Hammett as Studied
Hammett’s novels have attracted a large audience from the time of their first publication, except for the last decade of his life, after he went to jail in 1951. During that time his novels were dropped from publishers’ lists, and Hammett’s name was rarely mentioned in literary circles. The normal course is for a popular writer’s reputation to gradually fade away after his death, or at least after he stops writing. In Hammett’s case the opposite happened. Upon his death in 1961, Lillian Hellman gained control of his literary rights, and she exploited them energetically. Hammett’s novels were all republished in mass-market paperback editions; new collections of his stories were published; a popular television show was produced based on the Thin Man characters. Largely through Hellman’s portrayal of him in her best-selling memoirs An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973), Hammett’s image was fixed in the public mind as a quiet literary genius, a man of uncompromising principle victimized for his political beliefs. His reputation soared in the mid 1960s and after, both among general readers and in universities.
Literary careers are not always the result of simple merit. They involve circumstance as well. The continuation of Hammett’s reputation involved social attitudes and educational trends. The blacklist of subversive writers that had affected the movie and radio industry most severely crumbled in 1960, when Dalton Trumbo received credit for his screen-play for the hit movie Spartacus, which won four Academy Awards. That event marked the public admission that the blacklist was unjust and should be abolished. The door was opened for the republication of Hammett’s novels.
Soon afterward, the popular-culture movement began to flourish. English teachers and young literary scholars turned their attention to the literature that people read outside the classroom. Genre fiction—particularly detective fiction and science fiction—which had previously been largely ignored by teachers, was incorporated into the college curriculum.
Courses were offered tracing the development of detective fiction, with an emphasis on what came to be known as the Black Mask school; that is, those writers who wrote for Black Mask magazine. Hammett was identified as the father of hard-boiled detective fiction, and The Maltese Falcon was regarded as the most perfect early example of the form, showing the way for the works by James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. Traditionalists, who believed that students should study writers whose works express ideas of enduring significance, generally opposed the popular-culture movement, but many of them saw merit in Hammett’s best novels. The result was that Hammett became generally accepted as an important writer, and his works have remained in print in affordable paperback editions since 1963.
Just as Lillian Hellman’s agency was a critical factor in the revival of his career, her death threatened the continuation of interest in him. Through a legal maneuver, Hellman had gained complete control of all Hammett’s literary rights after his death. She was a domineering woman, and during her lifetime she grew increasingly frustrated in her attempts to direct not just his literary properties, but expressions of opinion about Hammett, particularly as they reflected on her. In the early 1980s there was a focused interest on Hammett biography. Between 1981 and 1984, the year Hellman died, there were three biographies of Hammett, only one of which she authorized, and all of which challenged Hellman as keeper of Hammett’s image. She was angered by suggestions that Hammett had more than an advisory role in Grafting Hellman’s most successful plays, that Hellman used her relationship with Hammett to enhance her own reputation, and that she abused her authority as literary executor by denying Hammett’s family their rightful share of income from his works.
In her will Hellman set up a trust to administer Hammett’s literary properties, naming three of her friends and associates as trustees, but through the complicated workings of the U.S. Copyright Law, Hammett’s surviving daughter, Josephine, began to acquire some rights to his works as well. (Mary died on 21 February 1992.) The effect after Hellman’s death was a stalemate of sorts. Those Hammett works already in print remained available, but new works, such as short stories not included in the two collections Hellman authorized during her lifetime, could not be published. Not until the late 1990s did the Hammett heirs and the Hammett trust begin to resolve their differences so that publishers felt legally comfortable with projects involving Hammett’s stories. Hellman’s death made possible a new biography by Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett (1996), based on research materials that Hellman had denied to previous biographers and interviews with associates who had refused to talk about Hammett while Hellman was alive. The result was a renewed interest in Hammett as a literary figure. In 1999 alone two documentaries—one produced in a series on American detective novelists by BBC and one in the PBSAmerican Masters series—and one teledrama based on the relationship Mellen recounted in her biography were broadcast. Hammett’s novels were published in a one-volume edition in the distinguished Library of America. A new collection of Hammett’s stories, many of which had been out of print for fifty years, was published. And the first collection of Hammett’s letters was announced.
