotions; as he remarked when he incarnated them in one unpredictable character [in the story "Faith"], "you don't know approximately what they will do under any given set of circumstances, and so they are sources of uneasiness and confusion. You can't count on them. They make you uncomfortable."

Some of the early stories, such as "The Breech" and "Nelson Redline," have this dis-ease at their thematic centers. Hammett's narrators prefer to be several steps removed, where they may observe the laws of social organization: "Without conventions any sort of group life is impossible, and no division of society is without its canons. The laws of the jungle are not the laws of the drawing room, but they are as certainly existent, and as important to their subjects" ["Faith"]. It was this interest in the larger social mechanism, in its codes and real functions, that prompted Hammett to read Spencer, Darwin, and later Marx. This "ballast" of social concern is never visible as emotional empathy, but always manifest in a concern for social process.

Hammett tried at first to reveal his detective's emotional life, but the experiment reinforced his decision to remain distant and to employ an objective point of view. In "The Hunter," the ruthless culling of the authentic from the inauthentic holds a personal emotional danger for the detective. It is the problem of means and ends, as Vitt, the detective, simulates moods that he thinks will be of use:

"That's tough." He put into the word and feature all the callousness for which he was fumbling inside. "But the way it stands is that if you're going to fight me on this check business, I'm going to make the going as tough as I can for the pair of you."

Vitt seized the irritation that the idiocy of this reiteration aroused in him, built it up, made a small anger out of it, and his discomfort under the gazes of the woman and child grew less.

A suspicion that all of this was ridiculous came to the detective, but he put it out of his mind. After he got a confession out of his man he could remember things and laugh. Meanwhile, what had to be done to get that confession needed an altogether different mood. If he could achieve some sort of rage. . . .

This simulation makes Vitt merely an actor, and frees him—as is necessary for an allegoric hero—from the personal cost of his actions. But what Vitt does is beat up, arrest, and imprison a penny-ante forger, whose motive is a desire to feed and clothe a widow and her children. Hammett saw the problem, and in the final sentence, after booking the criminal, his Vitt "hastened up to the shopping district. The department stores closed at half past five, and his wife had asked him to bring home three spools of No. 60 black thread." Hammett intended to frame Vitt in a domesticity comparable to his victim's—to show that they were both job-doers, that the impersonal commercial operations of capitalism rolled over both. As he remarked earlier in the story, "A detective is a man employed to do certain defined things: he is not a judge, a god. Every thief has his justification, to hear him tell it." But what the story shows is that a realistic detective, set in a real world, inevitably becomes a hollow man, because the inauthentic that he seeks to destroy, arrest, or remove is inextricably entwined with the authentic, the real, and the emotional. He is as culpable as those he arrests.

The alternative is to make the detective a judge and a god, but to do it covertly. He must be the one who hears the thieves, appraises their justifications, and pursues destruction of the inauthentic while sparing the real. He must not deal with emotions except as falsehoods that ravel the plots he is commissioned to unravel. If he moves on this level, an enormous power comes into his hands, of which the reader is initially ignorant; it is the detective who decides what alibi will be valid, what clue to follow, and, to borrow Robert Champigny's phrase, "what will have happened" at the story's end. In Hammett's work this power is most evident when the detective is drawn taut between world-weary realist and knight in pursuit of the grail.

It took Hammett some time to settle on the move away from emotional intimacy with his characters; at first, in such published stories as "The Sardonic Star of Tom Dooley" and "The Joke on Eloise Morey," he took refuge in heavy irony. But in late 1923, when he wrote "The Second-Story Angel" and "Itchy," his touch lightened. In the second piece Hammett sketched a crook who believed what he read about himself in the newspaper and was captured as a consequence: "Fiction, Itchy knew, meant stories, books. He had never thought of stories as having any connection with actuality, any relation to it. But it seemed they did, and not only with life but with him personally. Books had been written about men like him; that was what the newspapers were getting at." The cavalier manner in which Hammett moves Itchy toward his demise marks his acceptance of the fictional tools at his command.

The Continental Op

The result of Hammett's early work was a detective whom he called, simply, the Continental Op. The Op began as an idealized character. Hammett himself told Frederick Danney that he was modeled on James Wright, his Pinkerton boss in Baltimore. But the Op soon moves in semiallegoric ways. Much of a reader's appreciation of him rests on an understanding of social code and how Hammett manipulates it to make allegoric gestures. Having grown up with genres like the detective and the western, Americans are not highly conscious of how the cues are manipulated. Because the Op delivers these details objectively, the reader assumes the Op is fair. The reader is thus allowed to be suspicious and to believe himself objective at once, and he assumes that the Op shares his state of mind.

The epitome and chief cause of this effect is Hammett's use of a first-person narrator who purports to be objective. Like a camera eye, the Op only tells what he is seeing; he is never omnipresent, except in the resolutions of stories, and, being nameless, he invites the reader to share his experience. Hammett afflicts the Op with the problems and habits customary to office-workers: back trouble, insomnia, thinning hair and thickening belly. The Op plays cards, gripes about paperwork and complains when the company does not deem Oakland "out of town" for expense account purposes. Details that might forestall complete identification—a wife, bills, politics—are eliminated. Realistic detail and social code screen allegoric structures from the reader's view.

