• Takes Charge Lightly.
• Appearance Striking.
• Tribute to Belgian
• Authentic
• Success
• Going Down
• Like Home

Dashiell Hammett rarely gave interviews, and when he did, he almost never took them seriously. There are rare accounts by associates of Hammett’s recounting conversations and giving their impressions of him. The most famous—and the most famously unreliable—are Lillian Hellman’s impressions of Hammett in her memoirs An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973). He is also mentioned in Scoundrel Time (1976), her subjective account of the events at the time of her testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Included here are some of the most revealing interview-articles and personal recollections by Hammett’s acquiantances.

Elizabeth Sanderson, “Ex-Detective Hammett,” Bookman (January 1932): 516-518.

A critic once said of Dashiell Hammett’s work: “The writing is better than Hemingway, since it conceals not softness but hardness.” If hardness consists of writing about criminals as though they were human, of looking on detectives with an unbiased eye and setting them down as less than paragons of shrewdness and integrity, of admitting corruption, human frailty and occasional pleasant qualities in both his man-hunters and their quarry, Dashiell Hammett’s hardness is the main reason for his success. He writes of people he knows, people with whom he has worked professionally, and his characters, instead of being the stock marionettes of the usual detective story, are the flesh-and-blood figures of any good novel. As a consequence the usual detective story formulas are not enough to carry them, and Mr. Hammett disregards the old rules. The result is that he has written, in Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, four of the best detective stories ever published. He is, in addition, a master of terse, abrupt prose, and he can tell more in one sentence

of it than many an earlier mystery novel writer managed to convey in a chapter.

It was with a great deal of interest, then, that I set out to interview this man who had contributed a new form of fiction to contemporary literature.

Dashiell Hammett is tall, slim, sophisticated, with prematurely white hair about a young face. He was born in Maryland in 1894, and he holds that the only remarkable thing about his family is that there were, on his mother’s side, sixteen army men of France who never saw one battle. The family name was De Chiel, and “Dashiell” is its Americanized version. (He will impress upon you that the accent falls on the second syllable.) He grew tired of school at the age of thirteen, and started on years of diverse jobs by working as a newsboy. Before the war broke out he had been a freight-clerk, a general worker around railroads, and a copy-writer for a small San Francisco jeweler. The World War broke the De Chiel curse: Dashiell Hammett saw fighting, and when he left the army he left it with tuberculosis. During his recuperation he met and married a hospital nurse, who is now the mother of his two daughters, aged ten and five. The next job he found he held eight years: it was as a detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

To Mr. Hammett being a detective was just another job; it was no fulfilment of a long-stifled boyish ambition born of reading Nick Carter. He admits that the first four years were full of interest and stimulation: he helped to send Nicky Arnstein to jail; he spent three months on a hospital cot trying to coax evidence from a suspect in the next bed; disguised as an ardent I.W.W he was sent to Minnesota to follow another suspicious character; he worked on the Arbuckle case, which, he says, was a frame-up by some newspaper boys, who saw a big scoop in Arbuckle’s guilt. (And politics in California, he asserts, are the most corrupt in the world.)

His Pinkerton career was interrupted for a time by another prolonged rest, and in his leisure he began to write. But he went back to Pinkerton’s, and when I asked why he had finally left that profession he answered: “I suppose because they wouldn’t let me go to Australia after some stolen gold. It sounded romantic. Later they found some of the gold in a San Francisco fire-hose.” So Dashiell Hammett settled down to write for a living, and has written in some form or other—as often for the movies as for the bookstores—ever since.

Mr. Hammett says that the detective in Red Harvest and The Dain Curse was drawn from a real man. Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, is half real and half imaginary, and all the rest of Hammett’s characters were made by combining the traits and experiences of people he really knew as a detective. A detective is not actually a romantic figure, and few thieves or murderers are ever pure “criminal types.” So Dashiell Hammett left the Philo Vances to Mr. Van Dine and wrote of what he had seen as a hard-working man among men of very little culture or nobility.

With all his experience to draw on, and in spite of the remarkable success that has come to him from his detective stories, Mr. Hammett does not want to go on writing them. He wants to write a play. Later he will write straight novels, but not until he has written his play.