In 1994 Christopher Metress compiled The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett, a summary of reviews and criticism. His introduction, which follows, provides an excellent overview of the responses, positive and negative, to Hammett’s works. The development in the way Hammett is studied since Metress’s assessment has been a renewed interest in his short stories and in his early career. Until the late 1990s, it was difficult for any but the most assiduous researcher to study Hammett’s development as a writer because his earliest work was unavailable. The current interest in social history and in the Cold War period in particular has sharpened popular interest in Hammett as a representative victim of the Red Scare during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Christopher Metress, Introduction to The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994).
In 1944, a full decade after Dashiell Hammett published his last novel, three important critics assessed the achievement of detective fiction’s once-prolific but by then long-silent innovator. In the February 7th issue of the New Republic, Andre Gide praised Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, as “a remarkable achievement,” and concluded that “Dashiell Hammett’s dialogues, in which every character is trying to deceive all the others and in which the truth slowly becomes visible through a fog of deception, can be compared only with the best of Hemingway” (“An Imaginary Interview,” 186). Edmund Wilson, writing in the October 14lh issue of the New Yorker, was less enthusiastic. In “Why do People Read Detective Stories?” Wilson took an entire genre to task, belittling the public’s endless fascination with such writers as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Rex Stout. Eventually, Wilson turned his sights on Ham-mett and The Maltese Falcon, which he “assumed to be a classic in the field.” But where so many others had found merit, Wilson found only incompetence:
As a writer, [Hammett] is surely almost as far below the rank of Rex Stout as Rex Stout is below that of James Cain. The Maltese Falcon today seems not much above those newspaper picture-strips in which you follow from day to day the ups and downs of a strong-jawed hero and a hardboiled but beautiful adventuress. (235-236)
Before year’s end, Raymond Chandler proffered his own assessment, one that fell midway between Gide’s admiration and Wilson’s denunciation. In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler praised Hammett as “the ace performer” in a school of writers who transformed the classical detective story, but he issued the following caveat: “I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was [simply] trying to make a living by writing something he had firsthand information about.” Yes, Chandler observed, Hammett did have a “literary style,” and while this style “at its best… could say anything,” it was “at its worst… as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean.” Moreover, “How original a writer Hammett really was isn’t easy to decide now,” Chandler reflected, “[but] there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and stories of Hemingway” (57). Yet despite such reservations about Hammett’s style and originality, Chandler in the end confessed that, whatever his shortcomings, Hammett “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” (58).
With a reputation as both a daring original and a mere pulpster, Dashiell Hammett has long held a peculiar position in American letters. Few writers can be dismissed one month as a creator of derivative “newspaper picture-strips” and then two months later be hailed as an artist who “wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” The Gide-Wilson-Chandler colloquy of 1944 is but one example of the eclectic and often contentious estimations that have long characterized the critical response to Dashiell Hammett. 1966 offers a similar illustration. Reviewing the reissued Novels of Dashiell Hammett in the January 8th issue of the New Republic, Leonard Moss found little to praise. Like Wilson more than twenty years before, Moss was extremely disappointed by Hammett’s most famous work. Calling The Maltese Falcon Hammett’s “worst novel,” one full of “insipid dialogue,” Moss concluded that “Dashiell Hammett cannot through any generosity be considered a complex author. It would be fatuous to search for profound ethical, sociological, or psychological implications” (34) in his fiction. Yet one month later, in the Spectator, A. Alvarez extended to Hammett the very generosity Moss so grudgingly withheld, arguing that Hammett’s five novels “tell you more about the United States than many with more high-minded intentions, like Upton Sinclair’s” (169). Hailing Hammett’s art as “meticulous, witty, authentic, and utterly nihilistic” (170), Alvarez insisted that, with “their elegant plots and stripped, clean writing,” Hammett’s novels “have their own unwavering kind of perfection” (169). As more recent examples bear out, Hammett’s fiction continues to be both embraced and rejected by the critical community. In 1986, for instance, French scholars placed The Glass Key on the Syllabus of Agregation, the highest competitive examination for teachers in France. The other American writer featured on the year’s syllabus was Walker Percy, and the following year the Sorbonne published a collection of critical essays devoted solely to these two writers. On the other hand, back in America, the 1250 page Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) contained only a few brief mentions of Hammett—including an unfortunate mischaracterization of Red Harvest as an example of 1920s “leftist literature” (864). Thus, in one year and on one side of the Atlantic, Hammett was presented to a generation of teachers as a major American writer. Two short years later, however, he was all but ignored in the most ambitious work of American literary history in the last forty years.