The most obvious of these structures derives from Hammett's understanding that the core of the American detective story, a fascination with death, was also an old topic of allegory. For the reader a good yardstick on this is the Op's changing attitude toward death. Obviously he cannot die, but in the earlier stories Hammett brought him to the edge of death frequently; it was a good way to bare the Op's soul, to elicit reader sympathy. Later the Op's brushes with death became rude gestures at fate, and he succumbed eventually, not to death, but to world-weariness. William Ruehlman calls him a "saint with a gun" and places him in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper's frontier romances. John Cawelti, another critic, calls him a "traditional man of virtue in an amoral and corrupt world," forced to "take over the basic moral functions of exposure, protection, judgment and execution." But as the following section will show, the Op's code is blurry, if not cynical, when he reaches full development. More to the point is Angus Fletcher's comment that such a semiallegoric figure stands "part way between the human and the divine spheres," and can "act free of the usual moral restraints, even when he is acting morally, since he is moral only in the interests of his power over other men."

The fascination with death is evident even in the earliest stories. In "The Tenth Clew" the Op is blackjacked and believes he is dying when his attackers dump him in San Francisco Bay.

Weariness settled upon me, and a sense of futility. The water was no longer cold. I was warm with a comfortable, soothing numbness. My head stopped throbbing; there was no feeling at all in it now. No lights, now, but the sound of fog-horns . . . fog-horns . . . fog-horns ahead of me, behind me, to either side, annoying me, irritating me.

Hold off, Charon—the Op rouses himself. Life is valuable for the Op yet, as it is in "The House in Turk Street" when he overhears the inscrutable Tai vetoing his execution: "My gratitude went out to the British voice! Somebody was in favor, at least to the extent of letting me live. I hadn't been very cheerful these last few minutes." But this same story, slightly later, shows a more cautious Op: "I might have stalked my enemies through the dark house, and possibly have nabbed them; but most likely I would simply have succeeded in getting myself shot. And I don't like to be shot."

After this story and its sequel, "The Girl with the Silver Eyes," the Op never puts himself deliberately in the path of danger. This heightens the implicit fear of death, or the fear of what death will reveal.

Only a year later, in "The Golden Horseshoe," the Op is no longer "a young sprout of twenty or so, newly attached to the Continental Detective Agency." Instead, he says, "the fifteen years that had slid by since then had dulled my appetite for rough stuff." This story and "The Whosis Kid" (March 1925) mark the maturation of the Op's career. Emphatically a working stiff, he suffers for the drinking bouts he initiates in the first story, and makes sure that he gets his "three square" a day in the second.

The Op's dehumanization by his work coincides with the rise of his "god-like" powers. In "The Golden Horseshoe," his ends—the necessity of success—have begun to corrupt his means. Much of the story's impact owes to the violence done the reader's sense of justice by the suggestion that God isn't fair. In "The Whosis Kid" Hammett reveals the Op as calculating:

For myself I counted on coming through all in one piece. Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed. I've had twenty years of experience at dodging that. I can count on being one of the survivors of whatever blow-up there is. And I hope to take most of the other survivors for a ride.

The Op's explanation is really an assurance that he is immortal, since the great unstated condition is death.

In "The Scorched Face" (May 1925) the Op exercises any means at his disposal. He invades the privacy of Mr. Correli, whose wife committed suicide. When Correli objects, the Op thinks: "That was silly. I felt sorry for this young man whose wife had killed herself. Apart from that, I had work to do. I tightened the screws." A few lines later the Op threatens to "advertise" her suicide in the newspapers. The Op's obvious use of immoral powers in the name of morality, is increasingly displaced on his boss, the Old Man "with his gentle eyes behind gold spectacles and his mild smile, hiding the fact that fifty years of sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject."

In "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money," the Op's use of immoral means for moral ends succeeds only because Hammett makes him exceptionally empathetic. "I was no fire-haired young rowdy," he says. "I was pushing forty, and I was twenty pounds overweight. I had the liking for ease that goes with that age and weight." He no longer does any spadework; he merely judges the guilty at the right time. He tells readers he is an organization man "settled down to cigarettes, guesses on who'd be the next heavyweight champion and where to get good gin," but he is headed for the same dehumanization that characterizes his boss.

Fifty years of crook-hunting for the Continental had emptied him of everything except brains and a soft-spoken shell of politeness that was the same whether things went good or bad—and meant as little at one time as another. We who worked under him were proud of his coldbloodedness. We used to boast that he could spit icicles in July, and we called him Pontius Pilate among ourselves, because he smiled politely when he sent us out to be crucified on suicidal jobs.

The Op of "The Tenth Clew" is gone. It is no mystery that after "$106,000 Blood Money," the Op says, "I'm going to take a couple of weeks off," but never returns.

Classical Formulas in the Op Stories

Hammett wrote the first widely anthologized Op story, "The Tenth Clew," in late 1923. In style and plot this story marks a new level of accomplishment. The first part of it concerns nine clues, some plausible, most preposterous, that seem to link the murder of Leopold Gantvoort to a vengeful Frenchman, Emil Bonfils. But the clues prove contradictory: Hammett is employing one of Poe's classic formulas—the trail of false clues laid down by the murderer. Finally the Op, and his police colleague Sergeant O'Gar, discover the tenth clue, which is that the first nine are false. They decide that the mystery rests with old Gantvoort's girl friend, Creda Dexter. Judging from her beauty, the Op infers a romantic triangle. He breaks the case by confronting her "brother" Madden, who, with an accomplice, blackjacks and dumps the Op into San Francisco Bay. But the Op revives in time to nab the pair with Sergeant O'Gar. The crime is pinned to Madden, who adopts an Iago-like silence, but his "sister" Creda confesses for him, providing the denouement and making her professed innocence and genuine love for old Gantvoort more credible. The interesting use of the classic "false trail" is not well carried out; Madden's purpose in setting out the misleading clues and in telephoning the Op are unexplained. Also left rough is the Op's comment at the end: "I don't believe her [Creda's] enjoyment of her threequarters of a million dollars is spoiled a bit by any qualms over what she did to Madden." The facts set out earlier clearly make young Gantvoort the heir. Despite the loose ends, "The Tenth Clew" shows the hand of a confident stylist: every word is in a chosen place. There is more rapidity of pace and consistency of characterization than Hammett had yet been able to attain.

