What can one say about the novels of Dashiell Hammett except that they are as superbly written as one remembers them from more than 30 years ago? Here are five novels, all familiar to my generation: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and The Thin Man. But for the present generation—whose only contact with Hammett may be through a television rerun of "The Maltese Falcon"—Knopf [the publisher of The Novels of Dashiell Hammett] could have provided a preface. A short one might have gone like this:

What is now known in America and England as the Black Mask school of writing began in the early spring of 1920 in a pulp magazine called Black Mask, founded by Henry L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. After six months Mencken and Nathan sold their pulp magazine for a nice profit. Under the subsequent editorship of such capable men as Phil Cody and Harry North, Black Mask took on a specific character. Within two or three years the heroic man of violence emerged. The private investigator was poised and indestructibly ready to take over as the protector of American ideals.

The "golden decade" of Black Mask began in November, 1926, under the editorship of Capt. Joseph T. Shaw. The new editor had a vision—that through Black Mask he could make a unique contribution to American literature. In the pages of his magazine Shaw singled out the stories of Dashiell Hammett as approximating what he had in mind: "simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility and belief." Shaw wanted action, but he held that "action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three-dimensional form."

With Shaw as the editor and Hammett as the leader, the Black Mask school flourished for 10 years. The editor insisted that his writers observe a cardinal principle. They were to create the illusion of reality by allowing their characters to act and talk tough rather than by making them do it. Instead of telling the reader how infallible the actors were, the authors permitted their heroes to demonstrate their abilities.

Perhaps the best known hero of the Black Mask school was the Continental Op (the private operator from the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency). Dashiell Hammett, the creator of the Op, had had a varied career, including service in World War I and several years as a Pinkerton detective. Hammett—who knew a man who once stole a Ferris-wheel—began to turn his experiences into stories.

Dashiell Hammett, as the leader of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, began to experiment with writing techniques. In his Black Mask stories he worked with plot, trying to keep it from becoming too obviously stereotyped. He created a protagonist in his short stories who would later stand up in longer works of fiction. He used the theme of the rugged individualist righting social wrongs. He concentrated on the objective, hard-boiled style, trying to make it as action-packed as possible.

In his Black Mask short stories from 1923 to 1927, Hammett developed his style. According to Raymond Chandler, Hammett "was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."

The clipped prose, the Hammett trade-mark, appeared in the early stories. Action abounded, but the economy of expression implied even more action than was visible. "The Golden Horseshoe" provided an example of violence in tempo.

A character named Gooseneck fired at one called Kewpie at the moment she threw a knife at him. Kewpie was "spun back across the room—hammered back by bullets that tore through her chest. Her back hit the wall. She pitched forward to the floor." The knife caught Gooseneck in the throat, and he "couldn't get his words past the blade."

In "Women, Politics and Murder" the style rattled like machine-gun fire: "My bullet cut the gullet out of him."

The hero of the short stories developed with the style. Although he played the traditional knightly role, he did not look the part. He was nameless, fat and 40.

In "Zigzags of Treachery" he did not like eloquence because "if it isn't effective enough to pierce your hide, it's tiresome; and if it's effective enough then it muddles your thoughts." He was not "a brilliant thinker," yet he had "flashes of intelligence." He was a man of action who liked his jobs to be "simply jobs—emotions are nuisances during business hours."

By 1927 Hammett was ready for more sustained fiction. His hero, style and setting had developed beyond the limits of the short story. In February and May of 1927 Black Mask carried two of Hammett's long stories—"The Big Knock-Over" and "$106,000 Blood Money"—which were published together as his first novel. One hundred and fifty of the country's finest crooks gathered in San Francisco where they simultaneously knocked over the Seaman's National and the Golden State Trust. During the noisy affair 16 cops were killed and three times that many were wounded; 12 bystanders and bank clerks were killed; and the bandits lost seven dead and had 31 of their number taken as bleeding prisoners. After the shooting died down, the Op and two assistants took over the job. They took care of the crooks who were left and then tidied up the town.

If there is such a thing as the poetry of violence, Hammett clearly achieved it in his first novel, "$106,000 Blood Money." The Continental Op got with the rhythmical spirit of the occasion: "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. God will see that there's always a mug there for your gun or black-jack to sock, a belly for your foot."

During the 32 months from November 1927 to June 1930, Dashiell Hammett's four important novels were published serially in Black Mask—Red Harvest The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key. They were clearly his best fiction, but they were successful only because he had previously worked out everything in them in his short stories. The first two continued the Op as the first person narrator, although he changed character somewhat in the second. The third developed the swaggering Sam Spade. And the fourth created a variation on the character in Ned Beaumont and also used the third person viewpoint.

Red Harvest (dedicated to Joseph Shaw) was originally a group of separate stories referred to under the general title "The Cleansing of Poisonville." They revolved around the Op at his hard-boiled best. The Op set out to clean up a crime-ridden city by playing everyone off against the middle. By his own count one and a half dozen criminals were murdered. He admitted that he could "swing the play legally," but he decided that it was "easier to have them killed off, easier and surer."

The Op did not allow himself any sexual diversion, but he did go in for some very heavy drinking.

Dashiell Hammett's last major effort, The Thin Man, was obviously written under excessive Hollywood influence. The original version of the novel had been planned and begun in 1930, in the style of that period. Only 65 pages were completed. The setting was San Francisco and its environs, the viewpoint the third person, the detective a kind of modified Op.

The most interesting aspect of the fragment was the unreal quality that Hammett insisted on attaching to the hero. He was referred to as untouchable, as not even a corpse but a ghost, as one with whom it was impossible to come into contact—like trying to hold a handful of smoke.

It was three years, one of which was spent in Hollywood, before Hammett returned to his fragment. Unable or unwilling to continue it, he wrote a different novel by the same name.

The Thin Man, dedicated to Lillian Hellman, was not published in Black Mask. It is a good novel in the older tradition of detective fiction but it does not belong in the Black Mask school.

For some, Dashiell Hammett wrote beyond the tradition of detective fiction by specifically expressing the giddiness of the 1920s—the period when violence and brutality were accepted as simply a part of the times. For many, Hammett's hero spoke for men who had lost faith in the values of their society.