Critical responses to Dashiell Hammett have not always been as extreme as the previous examples suggest. During the five years in which he published his five novels, the response to his work was fairly uniform, and where there was disagreement it was not about whether to praise his achievement, but how far to go in one’s praise of it. From 1929 to 1934, few doubted Hammett’s supremacy in the field of detective fiction. Here, the critics agreed, was an American original, a distinctive voice that was revitalizing a tired genre. Others, however, went further in their praise, demanding that Hammett be placed not only at the top of his genre but also at the top of American literature. Whether Hammett was a better artist than S. S. Van Dine was not an issue. Whether Hammett was the equal of Hemingway, Lardner, and Fitzgerald, this was perhaps the one point of serious critical contention between 1929 and 1934. In fact, the only critic who continually remained unimpressed by Hammett’s achievement was Hammett himself. In a 1932 interview with the author, Elizabeth Sanderson recounted Hammett’s critical response to his own work: “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” (518).
Fortunately, the critics were more willing to trust the tales than the teller. Although a reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript observed that “when [Red Harvest] is all over the reader wonders just what it was all about” (3), Hammett’s first novel was generally well-received. Walter Brooks claimed that he and his colleagues at Outlook and Independent gave it an “A plus before we’d finished the first chapter” (274). In Bookman, Herbert Asbury doubted “if even Ernest Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue than may be found within the pages of [Red Harvest].” According to Asbury, Hammett’s novel was “the liveliest detective story that has been published in a decade” (92). The Dain Curse, published in the same year as Red Harvest, fared just as well. In the New York Herald Tribune, Will Cuppy recommended the novel for “its weird characters and really astonishing speed” (11), and in the New York Times Bruce Rae praised “the racy narrative style of the author’s detective mouthpiece” (16). Moreover, Walter Brooks and his colleagues once again chimed in with high praise: “We can think of only one story of the kind better than this second book of Mr. Hammett’s and that is his first” (552).
With the 1930 publication of The Maltese Falcon Hammett secured his most enthusiastic contemporary response. Brooks not only reshuffled his ordering of Hammett’s novels, moving The Maltese Falcon ahead of Red Harvest, but he also argued for the larger merits of the work: “this is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, but it is an exceedingly well-written novel. There are few contemporaries who can write prose as clean-cut, vivid and realistic” (350). In the upscale Town and Country, William Curtis concurred, claiming that “Mr. Hammett has something quite as definite to say, quite as decided an impetus to give the course of newness in the development of the American tongue, as any man now writing” (qtd. in Layman 113). “There is nothing like [Hammett’s] books in the whole range of detective fiction,” wrote Donald Douglas in the New Republic. “The plots don’t matter so much,” Douglas contended, “[but] the art does; and there is an absolute distinction of real art” (226).
While never quite generating the same kind of unreserved enthusiasm as The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s next two novels, The Glass Key and The Thin Man, continued to increase his reputation. Despite Will Cuppy’s claim that The Glass Key was “about twice as good as The Maltese Falcon” (13), most critics concurred with Bruce Rae, who predicted that “Mr. Hammett’s new book is bound to find favour, although probably not as much as was accorded … The Maltese Falcon” (23). In the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker confirmed Rae’s suspicion when she admitted that The Glass Key, while a “good and enthralling” novel, “seems to me nowhere to touch its predecessor” (84). In responding to The Thin Man, most critics agreed with Peter Quennell, who characterized Hammett’s final novel as “not only an absorbing and extremely ingenious ‘thriller,’ but [also a work that] contains portraits, snatches of dialogue … that Hemingway himself could not have improved on.” For Quennell, “The Thin Man—usually brilliant read as a detective story—has every right to consideration on its literary merits” (801). T. S. Matthews, however, argued against the brilliance of The Thin Man. While noting that Hammett’s latest novel was “still head-and-shoulders above any other murder mystery published since” The Glass Key, Matthews declared that The Thin Man “seems a less excitingly fresh performance than, say, The Maltese Falcon.” “Now that Dashiell Hammett is beginning to be taken seriously by the highbrows,” Matthews confessed, “my first enthusiasm for him is beginning to cool a little” (395).