The classic formulas also appear in "The Gatewood Caper" (October 1923), a less satisfying story in which the central enigma is a variant of the "sealed room" problem. When millionaire Harvey Gatewood's daughter is "kidnapped," the Op and Sergeant O'Gar advise him to pay the ransom, so they may find, follow, and arrest the criminal. He does, but they do not; the "kidnapper" vanishes into an alley with no apparent egress. As customary, there is an unexpected "means." The criminal has rented an apartment on the alley, and "vanished" by locking the back door to his building behind him, then exiting through the front door.

Hammett returned to the sealed room problem seven years later in "The Farewell Murder," another middling story. The problem here is how Karalov, who hires the Op, could be killed by Sherry, whom the Op is certain was at the time on a train to Los Angeles—a suspect in a locked room, in other words. The answer is that Sherry did not do it; Karalov's apparent friend Rringo did it. Hammett does not play fairly with the reader, however, since at the time of the murder he portrays Rringo as suffering a disabling injury.

The classic problems were not Hammett's strength, nor the chief interest of his editors at Black Mask, but he did pay homage to them again in an exceptional later story, "Fly Paper." The Op calls this search for runaway Sue Hambleton "a wandering daughter job." Before he can find her, she is poisoned, which causes the other principals to kill each other. When the Op investigates the deaths, he finds a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo wrapped in flypaper behind a refrigerator. "Ah, the arsenical fly paper, the Maybrick-Seddons trick," exclaims his boss. But the sequence and motive for the murders remain unclear until the Old Man remembers a passage in the novel that explains the mechanics and psychology of slow poisoning. Though both the logic and resolution of "Fly Paper" come from The Count of Monte Cristo, the homage is a graceful close to an excellent story.

Hammett's early investigation of the classic formulae turned up no impelling material, however; the formulas were not adaptable to a Natty Bumppo readership. They emphasized foiling the reader and astonishing him with witty resolutions. Hammett preferred, and saw that his audience required, strong plotting and vivid characterization in an intensely physical world.

Thus "The House in Turk Street," published in the spring of 1924, adds a detailed foreground and a "romantic interest" to achieve its complexity. While inquiring after a run-away, the Op meets the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Quarre, who invite him in for tea and cookies. Shortly afterward, an ugly con named Hook puts a gun to the surprised detective's head: he foolishly reveals to the Op that the Quarres are a front for a bond-heist involving himself, an Englisheducated Chinese named Tai, and a beautiful woman with grey eyes named Elvira. The Op has stumbled on their hide-out. They bind and gag him and prepare to leave; the Op is entirely the bystander in a plot that develops through the misapprehended meaning of his appearance.

Then Elvira, who has seduced Hook, decides to use the confusion as a cover to steal the bonds. She appeals to Hook to kill Tai. He tries and fails, but Elvira hides the bonds during the tussle. Only the Op sees, which establishes a link between the two of them: "her eyes twinkled with a flash of mirth as they met mine," he reports. After the gang departs, the Op escapes with Tai's aid, and kills Hook when the latter returns. Then he hides the bonds in a new place, waiting for Tai and Elvira to return and interrogate him. They do, leading Hammett to discover one of his best stock situations—the "apartment drama" with a central female character—and one of his best themes: that greed divides the crooks and makes possible their capture.

When Elvira finds the Op, "her eyes snap scornfully." When Tai finds them both, he offers to "give her" to the Op, though he loves her. The scene in the apartment is a tense three-cornered stand-off. For the first time in any Hammett story, events turn on a woman who is both criminal and attractive. In the gunplay that follows, initiated when the disgruntled Quarres return and Tai kills them, Elvira escapes. Only Tai is left alive to hear the Op explain ironically that he "was trying to find a young fellow named Fisher who left his Tacoma home in anger a week or two ago." The resolution unfolds more promising material than the story's development contained. Besides the ironic ending, the sketch of "Tai Choon Tau . . . the brains of the mob" anticipates the later Chang Li Ching and a legion of Fu Manchu bad-guys after him.

Hammett recognized that the crooks divided among themselves in the claustrophobic confines of an apartment offered a potent dramatic situation. It placed the treacherous face to face, heightened tension by reducing movement, and by joining constriction and violence, offered a metaphor for modern life. Introduced to such a locale, the characters need only be left to work out their fates.

Hammett tried it again in "The Whosis Kid" a bit later. Hunting the character of the title, the Op incidentally rescues Inés Almad, a dark foreign siren. He accompanies her home, and in her apartment meets the Kid and Edouard Maurois, who have come to divide with Inés the loot from a robbery. Since crooks never share in Hammett's stories, a stand-off and violence ensue. The resolution is neither as tidy nor as ironic as in "The House in Turk Street," but many of the details—Inés is threatened with a strip-search, the mastermind is an oily foreigner—will appear in The Maltese Falcon. What could animate "The Whosis Kid" but does not is the relation between the Op and the principal female character. Inés, like Elvira, is a femme fatale, but neither the Op nor his creator have clarified the degree to which the detective is vulnerable.

Hammett addressed that material in a sequel to "The House in Turk Street" involving Elvira. "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" was published in the Black Mask in June 1924. In this story Elvira changes her name to Jeanne Delano. The poet Burke Pangburn thinks her the most beautiful woman in the world. She wins Pangburn by praising his poetry, convinces him to forge a check on his rich brother-in-law for $20,000, and then disappears. The Op thinks the case suspicious; at first he declines it out of regard for his agency's reputation. "I am only a hired man and have to go by the rules," he says. When the Continental Agency takes the case, he proceeds in a methodical, realistic manner. He goes to banks; he compares checks and signatures; he traces baggage tickets and transfers; he checks weather reports and prevails on clerks at taxi companies to search their log-books. These days of work he condenses into one paragraph when he gives an update to the Old Man.