He ought to be successful as a playwright. His dialogue is dramatic, accurate, and economical. He can inject qualities in commonplace scenes that turn them into extraordinary situations. His characters are living persons, compounded of good and evil qualities. He can portray ruthlessness and greed as well as William Faulkner. His characters are not pathological, as Faulkner’s are, but Mr. Hammett draws them just as pitilessly and far more directly. He knows the effective use of suspense. The prospects for a good play look auspicious.

In the course of the interview I gather that Mr. Hammett has written some verse. That he thinks Robinson Jeffers the best story-teller he has ever read, and the cruellest. That he likes Hemingway, Faulkner, and Hecht. He thinks Wilbur Daniel Steele is a competent magazine writer. He considers The Dain Curse a silly story, The Maltese Falcon “too manufactured,” and The Glass Key not so bad—that the clews were nicely placed there, although nobody seemed to see them. (I told him that everyone hadn’t been a detective.) He had Mickey Mouse’s orchestra on top of his bookcase, and on his desk were a lot his own publicity photographs, of which he gave me the most flattering. When he works enthusiasm carries him through thirty-six hour periods of steady writing, which explains the evenness of his atmosphere.

At present Mr. Hammett is working on a story for Marlene Dietrich, and after it is finished he plans to go abroad. He wants to stay in Europe a year or two while he finishes his play and tries his hand at a straight novel. I suspect that despite what he says the Pinkerton days have left an ineradicable imprint; that notwithstanding the plans for the play, the novels and the scenarios, he will weaken from time to time and write other detective stories. I devoutly hope so. He is sufficiently versatile and talented to write excellently in all these forms.

Joseph Harrington, “Hammett Solves Big Crime; Finds Ferris Wheel,” New York Evening Journal, 28? January 1934.

Dashiell Hammett knows about crime from experience. In the days before he wrote about it, he solved, single-handedly, perhaps the biggest theft ever committed. He hates to hear the case brought up, though, seeing that he’s taken enough ribbing about it.

It was the theft of a full-grown ferris wheel from a client of the Pinkertons. Hammett, a Pinkerton then, solved it by process of elimination. He eliminated everybody right away, except carnival owners. He just tracked down carnivals with ferris wheels until he found one for which the company had no receipted bill, he said.

“Those are the facts. Sometimes the story, in certain circles, gets garbled. So much so that I am called The Man Who Stole A Ferris Wheel. There’s no truth to that.”

Takes Charge Lightly.

The author of “The Thin Man” and “The Maltese Falcon” whose comic strip “Secret Agent X-9” begins in the New York Journal Monday was not particularly outraged by the libel. He isn’t as [ ] or grim as the detectives he writes about. The incorrect identification of the ferris wheel mystery undoubtedly had its origin in Hammett’s reputation for mischievousness, which, in certain quarters, exceeds his fame for shocking drama. He declared:

“I do take most of my characters from life. Nick’s wife in ‘The Thin Man’ is real, for instance. Nick himself is a composite of two or three detectives.”

Appearance Striking.

None of his detectives ever look like himself, probably because he is too much like a fictionized detective in appearance.

Very tall, very lean, with a dark moustache, a brown face and a shock of snow white hair sweeping back from his forehead, any description of himself would be unconvincing. He is meticulous in his dress, is very lazy, and proud of it. He explained:

“I’m a two-fisted loafer. I can loaf longer and better than anybody I know. I did not acquire this genius. I was born with it. I quit school when I was thirteen because I wanted to loaf. I sold newspapers for a while, loafed, became a stevedore, loafed, worked in a machine shop, loafed, became a stock broker, loafed, went into the advertising business, loafed, tried hoboing in earnest, loafed, became a Pinkerton detective for seven years and went into the army.

“I was a sergeant during the war, but—please get this straight—not in the war. The war and my service in the army were contemporary, that’s all you can say about it.”

After the war, in which he took no part, Hammett became ill. He spent a year in a hospital, then tried to go back to work, but found it didn’t agree with him. He remarked:

“That’s how I came to take up writing, and I’ve been at it ever since.”

“Hobbies? Let’s see, I drink a lot. Also play poker. That’s all. I had a dog once, but he died. Summers I live down at Port Washington; Winters here in Manhattan. I’m married; two children.”

Hammett never works regular hours and hasn’t slept at nights for years. When he does work, he gets at his typewriter between midnight and 2 A.M. and stays there until daybreak; if his inspiration is strong, or he is being hounded for copy, he may stay at it until noon, then go to bed, getting up at sundown.