It is only after we move away from contemporary responses to Hammett’s fiction do we see, if not a cooling of enthusiasm, then at least a warming up of critical dissent. Early on characterized almost exclusively by praise for Hammett’s achievement, the critical response since then has generated an engaging, and sometimes maddening, disagreement as to the respective merits of the five novels. As noted earlier, Andre Gide considered Red Harvest a “remarkable achievement,” and elsewhere, against popular opinion, he hailed the novel as “far superior to The Falcon.” For Gide, Red Harvest is Hammett’s greatest achievement, a novel which could “give pointers to Hemingway or even Faulkner” (Journals 191). In the early 1940s, Robert Graves, while not as rhapsodic as Gide, tabbed Red Harvest as “an acknowledged literary landmark” (qtd. in Nolan, Casebook 46), and the general consensus in that Red Harvest is a carefully-crafted and innovative novel. As Geoffrey O’Brien put it in 1981, “The hardboiled novel was born complete in Red Harvest in 1929, after a decade of experiments in the pages of Black Mask…. [and it remains] a remarkably original and brilliant exercise in the American language” (68). Where there is dissent about the novel, it usually echoes the sentiments of Peter Wolfe: “Too many bullets fly; too many bombs explode; too much blood spilled. [The] brutality [of Red Harvest] is numbing, not exciting” (91).
The critical assessment of The Dain Curse is more varied than that of Red Harvest. Gide, who loved everything else Hammett ever wrote, could not recall the title of this second novel. All he could remember was that it seemed “obviously written on order” (Journals 191). In turn, Alvarez characterizes The Dain Curse as “wandering, melodramatic, a bit silly, and, with its supernatural trimmings, not at all typical” (169), and Wolfe, while he sees The Dain Curse as a “notable advance from Red Harvest” (94), still warns us that the work never becomes a “solid, serious novel” (110). For William Nolan, The Dain Curse is not as bad as many critics have contended, but it indeed “marked a plateau, not an upward step” (Casebook 51) in Hammett’s artistic development. On the other hand, William Marling defends The Dain Curse as “a novel of sophisticated intent” (57), Sinda Gregory argues persuasively for its “innovative cleverness” (175), Robert Edenbaum considers it “by far the most complicated of the novels,” and Philip Durham praises it as the work in which “Hammett reached his peak” (70).
Durham’s pronouncement aside, most critics consider The Maltese Falcon the peak of Hammett’s achievement. William Patrick Kenney hails The Maltese Falcon as “one of the remarkable achievements in American crime fiction” (108), Robert Schulman calls it Hammett’s “most precise and suggestive work” (401), Sinda Gregory characterizes it as “a brilliantly unified novel whose imagery, character development, style, and theme are closely interwoven” (88), and Bernard Schopen believes The Maltese Falcon “demands that [Hammett] be ranked among the important writers of the period” (180). Moreover, Hammett’s two most important disciples, Chandler and Ross Macdonald, consider The Maltese Falcon the pinnacle of Hammett’s career. While Chandler had high praise for the book—“The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not ‘by hypothesis’ incapable of anything” (58)—perhaps Macdonald best expresses the immediate and continued admiration critics have had for Hammett’s third novel: “The Maltese Falcon broke the barrier of the genre; it was, and is, a work of art.”
The Glass Key and The Thin Man were both well-received upon publication, but since then they, like The Dain Curse, have met with disparate critical assessments. Nolan, for instance, describes The Glass Key as “a perplexing, frustrating book” (Casebook 69), Wolfe labels it a “scamped, evasive novel” (146), and Gregory marks it as “Hammett’s most frustrating and puzzling work … a less artistically satisfying book” (116) than his first three novels. Furthermore, Edenbaum, in one of the most influential essays on Hammett, judges The Glass Key to be “Hammett’s least satisfactory novel” (100). On the other hand, William Marling hails The Glass Key as “one of Hammett’s best novels” (97), Julian Symons considers it “the peak of Hammett’s achievement” (Mortal Consequences 139), and fellow crime novelist Rex Stout praises the novel as “more pointed and profound … than anything Hemingway ever wrote” (Lochte 213). According to Paul Gray, The Glass Key, along with The Maltese Falcon, is responsible for Hammett’s “international reputation” (73), and biographer Diane Johnson believes it to be “as elegant and controlled in style as anything [Hammett] ever wrote” (85).