When Delano and Pangburn are seen together at a road-house of larcenous repute, the Op deploys one of his informants. In Porky Grout—"a liar . . . a thief . . . a hophead"—Hammett portrays the marginal type nakedly. The trick is "keeping him under my heel," notes the Op. While Grout stakes out the roadhouse, the Op meticulously tracks down more leads. Someone in Baltimore has mailed Pangburn letters from Delano, someone else taxied between her abandoned apartment and the Marquis Hotel. The Op sweet-talks telephone operators to learn more, and then dispatches Dick Foley, one of the most extraordinary minor characters in the Hammett opus, to tail the suspect: " 'Damnedest!' The little Canadian talks like a telegram when his peace of mind is disturbed, and just now he was decidedly peevish. Took me two blocks. Shook me. Only taxi in sight'." The appearance of Foley underlines the increasing complexity of Hammett's code. Communication in the most objective manner possible is now an implicit yardstick of character for the Op, as well as the form of Hammett's narrative. Immediately after Foley, loudmouthed Porky Grout appears, boasting to the Op, "I knocked it over for you, kid!"

The shoot-out, car chase, and confrontation that follow on the Op's reconnaissance of the roadhouse constitute an exceptional passage in Hammett's work. Watching Jeanne Delano the Op notices "a mocking smile that bared the edges of razor-sharp little animal-teeth. And with the smile I knew her!" This detail of physiognomy will typify most of Hammett's later femme fatales, and tells that his interest has shifted. Burke Pangburn and his brother-inlaw fade. "This is the idea," announces the Op, as he bursts into the room, "I want the girl for a murder a couple of months back." The lights go out and they fight; the change in pace is prose adrenalin. Footwork and preparation so methodical that they seem to be ritual purification lead to pure action, which is given its sanctity by emerging allegoric relationships. Not Burke, not the forgery, not the gunplay but the Op's quest for Jeanne is what counts. Can he withstand her allure? Burke is dead by this point. Tai is dead. Porky Grout dies defending Jeanne from the Op. She flees. But the detective has a huge, powerful car at his disposal. He overtakes Jeanne and Fag Kilcourse. Kilcourse dies. It is Jeanne and Everyman.

"She was a thing to start crazy thoughts even in the head of an unimaginative middle-aged thief catcher," says the Op. "She looked at me with a gaze that I couldn't fathom. . . . I was uncomfortable along the spine." All manner of thrust and parry between the sexes follows, the Op adopting the role of gallant, Jeanne that of damsel. They stop along the roadside. Jeanne attempts his seduction:

If you were to take me in your arms and hold me close to the chest that I am already leaning against, and if you were to tell me that there is no jail ahead for me just now, I would be glad of course. But, though for a while you might hold me, you would be only one of the men with which I am familiar: men who love and are used and are succeeded by other men. But because you do none of these things, because you are a wooden block of a man, I find myself wanting you. Would I tell you this, little fat detective, if I were playing a game?

After several minutes, the Op comes to his limit. "You're beautiful as all hell!" he shouts, and flings her against the door. He remembers Porky Grout and the other dead; only the Op's quest sets him above them. He can resist Jeanne because once she paints his fate allegorically, his code sanctions any action that preserves the quest. Hammett attended to strictly realistic interpretations as well: Jeanne has said a few pages earlier that "everyone in the world is either a fellow crook or a prospective victim." The twin detailing of his decision makes the reader forget that the Op is really "a judge and a god."

When he somewhat uncertainly turns Jeanne in, she "put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable," says the Op. End of story—a tour de force of plot and characterization, but also a discovery for Hammett of the depth and potency of archetypes.

When he returned to the theme eighteen months later, in "The Gutting of Couffignal," Hammett made more explicit the danger posed by the femme fatale and the Op's proper response. Princess Zhukovski offers her body. "You think I'm a man and you're a woman. That's wrong," the Op responds, "I'm a man-hunter and you're something that's been running in front of me. There's nothing human about it."

The Op in Adventure Stories

In 1924 Hammett wrote the first in a series of stories that beckoned to the "adventure" readership. "The Golden Horseshoe" takes place in Tijuana; it was followed the next year by "Corkscrew," a detective Western set in Arizona; by "Ber-Bulu," in the Philippines; by "Dead Yellow Women," in Chinatown; and eventually by the Balkan intrigue of "The King Business."

"The Golden Horseshoe" is an average piece of plotting and detection, but it is important for the development of the Op's character and for its stunning conclusion, which rests on the Op's willingness to falsify evidence. Initially the story concerns Norman Ashcraft, a missing architect whose wife wants him back. Ashcraft cannot decide whether to return and commits suicide (he will be reincarnated as the character Flitcraft in The Maltese Falcon). When he dies, Ashcraft's identity is assumed by a hotel burglar named Ed Bohannon, who finds Mrs. Ashcraft willing to send him generous amounts of money in exchange for vague promises that he will return.

The Op is called in to determine the whereabouts of "Ashcraft" and the likelihood of his return—nothing exciting, but the Op, to whom Hammett adds paunch and years, is slightly weary anyway. He stakes out the post office, first intimidating and then jailing an accomplice of Ashcraft in order to get his address. It is the "Golden Horseshoe Cafe" in Tijuana. Hammett sketches the scene of "dirty side streets taking care of the dives that couldn't find room on the main street" with great fidelity.