Henry Dan Piper, “Dashiel [sic] Hammett flees Night Club Round Succumbing to Rustication in New Jersey,” Daily Princetonian, 11 November 1936, pp. 1,4.

Wearied of New York’s sophisticated clatter, the tall, prematurely greying Dashiell Hammett, author of “The Thin Man” and “The Glass Key,” has escaped to the privacy of a rambling, white clapboard farmhouse perched on a hillside outside of Princeton.

“This is the life,” he sighed, seated in his armchair before a roaring fire, and succumbing to the inquisition of a PRINCETONIAN interviewer. “You can get fed plenty cooped up in a three-room apartment, making the same rounds every night—Stork Club, 21, Dempsey’s—seeing the same old faces and hearing the same damned chatter. Nuts.”

“There isn’t much to tell about me,” he said. “Baltimore as a kid … school for a coupla of years … stevedore … newsboy … Golly, I’ve seen lots of things, but I never seemed to stick long at ’em.”

“When the Armistice came along, all I could boast was a pair of weak lungs contracted in the Ambulance Corps. 1 did some private detective work for Pinkerton’s, but all the time I was getting sicker, and found myself shortly in a California hospital.

“Then it was a case of turning to something to keep the butcher away from the door while I tried to bluff along the baker. So I rented a second-hand typewriter and pounded out my first novel. It was just a case of lucky breaks after that.

“Yes, I’m working on a book here, but it’s not a mystery, and it’s not about Princeton. I really don’t like detective stories, anyway. I get too tangled up in the plots. This one is just about a family of a dozen children out on an island. You see, all I do in a story is just get some characters together, and then let them get in each other’s way. And let me tell you, 12 kids can sure get in each other’s way!”

Asked if he were indulging in any more stories about the liquor-swilling, sophisticated pent house dwellers of “The Thin Man,” Hammett wrinkled his brow and exclaimed, “I can’t understand why people get the idea all I ever write is artificial, with tinsled-and-ginned up characters. They’re just like lots of people I know, neurotics and what have you.

“You know, ideas float around that New York and Hollywood people are all nuts. I’ve just come back from working on a new Powell-Loy film and I admit lots of those guys out there are screwy. But, hell, they’ve got tons of money to be screwy with. And anyhow, they’re no more bats than a lot of over-stuffed executives I’ve had the misfortune to meet.

“Yes, it’s going to be like the others,” he said, returning to the new movie. “They say they’re going to call it ‘After the Thin Man.’ Heaven only knows why. Before Hollywood started monkeying with the plot it was something like the The Thin Man,’ but its own mother wouldn’t recognize it now.”

E. E. Spitzer, “With Corporal Hammett on Adak,” Nation (5 January 1974): 6-9.

I feel I’m mainly responsible for Dashiell Hammett’s going to jail and the only way I can try to ease my mind is by telling how it happened. I knew him for about two and a half years and two of those were on the island of Adak in the Aleutians during World War II, when we both were corporals in the Army. His rank, the weather and the war were factors in the Hammett I knew.

First, the weather. The Aleutians, stretching from Alaska almost to the tip of the Soviet Union, have the worst weather possible, since it combines constant dampness with constant wind and a constant cloud cover. On an average day the wind is 40 miles an hour, which means that what would call for gale warnings elsewhere is just another day in the Aleutians. On an unaverage day in the winter, the wind can rise to 140 miles an hour. Add to this a cold dampness and the continual overcast of low gray clouds for about 360 days a year, and you have one of the most depressing places in the world, even without the occasional earthquakes.

It was the weather, even more than the lack of women, that produced in soldiers what was called the Aleutian Stare. In the early days our company took its meals in the mess of a National Guard Company that had been there a year, having arrived with the American invasion on the heels of the Japanese pull-out. On my first morning in the mess hall, I thought I had run into a collection of zombies. The guardsmen stared into their plates unseeingly and pushed food into their mouths mechanically. Then, like robots, they stood in line, scraped their plates, handed them in, and marched out dully into the howling snow. Later, I heard the story of a staff sergeant who had entered a mess hall of his own company and machine-gunned his own men.

I had been in the Aleutians for two years when one spring day, walking across the tundra, I found myself yelling, “All right, you sonofabitch wind, I’ve had enough of you! Now quit it! Stop it! Or I’ll kill you!”