When The Thin Man first appeared, Alexander Woollcott and Sinclair Lewis were among the many voices to praise Hammett’s final novel. Woollcott called The Thin Man “the best detective story yet written in America” and Lewis proclaimed that “The Thin Man is certainly the most breathless of [Hammett’s] stories” (qtd. in Nolan, Casebook 86). Since then, however, such praise for The Thin Man has been, well, thin. According to the usually sympathetic Howard Haycraft, Hammett’s last novel is “his least typical and least important contribution” (171), showing “a distinct softening of the author’s talents” (170). Roger Sale agrees, characterizing the novel as “an inconsequential effort” (20), and Wolfe takes this all a step further by professing that “The Thin Man robs Hammett’s career of a sense of artistic growth or deepening vision” (162). Russell Nye concurs, claiming that “the heart of Hammett’s work lies in his first four novels” (259) and, Richard Layman, in a very direct assessment, proclaims that “After The Glass Key, Hammett was ruined as a novelist” (115). And yet The Thin Man has found a few champions. Gregory suggests that The Thin Man “may be [Hammett’s] most subtle and, in certain ways, his most controlled work” (177), Alvarez characterizes Hammett’s last novel as “smarter, more deliberately sophisticated” (169) than the rest, and Julian Symons praises it as “a continually charming and sparkling performance” (Mortal Consequences 140). Moreover, George J. Thompson declares that “Because the critics have been more interested in determining what the novel is not rather than what it is, they have isolated weaknesses that should more properly be seen as strengths, strengths that are intrinsically connected with Hammett’s intention to render a dark vision” (28). According to Thompson, The Thin Man does not, as Wolfe would have us believe, rob Hammett’s career of a sense of artistic growth or deepening vision. It is not, as crime-novelist Robert Parker has suggested, “Hammett’s weakest effort” (118); rather, The Thin Man is an indispensable novel, without which Hammett’s career, achievement, and vision cannot be fully appreciated.
Similarly, we cannot fully appreciate Hammett’s critical reputation by merely discussing contemporary book reviews and subsequent responses to individual works. Certainly, all critical reputations begin with book reviews, and, as we have seen, the immediate response to Hammett was, for the most part, laudatory. But critical reputations are only begun, not made, by contemporaries. One of America’s most talked about writers from 1929 to 1935, Hammett fell out of critical discourse for the remainder of the decade. Whereas in his 1932 memoir, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway was telling the world that he had once asked his wife to read aloud to him The Dain Curse, and whereas in 1935 Gertrude Stein proclaimed that in all of California there were only two people she would like to meet, Charlie Chaplin and Dashiell Hammett, by decade’s end critics were ignoring Hammett’s work. They, like he, had lapsed into silence.
By the early 1940s, however, critical appreciation of Hammett began to reemerge. Overseas, in The Long Week-end: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 (1940), Robert Graves and Alan Hodge determined that “Of all the detective novelists of the period only one, the American Dashiell Hammett, happened to be … a first-rate writer” (301). In 1941, back here in the United States, Howard Haycraft wrote the first sustained commentary on Hammett’s fiction. In Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, Haycraft devoted five-plus pages to Hammett, offering an assessment that would be repeated many times by later critics:
Because of their startling originality, the Hammett novels virtually defy exegesis even to-day—though their external pattern is by now all too familiar by process of over-much imitation. As straightway detective stories they can hold their own with the best. They are also character studies of close to top rank in their own right, and are penetrating if often shocking novels of manners as well. They established new standards for realism in the genre. Yet they are as sharply stylized and deliberately artificial as Restoration Comedy, and have been called an inverted form of romanticism. They were commercial in inception; but they miss being Literature, if at all, by the narrowest margin. (171)
By 1944, Gide, Wilson, and Chandler were submitting their own assessments—Gide and Chandler concurring with Haycraft that Hammett’s work missed being literature, if at all, by the narrowest margins; Wilson professing that Hammett’s most admired novel missed being even good detective fiction (and that, if it belonged anywhere, it belonged not in the margins of literature but in the middle of the comics page).
At the close of the decade, David T. Bazelon published in Commentary magazine the first critical essay devoted solely to Hammett’s work. In “Dashiell Hammett’s Private Eye: No Loyalty Beyond the Job” (1949), Bazelon discovers “the chief concern of Dashiell Hammett’s art” to be the “ascendancy of the job in the lives of Americans” (468). Furthermore, he senses an abdication of moral responsibility of Hammett’s fiction, complaining that “the question of doing or not doing a job competently seems to have replaced the whole larger question of good and evil” (470). Bazelon’s conservative politics no doubt inform his dislike for Hammett’s fiction, but his mostly unsympathetic essay marks Hammett as worthy of serious critical attention. Until this essay, critical discourse about Hammett focused on little else but his innovations within the detective genre. While Bazelon does not particularly like what he sees in Hammett’s fiction, he finds in it something more than generic innovation and cleverness—he finds a social, political, and moral vision that, however distasteful, deserves—and can sustain—thoughtful commentary.