He finds Ashcraft easily, and engages him in a three-day drinking contest. The rivalry works toward Hammett's central insight into the underworld: universal greed leads to universal mistrust. "Ashcraft and I were as thick as thieves, on the surface, but neither of us ever lost his distrust of the other, no matter how drunk we got." When the binge ends, the Op returns to San Francisco, where he finds Mrs. Ashcraft and her two servants dead. He suspects Bohannon as the mastermind and returns to Tijuana to see if he can discover an accomplice. He settles on the bar's bouncer, a "tall, skinny man with a long yellow neck" named Gooseneck Flinn. The Op hires four men to enter the bar and identify Flinn, and when they do Flinn panics. The Op wants the same from Bohannon and his girl friend, but Flinn and the girl kill each other. After an auto chase and a foot race, complete with arroyo shootout, the Op captures Bohannon, who explains how he hid in a closet during the real Ashcraft's suicide. But he declines to state that he arranged Mrs. Ashcraft's murder. When the Op asks him to pick up the nearer of two cigarettes if he "did a certain thing," however, Bohannon reveals his complicity. Both know this is inadmissible in court. Satisfied that Bohannon is responsible for the deaths, the Op administers justice:

"I can't put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn't do in Seattle—so justice won't be cheated. You're going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft's suicide."

And he did.

The unfortunate Bohannon set himself up for the ironic ending by destroying a suicide note that Ashcraft left; the Op's sentence seems immediately appropriate because it implies a causal relationship linking past and present, but a rereading shows that the Op has made a simple subjective evaluation of character. Hammett developed this ending earlier, in "The Joke on Eloise Morey," and pressed the appeal of biblical vengeance under the guise of impartial justice again in other stories.

The reverse side of this "justice" is shown in "The Scorched Face," published in Black Mask in May 1925. Myra and Ruth Banbrock are missing, another "wandering daughter case" (like "Fly Paper," "$106,000 Blood Money," and "The Gatewood Caper"). The Op is unable to learn much, until Mrs. Stuart Correli, one of the girls' friends, commits suicide after interrogation. A difference in the testimonies of Mrs. Correli and the Banbrocks give the Op his first lead, but it goes nowhere.

Then Hammett introduces Pat Reddy, "a big blond Irishman who went in for the spectacular in his lazy way." Reddy's absolute sense of justice once led him to arrest, and later to marry, the daughter of a wealthy coffeeimporter. But he "kept on working," notes an approving Op; "I don't know what his wife did with her money, but. . . there was no difference in him. . . ." The only favorable portrait of the rich in the Hammett opus, Reddy plays Chingachgook to the Op's Natty Bumppo. Their case is becalmed until an up-country grape grower discovers a charred photograph that he recognizes from the newspapers. The Op and a deputy stalk through the woods, the Op admitting "I'm a shine Indian." They find Ruth Banbrock: "At the base of a tree, on her side, her knees drawn up close to her body, a girl was dead. She wasn't nice to see. Birds had been at her."

But the leads go nowhere. The Op resorts to basic detective work; he makes lists of all of those who have committed suicide recently and he interviews their relatives. He discovers that many of them knew Raymond Elwood, a sleek young real estate agent. Dick Foley, by now a regular supporting actor, tails Elwood, discovering that he spends afternoons with various wealthy women in a yellow house on Telegraph Hill.

The case breaks when Myra appears at the house. Rephrasing one of Poe's maxims, the Op notes that "The crazier the people you are sleuthing act, as a rule, the nearer you are to an ending of your troubles." Deciding that his policeman friend can get the necessary papers "fixed up afterward," the Op persuades Reddy to break into the house. They find "a small room packed and tangled with bodies. Live bodies, seething, writhing. The room was a funnel into which men and women had been poured. . . . Some had no clothes."

Several people are killed, including Raymond Elwood and his corps of burly black servants, before the Op finds a photography darkroom and a safe in the basement. There too is Myra, smoking gun in hand. She has killed Hador, the mastermind of the extortion ring, a "queer little man" who dressed in "black velvet blouse and breeches, black silk stockings and skull cap, black patent leather pumps. His face was small and old and bony but smooth as stone, without line or wrinkle." Everything but cloven feet.

"Hador was a devil," explains Myra; "He told you things and you believed them. You couldn't help it." This exculpation prepares Pat Reddy, the only one accountable to the law, for a rationale that will cover up Myra's crime. The Op points out that two women have committed suicide rather than admit to the orgies. How many more will try when the news of Hador's death leaks out? The Op constructs an alternate version, in which Reddy shoots Hador. He wins Reddy's assent, but the policeman is reluctant when the Op proposes to destroy all the evidence: "They're photographs of people, Pat, mostly women and girls, and some of them are pretty rotten." But most of them are rich. And though the Op eventually wins Reddy to his notion of the greater common good, the Op is simply protecting his client for her rich father. Reddy is the only standard-bearer of justice in the story; the Op is a hired man of the rich. Lest a reader ponder this too deeply, Hammett adds a twist, as in "The Golden Horseshoe." Here, though, he makes the Op the benefactor of the unwitting Reddy: "The sixth photograph in the stack," notes the Op at the end, "had been of his wife—the coffeeimporter's reckless hot-eyed daughter."

"The Scorched Face," viewed objectively, shows that the rich escape justice. Hammett invites the reader to think that justice is done because the essentially innocent are protected; but in fact Myra has murdered Hador. Codes begin to bend as Hammett discovers the Op's entrancing power to create alternate realities. The rich are sympathetic only through Reddy, but his principal characteristic is that he has not changed—he acts poor, and could not be further from the adventurism of the rich. A cynicism about wealth, born of his reading, begins to tint Hammett's work.

