SOURCE: "Dashiell Hammett: Themes and Techniques," in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes, Duke University Press, 1967, pp. 295-306.

The influence of subliterary works (sentimental fiction and poetry, popular humor, melodrama, and the like) on literary works, or the ways literary works shape subliterature often are fascinating. Without Gothic fiction Poe and Hawthorne would have been impossible; without Scott and Dickens nineteenth-century American humor, with all its vulgarity, could not have been written. An instance is the career of Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), writer of detective fiction. Two uncertainties furnish difficulties but add interest to a consideration of him: (1) the possibility that Hammett's writings, despite their genre, are good enough to classify not as subliterature but as literature, and (2) the impossibility of one's being sure about the precise direction of the influence—about who influenced whom. Regardless, affiliations between the detective story fictionist and some of his more reputable contemporaries, particularly Ernest Hemingway, have great interest, and in his best novel, Hammett brilliantly, and I think uniquely, adapted current techniques to his genre.

Hammett's lasting popularity and repute suggest that his work may be of more than ephemeral value. Having crowded practically all his writing into a decade, he published practically nothing after January, 1934. But between that date and his death twenty-seven years later, his novels and collected short stories sold four million copies in paperback editions; three of his novels (Red Harvest, 1929; The Dain Curse, 1929; and The Maltese Falcon, 1930) were collected in an Omnibus in 1935; and The Complete Novels (the three above plus The Glass Key, 1931, and The Thin Man, 1934) appeared in 1942. A few months after Hammett's death, a million copies in paperback of his various works were issued; in October, 1965, The Novels of Dashiell Hammett was reset and printed from new plates; in June, 1966, his The Big Knockover: Selected Stories and Short Novels appeared; and, the following month, three of his novels (Glass Key, Falcon, Thin Man) were reissued in paperback editions.

The nature of the critical acclaim that accompanied such successes raises the strong possibility that something more than sensational appeals was responsible. Granted, a share of these sales may well have been stimulated by portrayals of Hammett's characters in popular movies, in radio and television series, even in comic strips. But surely a good share was stimulated by Hammett's remarkable—perhaps unique—reputation.

Indicative of the nature of this is the fact that The Maltese Falcon went through at least fifteen printings as part of a prestigious collection, the Modern Library. Indicative, too, is the esteem in which the author was held by enthusiastic readers who belonged to a rather unusual group. Detective stories for about five decades (since World War I) were read, liked, and discussed by many professional men, political leaders, pundits, and professors. As a result, a genre of subliterature was assessed and in some instances praised by highly influential—as well as perceptive and articulate—readers. The admiration of these readers for Hammett's writings has been consistently strong and widespread. In addition, leading reviewers of mystery novels and informed historians of the genre such as Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen, and famous practitioners such as Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner habitually and casually—as if there were no possible question about the matter—referred to him as the greatest writer in his field, perhaps even "a genius." Finally, respected literary men not as a rule much interested in mystery fiction manifested warm admiration for Hammett—Somerset Maugham, Peter Quennell, and Robert Graves of England; André Malraux and André Gide of France; and a trio of American Nobel prize winners—Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Quennell in 1934 correctly remarked that Hammett was almost alone among mystery writers "in being praised by writers as a serious writer and by good novelists as a master of their business."

Available details about Hammett's life before he began to write indicate that it provided unusual and exploitable experiences but scant training for a writing career. Born in 1894 in St. Mary's County on the eastern shore of Maryland, he attended a technical school, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, and was a dropout from its nonliterary program at thirteen. During the next several years he had a number of quite unliterary jobs—messenger, newsboy, freight clerk, timekeeper, stevedore, yardman, and machine operator. After that for eight years he was an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, his chief literary exercises presumably being the writing of reports on his cases. He then served during World War I as a sergeant in the ambulance corps. After emerging from the war with damaged lungs and after a period of hospitalization and a brief return to detective work, he began to make use of remembrances of his sleuthing in articles and stories.