In the 1950s, however, critics did not follow Bazelon’s example. The silence and misprision that characterize the critical response to Hammett during this decade can be attributed, in part at least, to politics. Hammett’s association with the Communist party drew scorn upon him and his work, a scorn that, more often than not, resulted in critical silence. Where attention was paid, it was mixed and, unfortunately, misleading. In “The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story” (1953), Somerset Maugham praised Hammett as “an inventive and original writer,” and reserved special recognition for The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s “most convincing novel,” and Sam Spade, “a nasty bit of goods, but … admiringly depicted” (126). But in The Development of the Detective Story (1958), A. E. Murch had little to say about Hammett, except that his novels began a kind of “vogue for over-emphasis, a cult of exaggerated realism” (227). Leo Gurko was even more hostile. In Hews, Highbrows and the Popular Mind (1953), Gurko labelled the private eye “begotten” by Hammett in Red Harvest as “sensual and amoral,” a man who “survived in a bloody world, only because he lost less blood than the opposition and because he had mastered better than they the fine points of Darwinian ethics” (187). Gurko’s attack on the amorality of the genre, and by extension the amorality of Hammett’s vision, echoes Bazelon’s earlier charge, but whereas Bazelon’s critique stemmed from a careful reading of Hammett’s imitators than with Hammett himself:
In that early book, at any rate, the private eye went through maneuvers soon destined to become a classic. Hired to find some important object (a jade necklace, an I.O.U., an incriminating photograph) our hero, aged thirty to forty and in incident to incident with no clear notion until the very end where they are leading him and who the major criminal is. As in the adventures of [Dreiser’s] Cow-perwood, slices of erotica and slices of violence are pasted together as far as the eye can reach. On the average he makes love to three or four sexually magnetic women, consumes four or five quarts of hard liquor, smokes cartons of cigarettes, is knocked on the head, shot, and bruised in fist fights from seven to ten times—while groping his way through a fog as far as breaking the case is concerned. … He is no more hampered by scruples than Dreiser’s robber baron, and is playing for high stakes (if not money, then in life) in the same kind of dangerous universe. (187-188)
There is more Mike Hammer in this description than Continental Op. Yes, the Op does move through events with little clear notion where events are leading him (he is, in his own words, simply “stirring things up”), and, yes, fist fights and shoot-outs are plenty in Red Harvest. But the Op never makes love to any woman (much less four or five “sexually magnetic women”) and while Poisonville gets the best of the Op (he does indeed go “blood-simple”) it is only because his scruples fail him, not because he is unhampered by them.
Gurko’s misreading of Hammett gives credence to Haycraft’s contention that “Like all originators, Dashiell Hammett has suffered at the hands of his imitators” (173). With the emergence of Mickey Spillane and his masochistic Mike Hammer in the late 40s and early 50s, Dashiell Hammett’s reputation suffered a serious setback. In this case of literary kinship, it seems, the sins of the son were visited upon the father. Leslie Fiedler’s discussion of hardboiled fiction in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) is evidence of this. Fiedler begins: “As it has descended the long way from Sam Spade to Mike Hammer, the proletarian thriller has come to treat the riddle of guilt and innocence more and more perfunctorily, as its occasion rather than its end…. Murder laced with lust, mayhem spiced with nymphomania: this is the formula for the chief surviving form of the murder mystery in America” (467-477). To his credit, Fiedler is in this passage distinguishing between Hammett and Spillane, suggesting a corruption of the genre as it moves from father to son. But if we continue on in the same paragraph we notice that the distinction between Hammett and Spillane is not simply blurred, but erased—first by eliding the difference between Spillane and Chandler, and then the difference between Chandler and Hammett. Eventually the “crude” Spillane and the “pretentious” Chandler are subsumed within Hammett’s “own school”:
Not only in the cruder and more successful books of Mickey Spillane, but in the more pretentious ones of Raymond Chandler, the detective story has reverted to the kind of populist semi-pornography that once made George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall a black-market best-seller…. [E]ven as a hundred years ago, such readers relish thinking that the sadist fantasies in which they find masturbatory pleasure are revelations of social disorder, first steps toward making a better world. “The realist in murder,” Hammett writes of his own school, “writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, and in which a screen star can be the finger-man for a mob….” And through this world, he continues, walks the private eye, the man of honor who is also the poor man, the common man. “If there were enough like him,” Chandler concludes, “the world would be a safe place to live in…” (477)