"Dead Yellow Women"

"Dead Yellow Women" is one of the best stories Hammett ever wrote. He set this long, 20,000 word piece (Black Mask, November 1925) in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the place has hardly had a rest in detective fiction since. The plot turns on the collaboration of Lillian Shan, a severely beautiful Chinese-American woman, with Chang Li Ching, the feudal lord of Chinatown. Unknown to the Op, whom Miss Shan hires to investigate two murders at her seafront mansion, Shan and Ching run guns to the anti-Japanese forces of Sun-yat-sen. Shan's mansion is the debarkation point, but the murders do not figure in.

The Op penetrates Chang Li Ching's circle through two informers, a Filipino boy called Cipriano and a career con named Dummy Uhl. Like Porky Grout, Uli proves untrustworthy, so the Op arranges for his informer to shoot him with blanks, then has Dick Foley tail Uhl when he flees. Foley makes one of his best cameo appearances:

"Good pickings!" he said when he came in. The little Canadian talks like a thrifty man's telegram. "Beat it for phone. Called Hotel Irvington. Booth—couldn't get anything but number. Ought to be enough. Then Chinatown. Dived in cellar west side Waverly Place. Couldn't stick close enough to spot place. Afraid to take chance hanging around. How do you like it?"

The quarry is a con called the Whistler; in the Continental files the Op finds a picture of him, wearing a Japanese war medal as he bilks Japanese immigrants of their money, and he puts the photo in his pocket.

All leads converge on Chinatown, which becomes a microcosm of the inscrutability and hostility of a larger world. But the Op is reduced to sitting on the doorstep of Chang Li Ching, his idealized foe ("my idea of a man worth working against," says the Op). To find him the Op must run a maze, with a Chinese guide. This passage echoes grail motifs so closely that, when the Op engages Ching on his own terms, which are wordplay, the unexpected levity surprises the reader: it suggests that verbal play is the core of the quest. Ching addresses the Op: "If the Terror of Evildoers will honor one of my deplorable chairs by resting his divine body on it, I can assure him the chair shall be burned afterward, so no lesser being may use it. Or will the Prince of Thief-catchers permit me to send a servant to his palace for a chair worthy of him?" The Op decides to play: " 'It's only because I'm weakkneed with awe of the mighty Chang Li Ching that I dare to sit down,' I explained."

The interview produces no leads. The case cracks when Dick Foley, shadowing the Whistler, seizes on the boot-legging activities of Lillian Shan's boy friend Jack Garthorne, who says that the Whistler runs illegal immigrants and liquor into the country and only a few guns out. Garthorne's role is to romance Shan away from the scene.

When the Op returns to converse with Chang Li Ching, he finds Garthorne, a "slavey" girl, and then Lillian Shan dressed as a Mongolian queen—"come back to her people," she explains. The Op tells how the Whistler has duped her.

They confront Ching and the Whistler in another part of the labyrinth. To avoid verbal gymnastics, the Op gives Ching the "photograph of The Whistler standing in a group of Japs, the medal of the Order of the Rising Sun on his chest." When the Op next looks, the Whistler is "slumped down in an attitude of defeat," killed by mysterious means. The rest of the story's principals go free; justice is served when Ching gives seven of the Whistler's men to the police. Hammett ends the story with a bad joke about Chinese restaurants and a note from Ching alluding in flowery language to the fact that he has discovered the Op's means of solving the case.

Except for a few racist overtones (Hammett's repeated references to "the smell of unwashed Chinese"), the story is told from a sustained distance. The Op rarely drops his irony and detachment, which reinforces the effect of the hyperbolic conversations and distracts the reader from the quest motifs. The solution to the quest lies at the end of labyrinths and mazes; not only are these actual blind alleys in Chinatown, but figurative ones, such as Lillian Shan's research into "old cabalistic manuscripts." The solution to the quest turns out to be a facsimile of reality adroitly manipulated by the Op: the "real" but false photo of the Whistler. This fools even Ching, whose final note expresses his resolve to "not again ever place his feeble wits in opposition to the irresistible will and dazzling intellect" of the Op (my italics). The irony grows when the reader realizes that the note is a compliment, paid by one of his finest creations, to the author, who points to his own "irresistible will" in planning and executing the plot that lead on Ching and the reader.

Like "Dead Yellow Women," "The Gutting of Couffignal" (December 1925) is an attempt to find a usable, exotic locale near San Francisco. An example of Hammett's style at its smoothest, this story is organized on the scale of war rather than on that of private detection. Both stories intend to paint broad canvases, for Hammett was training for longer work. In "Couffignal" he hoped to sustain a long narrative drive, but got bogged down in unexplained details. He returned to a manageable scale in his two notable efforts of 1926, "The Nails in Mr. Caterer" and "The Creeping Siamese," the latter attempting to exploit the Chinese theme again, but with mixed results. Then Hammett's work tailed off a bit. . . .

Toward Longer Works

It was eleven months before another short story appeared, but when it did Hammett showed that his eye was on longer, more profitable work. "The Big Knockover" (February 1927) and its sequel "$106,000 Blood Money" are test canvases for the landscape of clashing armies in Red Earvest

They are also excellent stories in themselves. As "The Big Knockover" opens, the Op passes information to a known con in a speakeasy. He enjoys the trust of criminals now, moving as easily among them as among the police. In fact, though he is tipped off to a huge bank robbery, the Op waits until the next day to inform his clients. As he approaches these banks the next morning, the Op sees a massive robbery in progress. Hammett introduces here a new and important motif—criminal gangs more powerful than the police, with leaders as rationally agile as the best detectives. After thirty-six dead bodies litter the initial pages, the possibility of society as leviathan emerges.