His writings were first published early in the 1920's, some in Pearson's Magazine, some, unpredictably, in H. L. Mencken's Smart Set, most of them in a pulp mystery magazine, Black Mask. At first the writings attracted little attention, in part it may be because one Carroll John Daly had briefly preceded Hammett in writing what would in time be dubbed hard-boiled detective stories, in part because the importance of originating this genre was not recognized or at least discussed at the time, in part because before long other writers (Gardner, for instance) began to publish similar stories. Then an editor, Joseph T. Shaw, decided that since Hammett was "the leader in the thought that finally brought the magazine [Black Mask] its distinctive form," he should be featured and the featuring, coupled with Hammett's outstanding talent, gave his stories pre-eminence. And when between 1929 and 1934, Hammett's five novels were published by Alfred A. Knopf and individually and collectively were enthusiastically praised far and wide, justifiably or no, he came to be known as the founder of the school.

The short stories as well as the more famous novels in time were appreciated for their innovations. For, drawing upon memories of his Pinkerton career, Hammett pictured crime and the work of a private operative (so everybody said) in a much more "real" fashion than they had been pictured before; and since the first-person narrator in many stories was a detective and since in all the stories the dialogue was largely that of dicks and criminals he used an economical vernacular style which seemed unusually lifelike.

Especially when compared with that of earlier mystery stories, Hammett's subject matter was revolutionary. From the time of their most venerable ancestor, Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, leading fictional detectives had been gentlemen and they had been erudite. In 1927, in a review of a book [The Benson Murder Case, in Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. 15, 1927] about one of the most exquisite and purportedly learned of such sleuths, Hammett himself scoffs at the type and at the ignorance of its portrayers about crime:

This Philo Vance is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. . . . He is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There is a theory that anyone who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he manages always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong. His exposition of the technique employed by a gentleman shooting another gentleman who sits six feet in front of him deserves a place in a How to be a detective by mail course.

Raymond Chandler praised Hammett for doing away with the unrealities here attacked:

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 with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put them down on paper as they are, and made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.

The linking of matter that is "real" ("put them down on paper as they are") with a style that is "real" occurs in much of the praise of the detective story writer. Chandler further remarks that at its best the style "is the American language."

Anyone familiar with discussions of developments in presumably more serious American fiction during the 1920's will recognize oft-repeated concerns—with the increased "reality" of the matter and with the "Americanization" of the style. Edmund Wilson saw both in Ernest Hemingway's earliest fiction and mentioned them in a Dial review of it in October, 1924. "Too proud an artist to simplify in the interest of conventional pretenses," went one sentence, "he [Hemingway] is showing you what life is like." Elsewhere:

. . . Miss Stein, Mr. Anderson, and Mr. Hemingway may now be said to form a school by themselves. The characteristic of this school is a naïveté of language, often passing into the colloquialism of the character dealt with. . . . I t is a distinctively American development in prose—as opposed to more or less successful American achievements in the traditional style of English prose. . . .

After Red Harvest appeared in 1929, critics of Hammett frequently compared him to Hemingway. "It is doubtful," wrote Herbert Asbury in a review of that first novel, "if even Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue. . . . The author displays a style of amazing clarity and compactness, devoid of literary frills and furbelows, and his characters speak the crisp, hard-boiled language of the underworld . . . truly, without a single false or jarring note." Gide asserted that the author's dialogues "can be compared [among American writers] only with the best in Hemingway." Peter Quennell held that the last of the novels, The Thin Man of 1934, provides interior evidence that Hammett admired Hemingway, since it "contains portraits, snatches of dialogue written in a terse colloquial vein—and lurid glimpses of New York drinking society, that Hemingway himself could not have improved upon."

Quennell was not alone in believing that Hemingway influenced Hammett, but a few critics wondered whether Hammett might not have influenced Hemingway. Gide said that some of Hammett's dialogues could "give pointers to Hemingway or even Faulkner." However, since both authors began to write and to publish obscurely almost simultaneously, the likelihood appears to be that neither shaped the earlier writings of the other. And by the time each had mastered his craft, the possibility of either shaping the work of the other was very small. Resemblances arose more probably because of similarities in temperament, in experiences, and in background.