Fortunately, most critics no longer lump together Hammett and Hammer, Spade and Spillane, though at first the temptation appears to have been great. Several important publishing events in the 1960s helped to correct the misreadings of the 1950s. First, in 1965 Knopf reset the 1942 Complete Dashiell Hammett and republished it as The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. More significantly, the following year Random House published The Big Knockover, a collection of ten tales, including the never before published “Tulip,” Hammett’s unfinished novel. With an introduction by Lillian Hellman, this collection received much critical attention, garnering significant laudatory reviews in the Nation, the National Review, Book Week, the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, and Newsweek. For instance, Anthony Boucher professed that “It is impossible to overstate the importance of Dashiell Hammett to the American detective story (or, I believe, to American literature),” and he hailed the collection as “one of the year’s major books” (22). In his review, Frederick Gardner bemoaned the fact that soon after Hammett started writing “imitators proliferated and Hammett … became typecast as the founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction” (455). Gardner insisted on Hammett’s distinctiveness, confessing that “Hammett is due for a renaissance and I hope The Big Knockover hastens it” (456).
With focus on the Continental Op, The Big Knockover reminded critics that Hammett’s achievement extended well beyond Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles. More importantly, however, the collection challenged many readers to recognize the vast differences between Hammett and his imitators, differences which had been all but forgotten in the previous decade. For instance, in his review of The Big Knockover, Richard Schickel first remarked on the difference between Hammett and the writer he supposedly imitated: “Hammett has been frequently put down as an imitation of Hemingway, but reading these early stories, one is impressed by how much Hammett was his own man.” While admitting that Hammett was “not, of course … Hemingway’s equal,” Schickel does observe that there is “less affection, less self-consciousness than in the average Hemingway piece. And in Hammett the lines never go limp with sentiment and only rarely become overly mannered in their cadences” (14). After noting the differences between Hammett and Hemingway, Schickel takes a more important step, highlighting the significant differences between Hammett and the writers who supposedly imitated him. In the following passage we hear a rebuke not only of Spillane and his “school” but also of critics like Gurko and Fiedler:
The Op neither strips nor tortures women; he fights only after someone else fires the first punch or shot; and in the cool description of the ensuing action, the nastier details are never lingered over. … As for the masochistic delights a James Bond appears to feel when a Goldfinger or a Blofeld is working him over, The Op would suspect his mind of failure if he felt such weird emotions welling up within him. In short, there is a purity in these stories that is now quite lost to the adventures and mysteries that are currently derived from the tradition Hammett established. (15)
The Novels of Dashiell Hammett and The Big Knockover gave readers in the 1960s easy access to almost all of Hammett’s fiction, and thus helped to ready him for the “renaissance” Gardner predicted/Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (1968), a collection of critical essays issued by Southern Illinois University Press, included three essays on Hammett’s fiction, and intimated that this renaissance was indeed underway. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these three pieces. Philip Durham’s “The Black Mask School” was the first essay to survey the achievement of Hammett’s short fiction; Irving Malin’s “Focus on The Maltese Falcon: The Metaphysical Falcon” was the first essay devoted solely to a single Hammett novel; and Robert Edenbaum’s “The Poetics of the Private Eye: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett” was the first essay to consider how Hammett’s fiction contained within it a critique of the very values it seemed to promote. The pieces by Malin and Edenbaum have proven especially important to later critics, the first for its emphasis on mutability and ambiguity as the foundation of Hammett’s fiction, and the latter for its insights into how Hammett’s novels, while portraying a hero “free of sentiment, of the fear of death, of the temptations of money and sex,” nonetheless “present a ’critique’ of the tough guy’s freedom as well” (81). 1968, then, marks the year that Hammett’s fiction entered the domain of academic discourse (with apologies to Walter Blair, whose “Dashiell Hammett: Themes and Techniques” appeared in 1967, but whose work has had less of an impact on Durham, Malin, and Edenbaum).