The female interest in the story is Angel Grace Cardigan, who appeared in the earlier "Second-Story Angel," a 1923 satire on pulp writers. Angel Grace is a crook with a code, a new kind of character; she believes in dealing fairly, but she "can't go over." Not nearly so honorable, the Op sets her up for a tail by Dick Foley. Meanwhile he and Counihan, a later version of Pat Reddy, trail Red O'Leary, the visible ringleader of the heist. He goes to a speakeasy, where they extricate him and his girl friend from a brawl. The way out is a peril of passages and halls; Hammett clearly liked the effect he had achieved in "Dead Yellow Women," for two men and a woman again achieve a crumbling moment of peace, a "promise of emptiness."

Outside the speakeasy, the Op finds it necessary to shoot O'Leary in the back surreptitiously to prevent him from fleeing. Then the Op accompanies him to a central hideout, the retreat of ringleaders Big Flora and Papadopoulos. The latter, a "shabby little old man" who follows Flora's orders, is the first in a series of sympathetic "rheumatic" or tubercular characters. Big Flora ties up the Op and puts him under the trembling gun of Papadopoulos. Convinced that the heist has been foiled, the old man arranges for the Op to capture O'Leary, then Pogey and Big Flora, in exchange for his freedom and Nancy Regan, O'Leary's girlfriend. Only after his departure does the Op learn that the innocuous old man is Papadopoulos, the mind behind the crime.

"The Big Knockover" is important because it is a long piece of writing, over 20,000 words, in which Hammett stretched Poe's boundary of the "tale" by linking a large number of crooks in one plot. To make the plot move, however, he had to kill off characters wholesale—at the end, there are fifty-eight known dead. This continued to be the problem with such plots, though Hammett was able to extend this one into a less bloody, equally effective sequel, "$106,000 Blood Money."

"$106,000 Blood Money" derives its narrative power from a series of betrayals, a theme of more interest than simple, benumbing murders. The story commences when Tom-Tom Carey announces to the Op that he intends to collect the $106,000 reward offered for Papadopoulos's capture. His ostensible motive is the murder of his brother, Paddy the Mex, in the bank robbery. But since he admits to betraying his brother, the theme of duplicity is established, and no character's motive is beyond suspicion. The Op strikes a deal with Tom-Tom: "If you turn in Papadopoulos I'll see that you get every nickel you're entitled to. . . . And I'll give you a clear field—I won't handicap you with too much of an attempt to keep my eyes on your actions." This is the first time Hammett perceived that he could enlist reader sympathy in a deal between the Op and a crook; usually he opened with an account of the crime by one of the aggrieved.

The Op ties Tom-Tom almost immediately to the murder of millionaire Taylor Newhall, whose estate hires the Op to investigate. He pursues a number of false leads while Hammett introduces the cast required for the finale. Angel Grace Cardigan, Paddy the Mex's girl friend, tracks down Big Flora Brace, his killer, and befriends her. Jack Counihan, the dashing young operative of "The Big Knockover," leads the Op into a suspicious gunfight. Angel Grace and Big Flora break out of prison; Tom-Tom tracks them to Papadopoulos's hiding place, and alerts the Op that he is moving in.

Sending an operative to protect the nearby heiress of Taylor Newhall, the Op goes with Counihan and Tom-Tom to make the arrest. Linehan and Foley follow. When they approach the hideout they discover that Nancy Regan, Papadopoulos's co-escapee, is really Ann Newhall, the heiress. Sequestering her, they close in on the house. Counihan climbs a second story window to make the arrest, apparently without gunplay. When the Op, Tom-Tom, and the reserves arrive, Papadopoulos makes a break and Tom-Tom kills him.

The Op calls Counihan outside, and reveals to all—including the surprised reader—Jack's complicity with the crooks. His is the folly of having fallen in love with Nancy Regan/Ann Newhall. In a grilling as merciless as any he gives criminals, the Op reduces Counihan to ashes before the others. "The prospect of all that money completely devastated my morals," confesses Jack. But the Op will not settle for commonplaces. "You met the girl and were too soft to turn her in," he accuses. "But your vanity—your pride in looking at yourself as a pretty cold proposition—wouldn't let you admit it even to yourself. You had to have a hard-boiled front." With Counihan reduced, the Op "stood up straight and got rid of the last trace of my hypocritical sympathy."

He demands Counihan's gun, but the latter seems ready to shoot. Tom-Tom shoots first. Linehan, in turn, kills Tom-Tom. Then the Op reveals his unsuspected allegiance: "I stepped over Jack's body, went into the room, knelt down beside the swarthy man. He squirmed, tried to say something, died before he could get it out. I waited until my face was straight before I stood up." After a moment's reflection, it becomes clear that the Op regards Tom-Tom more highly than his fellow detective, that he has arranged the humiliation leading to Jack's death, and that he regards anyone who leaves himself open to sentiment or love as foolish. These are lessons that clarify Sam Spade's later decision about Brigid in The Maltese Falcon.

For the Op, however, the incident signals an end, because his superhuman ability to say what happens next has moved beyond self-mocking irony to an attack on his fellow questers that is only a step from self-destruction. In the story's last lines the Op says, "I felt tired, washed out." When he talks over the events with that superannuated office deity, the Old Man, the Op realizes that "for the first time in the years I had known him I knew what he was thinking. . . . 'It happened that way,' I said deliberately. "I played the cards so that we could get the benefit of the breaks—but it just happened that way.' " But of course the Op arranges it that way, and the fact that he does vitiates the allegoric level so much that, if he continues in this direction, Hammett will have to take up the problems of existentialism and absurdism. The Op will end here, because he has gotten too serious for popular culture.