Not only were the two alike in picturing a world that met the post-World War I demand for "more reality" and in using a style that was "more laconic" and "more colloquial"; they were alike in other important ways. Wounded by the war and unhappy in the postwar world, both were battered by disillusionment and cynicism, and both created worlds and characters justifying their attitude. Their protagonists are forced to cope with such worlds and their inhabitants. "Hemingway's favorite characters," André Maurois has noticed, "are men who deal with death and accept its risk": the same remark of course could be made about Hammett's favorite characters. Moreover, as Joseph Haas recently remarked [in the Chicago Daily News, June 18, 1966], "Their similarities don't end there, either. Their heroes were much alike, and we find it easy to put Sam Spade in Jake Barnes' place, or to imagine that Robert Jordan and the Continental Op[erator] could have become good friends. They all lived by that simple, sentimental code of loyalty, courage and cynicism in a world of betrayal." Many discussions of Hemingway's morality indicate that his code was a rather more complex one than Haas suggests; and so, I venture to say, was Hammett's. Interestingly, both men were accused from time to time of having no standards—probably because they both were contemptuous of many pre-World War I standards and because they both admiringly portrayed heroes who were. Oscar Handlin has said of Hammett's heroes: "Their virtues were distinctly personal—courage, dignity, and patience; and to them the hero clung for their own sake, not because the client for whom he fought had any worth. Honor to Sam Spade was conformity to a code of rules which he himself invented, a means of demonstrating his own worth against the world." The same, or something very like it, could be said of the codes of Hemingway's heroes.

Both men's lives were shaped by similar personal codes. That Hemingway's life was has been clearly demonstrated. Hammett's code compelled him at the age of forty-eight to enlist in the United States army for service in World War II and to carry out a dull assignment in the Aleutians not only with meticulous care but with gusto. Lillian Hellman tells of another instance in 1951:

He had made up honor early in his life and stuck with his rules, fierce in his protection of them. In 1951 he went to jail because he and two other trustees of the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress refused to reveal the names of the contributors to the fund. The truth was that Hammett had never been in the office of the Committee and did not know the name of a single contributor. The night before he was to appear in court, I said, "Why don't you say that you don't know the names?" "No," he said, "I can't say that. .. . I guess it has something to do with keeping my word . . . but. . . if it were my life, I would give it for what I think democracy is and I don't let cops or judges tell me what I think democracy is."

He served a term of six months in a federal prison.

The codes of both Hemingway and Hammett related not only to their lives but also to their writing. "The great thing," remarked the former in 1932, "is to last and get your work done and see and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know." In a late uncompleted story, "Tulip" [published in The Big Knockover in 1966], a character obviously voicing Hammett's opinions states a similar belief that an author must write only about matters that have real significance for him. The speaker, a professional fictionist, has never written a word about some of his experiences: "Why? All I can say is that they're not for me. Maybe not yet, maybe not ever. I used to try now and then . . . but they never came out meaning very much to me."

Both authors believed strongly that harsh self-discipline was an essential to good writing. Hemingway did not go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel prize in 1954 because he refused to interrupt his writing of a novel that was going well. His manuscripts attest to the fact that, word by word, he wrote with infinite care. Lillian Hellman testifies that, when writing a novel (The Thin Man), Hammett similarly let the task of composition possess him: "Life changed: the drinking stopped, the parties were over. The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ten days or two weeks to go out even for a walk for fear something would be lost."

During the last few decades probably no other aspect of the technique of fiction has loomed as large in the concerns of critics and the conscious procedures of authors as the fictional point of view. Fictionists as different—and as influential—as Mark Twain and a bit later Henry James independently noticed the tremendous significance the choice of this had in shaping their fiction. James, and after James many leading critics, have discussed exhaustively the authors' or the narrators' insights into characters' thoughts and feelings, and the authors' or the narrators' biases and attitudes, as the narratives reveal them. Often the discussions have been very illuminating.