About a month before this, I was in front of Hammett in a chow line. (He claimed I always beat him to it and he was right.) We were standing in the cold muck of which the islands are made. Above us the lowering clouds raced along, while the wind pulled at us. In the distance was the snow-sprinkled peak of Mount Moffit, a mainly extinct volcano.

“Ugly, stinking place,” I said, kicking the muck. “I’ve got to get out of here.” Hammett said mildly, “You’re looking in the wrong direction.” He gestured with his spoon at the clouds and Mount Moffit.

I suddenly saw everything through his eyes and realized it could be considered beautiful, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction or, more important, give up my right to bitch. I said elegantly, “Sam, you’re full of shit,” although I knew he was at least as right as I was.

That brings up a small but significant point. To those who knew Hammett in civilian life, he was called, “Dash” to those who knew him in the Army, he was “Sam,” his full name being Samuel Dashiell Hammett. Sam himself never indicated any feelings on the subject, responding or not responding equally to both.

Which brings up the matter of rank. Sam was a great unre-specter of rank, and since he was only an enlisted man, enlisted men did not respect him; only the brass did. Sam was pretty much at the height of his fame then. He was known as the author of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. He was still play-doctoring for Lillian Hellman, but by cable, and it was said he got more cables than the commanding general. Also, there was the fact he was over-age for an enlisted man and it was known he had volunteered.

What was not generally known was that, having taken him in as a volunteer, the Army decided he was a radical and not to be trusted. By the time it decided that, Sam was working in cryptanalysis on the island of Umnak in the Aleutians.

What to do with him? The Army transferred him to the island of Adak, attached him to Headquarters Company and gave him nothing to do. Sam, looking for something to do, asked the commanding officer of Adak, Brig. Gen. Harry Thompson, for permission to establish a newspaper.

Thompson, a bright, no-nonsense man, thought it would be good for morale and told Corporal Hammett that if any of the brass ever gave the corporal any flak, the corporal should tell the brass to complain to the general about their problem.

I saw a notable result of that instruction more than a year later in the newspaper quonset hut. Sam was in his usual position, lying in his sleeping bag on the wooden counter that served as the staff’s desks. His head was on the mimeograph machine and he was reading a book on materialist philosophy when there was a brisk knock on the door.

No one even looked up. The staff, which at that point included me, was busy typing and writing the next day’s issue, and who the hell ever knocked on a door anyway? Presently, the door snapped open and in strolled a major, all gleaning brass and still-shined shoes. He glanced about sharply, looking as though he expected someone would call attention, although regulations make that unnecessary when you’re working.

It was as if he had not entered. Finally, after what to him must have been a pregnant pause, he walked briskly to where editor Bill Glackin was typing.

“Sergeant, where can 1 find Corporal Hammett?”

Without losing the rhythm of his typing, Bill nodded toward the rear where Sam lay contemplating the intricacies of Marxian dialectics, while his busy and well-trained slaves turned out the 4-page newspaper that had become famous through the chain.

The major marched up to Sam.

“Corporal Hammett?”

A rhetorical question, because no one else in the hut had snow-white hair, the face of a philosophical hawk and a corporal’s stripes. Sam’s eyes slowly came off the page, went up to the major’s face and uniform, and came down to the page again.

“Corporal! I’m speaking to you!”

Intent on the page, Sam said nothing.

“Corporal, I’ve come to inspect your newspaper!”

Obviously a lie, but also obviously, one delivered by a field-grade officer and one whose dignity and position were being ignored in front of a group of enlisted men, including one Pfc.

Sam shifted his book to make it more comfortable.

“If you have a complaint, Major, make it to the general.”

The major fell over his feet getting out of the hut.

Pfc. Dick Jack who didn’t really believe that Sam was famous, said, “Boy, now you’re going to get it, stupid bastard.”

Bernie Anastasia, one of our artists said, “All he wanted was your autograph, Sam. Why didn’t you give it to him?” Bernie Kalb who was trying to learn to be a newspaperman said, “I guess that’ll stop those klebes from bothering us.” (Klebe was Bernie’s current word for things he especially disliked or liked.)

It didn’t stop the klebes entirely, but it did cut their visits to almost nothing.

Sam had staffed his newspaper entirely from our company. Ours was a Special Service outfit and contained not only an entertainment unit but a newspaper unit. The difference between the two units was that the entertainers had all been professionals, but the men in the newspaper unit had had almost no experience with a newspaper except reading one, and the short Army courses in journalism given them, along with calisthenics, close-order drill and bayonet practice during six weeks of basic training.