Hammett's Style

The prose that Hammett discovered in the Op stories was at once deft and muscular, a style "that, at its best, was capable of saying anything," wrote Raymond Chandler. It has drawn praise from numerous critics because this prose practices, in few words, devices of tone, transition, and plot long thought to require more space. Many readers assume that Hammett's prose is simply the "tough talk" typical of American fiction in the 1920s. It is, but it goes beyond what previously existed. Tough writing has been dissected with insight by Walker Gibson [in his Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, 1975], who writes that the tough narrator is in fact more concerned with "feelings than he is with the outward scenes he presents, or with cultivating the good wishes of the reader to whom he is introducing himself. He can ignore these traditional services to the reader because he assumes in advance much intimacy and common knowledge."

Gibson sets up a number of tests, and Hammett—like Hemingway or O'Farrell—meets all of them. His diction is characterized by short, simple, largely Anglo-Saxon words. In a typical story his vocabulary is 77 percent monosyllabic, and only 2 percent of his words are not Anglo-Saxon. Hammett's stress on clarity is manifest in Dick Foley, who satirizes euphemisms such as "in conference," and "a victim of foul play."

Hammett's prose aligns with other "tough talk" criteria: it features the first-person pronoun, eschews the passive voice, and employs short clauses. Hammett's average sentence, in his early work, is thirteen words long. Highly descriptive passages run into flab at fifteen words. Fight scenes are built of sentences averaging eight words each, some only three or four words long.

My arms had Maurois. We crashed down on dead Billie. I twisted around, kicking the Frenchman's face. Loosened one arm. Caught one of his. His other hand gouged at my face. That told me the bag was in the one I held. Clawing fingers tore at my mouth. I put my teeth in them and kept them there. One of my knees was on his face. I put my weight on it. My teeth still held his hand. Both of my hands were free to get the bag.

These sentences were not only easy to read, but formed their own tiny paragraphs in the narrow columns of the pulp format. The resulting white spaces indicated a quickened pace of action. Later on Hammett wrote fight scenes of remarkable rhythm, a sort of fistic poetry: "It was a swell bag of nails. Swing right, swing left, kick, swing right, swing left, kick. Don't hesitate, don't look for targets."

The speed of this prose resides in its verbs. In a sample section of "The Scorched Face," 20 percent of the words are verbs. They tend to be simple and active, especially when the Op speaks or describes his actions, and only compound or passive when Hammett characterizes the rich or fills in a case history.

Hammett also gives the impression of eliding his story for his reader. Time and space are compressed as the reader moves from scene to scene. If the Op seeks information from someone windy or inarticulate, he summarizes the content: "I finally got it, but it cost me more words than I like to waste on incidentals." In "The Golden Horseshoe" the Op dashes to his "rooms for a bagful of clean clothes and went to sleep riding south again," thus spanning the distance between San Francisco and Mexico in a sentence. No time is wasted on travel; essential detail after essential detail creates a sense of necessity in what comes next.

This speed allowed Hammett to write economical transitions. He of t e n delays the revelation of a new scene until late in the transitional sentence, forcing the reader to absorb other information first. In "The Tenth Clew," for instance, "Half a dozen police detectives were waiting for us when we reached the detective bureau." When he is rescued from death in the Bay: "Half an hour later, shivering and shaking in my wet clothes, .. . I climbed into a taxi at the Ferry Building and went to my flat." Periodic sentences are a staple of good writing, but rarely has a writer used them so successfully to engage the reader in a new scene when he is expecting explication of the preceding one.

Equally deft are Hammett's creations of minor characters, an indispensable stock of detective fiction. At the beginning of "The Tenth Clew," he created and dismissed a butler in the same sentence, then passed two hours in twenty words. More celebrated, perhaps, are his descriptions of San Francisco. In reality these are spare and functional, setting important scenes, such as the Op's approach to Chinatown in "Dead Yellow Women":

Grant Avenue, the main street and spine of this strip, is for most of its length a street of gaudy shops and flashy chop-suey houses catering to the tourist trade, where the racket of American jazz orchestras drowns the occasional squeak of a Chinese flute. Farther out, there isn't so much paint and gilt, and you can catch the proper Chinese smell of spices and vinegar and dried things. If you leave the main thoroughfares and showplaces and start poking around in alleys and dark corners and nothing happens to you, the chances are you'll find some interesting things—though you won't like some of them.

Hammett could achieve the effects appropriate to those "alleys and dark corners." The feeling of directionlessness in the Op's first trip to see Chang Li Ching's house is achieved by the sudden prevalence of the first-person pronoun without the usual emphatic verbs: "I was confused enough now, so far as the directions were concerned. I hadn't the least idea where I might be." When he required the reader to remember the topography of a locale for later action Hammett laid out the scene with scientific precision:

The White Shack is a large building, square-built of imitation stone. It is set away from the road, and is approached by two curving driveways, which, together, make a semi-circle whose diameter is the public road. The center of this semicircle is occupied by sheds under which Joplin's patrons stow their cars, and here and there around the sheds are flower-beds and clumps of shrubbery. We were still going at a fair clip when we turned into one end of this semi-circular driveway.

Such stylistic facility did not come automatically. An early draft of "The Sign of the Potent Pills" shows that the young Hammett was susceptible to editorializing and overwriting. He improved by rewriting and editing his old work. . . .

It was a made, not a found, style. Some of its hallmarks seem dated—"I encouraged my brain with two Fatimas"—but it is a style that spoke to and for a large audience. "Hammett 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," wrote Raymond Chandler [in The Simple Art of Murder, 1972]. "He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes....Hammett's style at its worst was as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything."