Critics of the subgenre long ago recognized Dashiell Hammett's impact upon crime and detective fiction. Along with Raymond Chandler, who, coincidentally, wrote one of the first essays discussing this impact, Hammett was one of the giants who established an American voice and style that stood in opposition to the British-dominated country-house school. His criminals were habitual wrongdoers, not insane spinsters, vicars, or retired colonels. His detectives were hardworking professionals, not gentlemen amateurs solving murders for lack of a more edifying hobby. He wrote about killings committed with the weapons men routinely use for murder, not exotic poisons or knives made of ice. Most importantly, Hammett set his crimes in a believable and recognizable environment.

This use of environment makes Hammett worthy of discussion as a serious American novelist and short story writer. His achievements in crime fiction have tended to obscure his genuine literary talents, just as his rugged dignity before a Congressional inquisition has turned him into a hero cast in the hard-boiled mold of his own characters. Because he chose prison over "squealing," to use a term a Hammett character would choose, the integrity of the man overshadows the accomplishments of the artist. It is easy to forget that his defiance of a congressional committee was not his first attempt to expose moral bankruptcy among the powerful.

Hammett's vision of America was that of a man staring at a vast wasteland. He shared with Sinclair Lewis the belief that the nation's traditional leaders lacked integrity, that the balance sheet had replaced ethical codes of conduct. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hammett saw the children of the rich as spoiled seekers after illicit thrills. With Faulkner, he wrote of society's dregs, the misfits condemned to live out a nightmare existence with no hope of escape. Hammett was one more writer of the 1920's and 1930's who took the naturalism of Dreiser and Norris as a received fiction technique and applied it to life around him.

None of these comparisons should suggest that Dashiell Hammett belongs among the giants, that in leaving him out of standard American literature anthologies editors have overlooked a great novelist. His writing is flawed. He fit too well into the Black Mask ambience. His strained metaphors and thieves' argot come across as stylized and artificial, and in the future readers will need the cumber-some network of explanatory footnotes found in most editions of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Hammett's characters are of t e n flat, distinguished from one another only by colorful nicknames, physical descriptions, and police records. Because pulp fiction demanded lots of action, his plots dominate all other story elements.

There are many points for comparison between Gay and Hammett. They lived in different centuries and different cultures; one wrote for the stage, while the other wrote mass fiction, yet both found incontrovertible proof that the seamy underbelly of society is an honest reflection of the dishonest upper stratum. Hammett's leftward leaning political notions can tempt the critic into sweeping generalizations about class warfare, the material dialectic, and basic proletarian virtues. Gay is a good antidote. He lived and wrote long before Marx, saying the same things that Hammett said. So did Mark Twain, who called the Grant Administration "The Great Barbecue"; so did Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote about crooked summoners and pardoners; so did Dante, who populated hell with the crooked leaders of the Italy of his time. Hammett's attack on his corrupt society was part of an honorable literary tradition.

Nonetheless, Hammett was unique to his time and place. In choosing to write hard-boiled crime stories and novels, he committed himself to producing works that would please a mass audience unwilling—or unable—to search for subtleties. As a crime writer he had but two choices: to create a milieu that matched the conventions surrounding certain romanticized characters (Robin Hood, A. J. Raffles, Sherlock Holmes), or to set his stories in an environment that readers connected with reality. Drawing upon the knowledge he had gained as a Pinkerton employee, Hammett chose recognizable reality.

He could have stopped with genuine criminals pursued by hardworking cops who considered the third degree a routine investigative method. This alone would have sufficed to make him important in crime and detective fiction, for his literary abilities were far above the standards demanded of the subgenre's practitioners. Hammett went far beyond this safe point, however. He saw—and wrote about—a culture in which petty criminals went to jail while the truly big crooks ran for Congress. When he wrote about this phenomenon, his readers recognized it as the story behind the headlines in their local newspapers.

The Glass Key revolves around an election in a small town somewhere near New York City. Ned Beaumont, the protagonist, works for Paul Madvig, the local political boss. Bootlegging and bank robbery, illegal gambling debts collected by a man with a badge issued by the D.A., police who are careful to arrest only those criminals not protected by the incumbent political machine, a newspaper editor paid off by criminal elements—these are the action elements that keep the novel moving. The central problem is the murder of Taylor Henry, wastrel son of the powerful, patrician Senator Henry, with whom Paul wishes to ally himself through marriage with the lawmaker's daughter. Paul is suspected of the murder, so loyal Ned sets out to clear his boss. Ultimately, Ned proves that the rich senator has sunk to murdering his own son—and that the senator is quite willing to let Paul take the blame for the crime.

Red Harvest is set in the western mining town of Personville, better known as Poisonville. The usual assortment of crooks and grifters creates a lot of problems for the anonymous Continental Op, but the real source of the evil that gives Poisonville its name is the mine owner who dabbles in politics. Elihu Wilsson is so compromised by his own crimes that he is afraid to let the Op investigate the murder of his own son.