However, the group had been taught that a newspaper story is Who, What, When, Where and Why, and they all knew how to type and they had learned how to run a mimeo, so they were the best candidates Sam could find. (What Sam’s influence on them was you can judge by the fact that at least two of the staff are still in the news business. Bill Glackin is on the Sacramento Bee and Bernie Kalb gives you the news on CBS-TV.)

Sam had some special theories about newspapers. He didn’t think it was enough just to give the news. He believed that most people do not remember the background of most news stories—that they could not usually recall who had previously said what or done what to whom. Therefore, shortly after the beginning of each news story, his paper, The Adakian, gave the background of the story. This was done in brackets so you could easily distinguish it from the latest news and you could ignore it if it was already familiar.

Also, Sam did not believe in relying on any one news service to deliver the truth, particularly in wartime. The Armed Service network was furnishing a radio feed that combined AP, UP and INS, but that wasn’t enough for Sam. He found a corporal with a formidable I.Q., who had taught history, and knew many languages, including Russian and German and Japanese. He set up a special shortwave receiving room at the post radio station for Robert Colodny.

Radio reception there where the Pacific meets the Bering Sea is phenomenal. Bob monitored Germany, Russia and Japan, among other countries. The result was a column in The Adakian of news and interpretation based on news reports from the major powers. The predictions were so accurate that soon General Thompson asked Corporal Colodny to prepare a weekly summary of the war for his personal use. This, despite the weekly summary he received from the Chiefs of Staff.

Movies were among the most important diversions on that bleak (beautiful?) island, so Sam trained our Hal Sykes to write movie reviews that encouraged you or discouraged you in one or two sentences. Sam felt that was all a review should do. After that, you ought to make your own judgments.

What was even scarcer than movies was humor, the humor you needed for your own equilibrium. Sam studded The Adakian with cartoons by three artists from our company. The humor was indigenous to the Aleutians and soon G.I.s all along the chain were mailing them home to explain what it was like. Eventually, the best cartoons were issued in a booklet, with a foreword by Sam. Probably the most important function of the cartoons was that they helped explain the G.I.s to themselves.

None of us knew that Sam had ever had a drinking problem. Even when beer finally became available, he never touched it. It was only when Sam visited civilization again that it emerged. Civilization in this case came to Sam via Joe Louis.

Louis arrived on Adak to give an exhibition, and to inaugurate an Army Boxing Tournament. The winners on each of the Aleutian Islands would compete with one another and the finalists would be flown to heaven, namely Anchorage, Alaska, where they would box the mainland winners.

The coverage by The Adakian was so complete and knowledgeable that the hand of a master was obvious. Naturally, the idea emerged to send Sam along with the boxing team, so that the whole Alaskan Department would have the advantage of his expert reporting.

Did he want to go? Maybe; otherwise why didn’t he appeal to the general to let him stay behind? Did General Thompson insist he go to bring credit to Adak? Anyway, he went and his fall from the wagon was spectacular.

Main Street in Anchorage was a procession of bars and liquor stores. Sam didn’t bother much with the liquor stores. Off the wagon, he was as effusive as he was withdrawn when sober. He wanted company for his drinking, anybody’s company. And with his natural Toid Avenue and Toity-Toid Street tough-guy accent, he could talk to anybody. And did.

Smashed, crocked, jugged; loud, boisterous, talking nonsense, then eloquence, then just four-letter words. The gamut, including weeping.

Not that I was there to see. I was back on Adak having been asked by Sam to fill in on the paper for Bill Glackin who went to Anchorage with him. But I had an accurate account of Sam’s journey through Anchorage bars because there was no lack of witnesses.

I had another account of how Sam later sobered up in Anchorage and stayed sober. The reason? Part of it certainly was a change of assignment. Once the boxing matches were over, it was decided a more serious assignment would be fitting, so an orientation team was set up by Major Hurford, head of the Alaskan Department Special Service. This team had the mission of touring the chain and telling the men Why We Fight. The team consisted of four men, led by Corporal Hammett. That was a subject Sam took seriously; it was why he had enlisted. He went on the wagon again.

When Sam returned to Adak, he resumed the horizontal reading position, once again the teetotaler.