In about twenty-five short stories and in the first two of Hammett's novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, the first-person narrator and the solver of the puzzle is an operative employed by the Continental Detective Agency. Unlike the exquisites of chiefly ratiocinative mystery stories this man (whose name is never revealed) is short, plump, and middle-aged, thus in his very ordinary appearance contrasting with a Dupin or a Sherlock Holmes. In an early story, "The Gutting of Couffignal," he explains that for him his enthusiasm about his job is a strong motive:

.. . I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there'd be no sense to it. .. . I don't know anything else, don't enjoy anything else, don't want to know or enjoy anything else. You can't weigh that against any sum of money. Money is good stuff. I haven't anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I've been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and solving riddles. .. . I can't imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it.

As Leonard Marsh has noticed, the Op's methods were accordingly different:

The conventional tale focused on the investigator's mental prowess; the later variety stressed the detective's physical engagement with the criminal. .. . in [Hammett's] stories he saw crime not as a completed history to be attacked with the mind, but as a dynamic activity to be conducted with force as well as cunning. . . . the Op adapts venerable investigative concepts to modern police methods. He painstakingly collects facts. He goes to the street, not to the study or the laboratory, fortified by familiarity with criminal behavior, by his wit, courage, endurance, luck. .. . He obtains information by surveillance and by questioning anyone remotely associated with crime. Finally, he often seeks help from other private operatives, from hotel and police detectives, from hired informants, from taxi drivers and railroad employees.

These techniques would be worthless, however, without the Op's ability to deduce the relevance of information and to exploit errors or weaknesses while in direct contact with his adversaries. . . .

Since action plays so large a part in the process, and since the detective's ratiocination is detailed at intervals and briefly, the narrator can (like a Twain, a Conrad, or a Hemingway) tell much of his story very concretely. Erle Stanley Gardner notices that the Continental Op stories in Black Mask "were told in terms of action . . . told objectively, and there was about them that peculiar attitude of aloofness and detachment which is so characteristic of the Hammett style." The same might be said of the novels in which the Continental Op appeared. And the operative's frequent concentration on the action and withholding of statements about his own reactions added mystery and suspense. Gide noticed this in Red Harvest, which he called "a remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror": "Dashiell Hammett's dialogues, in which every character is trying to deceive all the others and in which the truth slowly becomes visible through the haze of deception, can be compared only with the best in Hemingway."

Even the first-person narrator's feelings and thoughts are often withheld. An outstanding instance is in Chapter XXVI of Red Harvest, wherein, after a drugged sleep on Dinah Brand's living room Chesterfield, the Op awakens to find himself in the dining room, his right hand holding an ice pick, the sharp blade of which is buried in Dinah's left breast. "She was lying on her back, dead," he goes on. Then he tells of his actions—his examining the body, the room, the adjacent rooms, and of his departing—all without a word detailing his emotional reactions or his thoughts about the woman's death.

The Continental Op disappears after The Dain Curse, and the next two novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, are told in the third person. . . . [In] both books the author abjures insight into any of the characters' thoughts or feelings. What Walter R. Books says about The Glass Key is true of both: "Mr. Hammett does not show you [the characters'] thoughts, only their actions. ... " Because not one but practically all the characters are either tightlipped stoics or superb liars, the reader's attempts to discover what makes characters tick, what they are trying to do and how, are baffled, and the mystery is greatly augmented.

In The Thin Man, Hammett returns to the first-person narrator, here a former detective, Nick Charles, who is persuaded to make use of his detecting skills again. Nick is very different from the Continental Op: he is attractive, sophisticated and witty. He resembles the earlier narrator in being cynical and worldly and in being unrevealing about his emotional and intellectual responses to most people and events. In the final novel as in the first, the author therefore utilizes a fictional point of view that is well adapted to the genre which he is writing—one productive of mystery and suspense.