Even detectives can be tainted by wealth. Nick Charles drinks too much, having retired from detecting after marrying the rich Nora. Circumstances force him out of retirement to solve the case of The Thin Man because this crime involves many of the wealthy people with whom he now socializes. He is soon moving through New York's speakeasies and renewing old acquaintances among the criminal set. The rich, especially the younger ones searching for thrills, are eager patrons of the speakeasies and friends of the crooks.

This same concept, that the children of the rich are wastrels, underlies many of Hammett's shorter works. "Fly Paper" is "a wandering daughter job" in which the wealthy Sue Hambleton consorts with criminals for thrills. Ann Newhall, alias Nancy Regan, of "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money" is a wealthy young heiress involved with some of the 150 criminals who rob a bank and start a gang war in the subsequent double-cross. Demonstrating all the instances where the criminal environment and the world of the wealthy and powerful interact in Hammett's work would require a major study.

The importance of his attitude lies less in his influence on subsequent crime writers than in his success in a mass audience subgenre. A writer who aims his work at the uneducated or unsophisticated must reflect their perceptions and beliefs. Hammett succeeded by assuming that his readers perceived the wasteland as clearly as did the literary and intellectual elites. Furthermore, the made this assumption several years before The Great Depression ended the presumed age of optimism that followed World War I.

He wrote always about greed. Both wealth and power corrupted his characters. Dishonest cops and politicians were the norm. Nick Charles and Sam Spade, the two detectives whom the moviemakers turned into pallid, posturing imitations of Hammett's harsh originals, found the desire for easy wealth a temptation too great to overcome. None of his protagonists, not even the nameless Op, is so bound by ethics that he reflexively refuses to break the law. Hammett created such characters in the sure belief that his readers held a puritan view of tainted man that would have met with Michael Wigglesworth's dour approval.

In Hammett's environment, the law itself was of t e n at fault. This, too, came from reality. Prohibition had turned previously upright citizens into defiant law-breakers. Only outlaws operated gambling emporiums, yet gambling was a gentleman's traditional pastime. Society's strictures had become absurd, and a free man could only resist them. If there is any Romantic element in Hammett's worldview, it is the glorification of every individual, the passionate commitment to personal freedom that underlies the American myth of the frontier. Reformers who tell another man how to live are useless busybodies, which is why the Op refuses to deal with them in "Corkscrew."

At the same time, Hammett avoided the trap of romanticizing the underworld. Dinah Brand, in Red Harvest, is not the whore with the heart of gold; she is instead a greedy bitch destroyed by her lust for money. Babe McCloor, in "Fly Paper," honestly loves Sue Hambleton, but that love in no way ennobles him. He remains a violent criminal, and no one mourns when he is hanged for the murder that avenges Sue's death. Senator Henry's evil, his willingness to let Paul Madvig suffer for a murder Paul didn't commit, in no way excuses the crimes that The Glass Key's political boss routinely commits or authorizes in order to maintain his machine's power and his own position of leadership.

This view of a corrupt universe is what makes the comparison of Hammett to Lewis and Fitzgerald so accurate. All three wrote in a conservative style. All three assumed that their readers comprehended the impulse to gain material wealth—and that these same readers recognized the impulse's potential for destroying those who followed it. None of them posited an America where the people fully believed in the pious public virtue so ostentatiously professed by politicians and preachers. Hammett, however, carried the idea of public despair over and disenchantment with American life much further than did the other two. Lewis strove for outrage. By exposing corruption and hypocrisy he hoped to anger his readers into action. Fitzgerald wanted a bittersweet sadness. He made his sad, rich young men suffer from their sins, so that readers could feel sorry for them. Hammett gave his readers credit for more intelligence. He assumed that they would suffer the full numbness of helpless recognition.

Recognition began with real criminals and detectives who couldn't spell nobility, let alone practice it. The reader who had met a real cop recently could quickly place the typical Hammett detective. Equally real were the crooked politicians, the wastrel rich, the popularity of cocaine, the openly operated speakeasies, the human greed permeating every level of society, the corrupting influence of power, and the helplessness and concomitant apathy of the average citizen. The sum of Hammett's work is a powerful jeremiad indicting virtually all of American society.

His world was as much the wasteland as London/Limbo, the "Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a winter noon." His lost youth are as numb to genuine human feeling as the small house agent's clerk and the typist copulating lovelessly on a couch. His bootleggers, dope runners, and political wheeler-dealers offer the same false dreams as Madame Sosostris. The good men and women, those who want the decent society promised in the civics textbooks that extol the American dream, are as impotent as the Fisher King. But while Eliot holds out the hope of the impending rescue by Parsifal, Hammett never suggests that any man can enter the ruined tower and find the Holy Grail. The rain will never come. Hammett's Wasteland will remain parched and sterile, a place where human evil and corrupt leaders will reach out to blight every level of society.