After the war, I saw Sam only three times. The first one was when he took my wife and me to the Stork Club. Sam had met my wife in Anchorage when she was with the USO, and when he had sobered up in preparation for travel with the orientation team.

At the Stork Club, he had his table up front, center. We were led there by the captain, who “Mr. Hammetted” continually, so that other patrons would know and they did, judging by their sidelong glances. Leonard Lyons came over, said a few words.

We reminisced, we drank. I got a little smashed; Sam got a lot smashed. After a while, he didn’t make much sense. It seemed to me he felt a lack of interest in his life.

The second time I saw Sam was when he was teaching a course in mystery writing in a radical school otherwise devoted to social studies. You may or may not remember, but during and after World War II there was a brouhaha about building a new world with liberty and justice for all.

At this time, someone, and the temper of the times, convinced me that the downtrodden of the world needed a more ballsy version of the American Civil Liberties Union. It was called the Civil Rights Congress and all that it lacked was a name to could attract public support, such as Dashiell Hammett. I was assured that he would be purely the honorary head, that he need do literally nothing. And all they wanted from me was to ask him to be on the letterhead.

Sam was the original nonorganization man, the ultra Private Private Eye, but evidently someone, and the temper of the times, had persuaded him he should lend his name and the teaching of a course in mystery-story writing to a left-wing school that was convinced the butler didn’t do it—his employer did.

The building where Sam taught was crummy. Up one flight to a beat-up classroom with the kind of chairs they used to have in one-arm lunchrooms. I had timed it so that class was just breaking up. A few students clustered around Sam; I waited in the hall. When he came out, still surrounded, he looked at me a little surprised, but pleasantly.

I asked if I could see him privately for a moment. Of course. We stepped back into the classroom. I told him what was wanted of him. He said, sure. I said, thanks, and left.

You may remember that soon after World War II, the Red witch hunt began. They got hold of Sam and asked him to surrender the names of the members of his organization. Knowing Sam, I was sure he didn’t know their names and didn’t care to know them, but that’s not what he told them. He told them he would not surrender the names. And they put him in jail.

I don’t remember for how long. All I remember is that it seemed to be a helluva long time. And while he was in, I kept saying to myself that I should really go see him. But I was so ashamed of what I had done that I didn’t go.

Finally, they let Sam out of jail and by then he was real sick and I heard he went back to drinking.

The third time I met Sam was in a theatre lobby. All I could say was hello. He helloed back matter of factly.

My wife said to Sam. “I guess I should have written you.”

Sam said, “Yes.”

It wasn’t too long after that, he died. My wife went to the funeral. I could not bring myself to go. Since then, I’ve argued the case with myself many times.

You can’t really get people to do what they don’t want to do, can you?

“Dashiell Hammett Has Hard Words for Tough Stuff He Used to Write,” Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1950.

“This hard-boiled stuff—it is a menace.” Dashiell Hammett made that remark—or confession—yesterday at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Hammett is a first-class writing man from Manhattan. He has written five mysteries and innumerable short stories of various plots. He is now working on a sixth novel to be titled “December 1.”

In a period when most writers reside in remodeled barns in Connecticut and Vermont, Hammett lives on Lower Manhattan and plays the table d’hotes. He seldom gets farther west than Philadelphia.

He came out to see his daughter, Mrs. Josephine Marshall of Westchester, who is wife of a Douglas Aircraft mechanical engineer.

“Are you up to something in Hollywood?” he was politely asked.

“Positively not,” he replied, and that was that.

The reason Hammett denounces the hard-boiled stuff he used to write with such relish and profit is that it has become old hat.

“It went all right in the Terrible 20s,” he explained. “The bootlegger days. The racketeering days. There are racketeers now, to be sure, but they are nice, refined people. They belong to country clubs.”

Hammett paused and looked as if he were going to say something unexpected. He did.

Tribute to Belgian

“Do you know,” he went on, “the best mystery writer today is a Belgian who writes in French? His name is Georges Simenon. His latest book, which has been translated into English, is titled, “The Snow Was Black.’”

“What makes him the best?”

“Well, he is more intelligent. There is something of the Edgar Allan Poe about him.”

After that tribute to a rival, Hammett toddled off to meet his daughter to go on a trip to the beach. Papas are about the same, whatever they do for a living.

James Cooper, “Lean Years for the Thin Man,” Washington Daily News, 11 March 1957.

Three typewriters stand mute as tombstones in a wooden caretaker’s cottage outside New York.

Still in pajamas at noon a lean, 6-ft. man with bushy hair, startlingly white in contrast to his black scars of eyebrows and moustache, paces the floor without a glance at the keyboards, dusty in the bright sunshine, intensified by the blue-white snow outside.

Once all three typewriters were needed to keep pace with the output of the haggard-looking man, and brought him as much as $100,000 a year.

For this is Dashiell Hammett, the creator of “The Thin Man” stories and regarded as the father of the tough detective vogue in mystery thrillers.

But at 62, and looking older, the man who could pass for his own hero is father of no more brain children.

It is more than seven years since the typewriters clacked, and in keeping with his own description now of being “a two-fisted loafer” Mr. Hammett shows no signs of the old spark that ignited his fame.

If you draw his attention to the silent machines he says:

“I keep them chiefly to remind myself I was once a writer.”

The fact that he is being sued for $110,000 for back income tax, offers no spur. He says:

“All my royalties are blocked. I am living on money borrowed from friends.”

Yet as he gazes listlessly over the lonely countryside from his isolated cottage there must be times when he reviews a life as bizarre as any of his whodunits.

At 14 he decided “formal education is bunk.” He left school to work at jobs unfitted to a frail frame that was later racked by tuberculosis.

Authentic

He was a messenger, a laborer, stevedore and then stumbled into the job that laid the foundation of his fortunes—a detective for the Pinkerton Private Agency.

His one big case involved film star Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle.

The work was too hard and in 1922 after five years he had to quit.

“I would have been fired anyway,” he says, “except for a literary quality about my reports.”

For a while he wrote literary reviews. It was not until 1929 that he jumped to fame with his detective stories “The Dain Curse” and “Red Harvest,” a title that proved prophetic.

Mr. Hammett explains his success: “I found I could sell the stories easily when it became known I had been a Pinkerton man. People thought my stuff was authentic.”

Success

Then in 1934 came his greatest success, “The Thin Man,” made famous thruout the world by Hollywood films with William Powell and Myrna Loy and Asta the dog. Royalties poured in from the films, from the books and from radio serials.

“But I was never too enthusiastic about the detective stories. The Thin Man always bored me.”

Yet The Thin Man took him to Hollywood at $1200 a week and later brought him as much as four times that a week for radio serials.

He became soured and complained: “Play writing is a jerk’s way of making a living. You do a play and someone tells you to do it over. Then some actor won’t do it that way and you fix it for him again. What is the good?”

Going Down

He quit Hollywood. His marriage to the girl who nursed him thru tuberculosis ended in divorce. The real-life Thin Man began to be seen in Left-wing circles around Greenwich Village, the Chelsea of New York. Finally in 1951 he went to jail for contempt of court for refusing to say who put up bail for convicted communists.

He served only five months but emerged an even lonelier man, content now to do little more than cook for himself and bring in wood for his log fire.

“I am concentrating on my health. I am learning to be a hypochondriac. I stopped writing because I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

“But the thing that ruined me was the writing of the last third of The Glass Key’ in one sitting of 30 hours.”

He looked towards the three dusty typewriters and said: “Ever since then I have told myself: ’I could do it again if I had to.”

Like Home

If working as a real live detective could produce the “The Thin Man,” could not his experiences in jail create another best seller?

Why did he not write in jail?

“I was never bored enough. I found the crooks had not changed since I was a Pinkerton man. Going to prison was like going home.”

“The best detectives are the ones who do not get into trouble.”

Richard T. Hammett, “Mystery Writer Was Enigmatic Throughout Life,” Baltimore News-American, 19 August 1973.

It is not an easy job to write an objective story about a controversial figure, especially when that person is your uncle.

The controversial person was a St. Marys County native called Samuel D. Hammett, best known as Dashiell Hammett. In literary circles he is considered to be the father of the modern hard-nosed detective story. But as a writer, he was a master of the short story almost unsurpassed in American literature.

He came by it honestly. After holding down a variety of jobs he followed up a blind newspaper ad and became a Pinkerton detective, a background he said he used in many of his novels.

He probably was best known for “The Thin Man” which was an instant success when printed during the 1930s and became the basis for a series of movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Often glossed over is the fact he created the great “private eye” Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and also authored a plethora of short stories, many of which did not deal with crime.

Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894, the son of a Southern Maryland farmer-politician.

He might still be there had his father not been run out of the county more or less on a rail. A popular but impecunious Democrat, he was persuaded to run for Congress as a Republican in return for Republican financial support. He lost; and eventually was forced to move to Philadelphia and then Baltimore, where Dashiell grew up in the family home at 212 North Stricker Street.

Few remember much of his childhood. My father said he was not a particularly remarkable child except for being quite stubborn at times, a trait U.S. Senate investigators were to discover some years later.

He was a Baltimore Polytechnic dropout prior to World War I in order to go to work to help the family. During that war he enlisted and managed to get as far as Camp Meade as a medical sergeant before being discharged for physical disability (tuberculosis).

While a Pinkerton agent for eight years he investigated the Fatty Arbuckle and Nicky Arnstein cases. He often said his first promotion as a detective came when he captured a man who stole a Ferris wheel. Also while with Pinkerton he was involved in a number of strikebreaking incidents, which may explain his later involvement in labor and leftist causes.

During the thirties and forties he became involved in a number of organizations, some of which were labeled “Communist Fronts.” My father feels that the Pinkerton methods of strike-breaking influenced his turn to leftist groups.

During the same period—according to Lillian Hellman—his friend and bed partner for 31 years, he also was the “hottest piece of property” in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for “The Watch on the Rhine,” which was adapted from Miss Hellman’s stage production of the same name, as well as many others.

He was being considered to do the screen play for “The Detective Story” which starred Kirk Douglas, when the Joe McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s hit. He was among the many writers who suddenly became persona non grata in the studios; a name on the “blacklist.”

Among his activities allegedly—had been raising bail money for Gerhard Eisler, an American Communist. Eisler promptly jumped bail or fled on a Polish ship to ultimately end up in Moscow.

Hammett was summoned before the McCarthy committee, but stubbornly refused to say where the $80,000 bail money came from. For this he was sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of Congress.

Miss Hellman insists that he was only a trustee of the American Civil Rights Congress and never knew the names of the contributors. Another theory advanced is that he refused to talk to protect a number of “little people” who gave a dollar or two to a cause that rightly or wrongly they believed in at that time.

In any event he spent his six months in jail, and upon release was hauled up before the committee again and again refused to talk.

Sen. John McClellan, D-Ark., said testily, “Mr. Hammett, you certainly don’t think much of the power of American public opinion, do you?” The reply was, “Senator, it wasn’t American public opinion that put me away for six months, it was your committee and a judge.”

The committee gave up.

At the time all this was going on I was in the Navy and much of what I have said was gleaned from conversations with my father and old newspaper files. They jibe.

After his period as the “hottest property in Hollywood” he fell on bad times. He was not only on the then lethal studio blacklist, but either couldn’t or wouldn’t write. He also had spent large sums in legal fees during his long ordeal. The Internal Revenue Service attached nearly everything he owned for tax claims.

Despite being invalided out of World War I, he managed to get into the Army in World War II. The Army in its wisdom processed him, decided they had a good mind on their hands and sent him to school to be a cryptographer.

Family story has it that after he had learned all about codes the Army finally learned about him. The story is that someone said, “My God, we may have a Communist on our hands. Send him someplace where he’ll never see a code.”

Whatever the reason, Hammett wound up in the Aleutians. Miss Hellman described him as saying his greatest contribution to the war effort was assuring young men they would not lose their virility by staying in the womanless Arctic for several years; at the time he was 50.

After the war his health began to fail. He drank heavily for a number of years, then suddenly quit. Miss Hellman thinks he quit because a doctor told him he couldn’t, and he was contrary enough to show him.

Unfortunately no one in his immediate family really knew him well after World War I. A very private person, he left Baltimore, seldom to return. However, what he considered his best book, “The Glass Key,” had clearly a Baltimore setting.

He had married his Army nurse at Camp Meade and had two daughters.

What little the family knows of him came from letters he sent to his sister, the only person in his family with whom he maintained any contact.

The man was an enigma, even to those who knew him best. In her autobiography, “An Unfinished Woman,” Miss Hellman devotes several chapters to him and in effect admits she did not entirely understand him after a 31-year-relationship.

On Jan. 10, 1961, Dashiell Hammett died at the age of 67 in New York’s Lennox Hill Hospital.

He had lived his life the way he wanted to live it, for his own reasons.