The renaissance of the 1960s was capped off with the publication of William Nolan’s Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (1969), the first book devoted solely to Hammett. Nolan himself recognized the limited scope of his work, warning the reader that his study “is not, nor does it pretend to be, a definitive treatment. Until Lillian Hellman, who controls [Hammett’s] estate, releases the full Hammett papers, including now-restricted letters, unpublished manuscripts, and various personal documents, no comprehensive study can be successfully undertaken” (vii). Still, Nolan’s work—which received an Edgar Allan Poe Special Award in 1970 from the Mystery Writers of America—blends biography and criticism (much more of the former than the latter) in an informative and perceptive manner. The most valuable aspect of Nolan’s study, however, was his “Dashiell Hammett Check-List.” Here, for the first time, was a complete list of primary materials, a list which included all of Hammett’s novels and story collections, as well as his magazine fiction, magazine articles, book introductions, book reviews, poetry, Black Mash letters, newspaper articles, anthology appearances, and radio work. Nolan’s checklist remained the definitive bibliography until 1979, when Richard Layman published his Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography.
The momentum of the late 1960s carried over into the next decade. In 1972, The Armchair Detective began serializing George J. Thompson’s seven part dissertation, “The Problem of Moral Vision in Dashiell Hammett’s Novels.” With an introduction, a chapter apiece on the five novels, and a conclusion, Thompson’s study was the first extensive critical analysis of Hammett’s fiction (the first dissertation on Hammett, William Patrick Kenney’s 1965 “The Dashiell Hammett Tradition and the Modern Detective Novel,” devoted less than one third of its pages to Hammett). Thompson’s study pays careful attention to previous critical responses to Hammett (especially those forwarded by Durham, Malin, and Edenbaum), thus making him the first critic to manifest an interest in both Hammett’s fiction and the critical discourse concerning that fiction. According to Thompson, “even Raymond Chandler, who was one of Hammett’s most ardent admirers, failed finally to perceive the full complexity and artistry in [Hammett’s] works. Too often what one comes away with after reading the critical material on Hammett—reviews, critiques, and analyses—are rather stereotyped notions that he is the founder of the so-called hardboiled detective novel, that his style is bare-boned, hard, muscular, realistic prose, and that his heroes are coldly methodical, machine-like creations.” Such stereotypes are “unfair or misleading”: furthermore “they encourage us to see him as a static writer, repeatedly employing the same formulas in only slightly varying patterns” (“Problem” 155). The intent of Thompson’s dissertation is to correct this image of Hammett as a “static writer,” forwarding instead the assertion that Hammett’s five novels reveal a “developing artistic pattern of moral and social vision” (“Problem” 155). In his final chapter, Thompson concludes that with each novel “we increasingly become aware of a darkening authorial vision” (“Conclusion” 126), a vision that eventually drove Hammett into silence. More than twenty years after its publication, Thompson’s dissertation remains an often-cited source, and his attempt to read the novels as a narrative of darkening authorial vision has encouraged other critics to proffer their own interpretations of Hammett’s evolving poetics.
The 1970s also saw the publication of other important critical responses. In “The First Thin Man” (1972), Donald K. Adams offered an intriguing analysis of Hammett’s aborted 1931 draft of The Thin Man, which exists today as an unpublished sixty-five page typescript housed in the E. T. Guymon, Jr. Collection of Detective and Mystery Fiction at Occi-dental College. William Ruehlman devoted a chapter to Hammett in his Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye (1974), and John G. Cawelti, in his landmark Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), praised Hammett’s work as manifesting “both an awareness of earlier literary models and a continual interest in such literary effects as irony and paradox” (164). In “Dashiell Hammett in the Wasteland” (1978), H. H. Morris compared Hammett to the high modernists, concluding, however, that “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” (202). For Paul F Kress the point of comparison was A. Conan Doyle rather than T. S. Eliot. In “Justice, Proof, and Plausibility in Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett” (1977), Kress examined “the considerable distance that separates [the] moral and intellectual uni-verses “of Conan Doyle and Hammett, concluding that” our loss of faith in the ontology of 1895 which supported Doyle’s belief in an ’objectivist’ science of detection and demonstration has a parallel in the erosion of confidence in our public institutions to render justice “(131-32), an erosion that is borne out in the novels of Dashiell Hammett. Other important contributions from the decade include George Grella’s comparison of Henry James and Hammett in” The Wings of the Falcon and the Maltese Dove, “Kathleen Hulley’s” From Crystal Sphere to Edge City: Ideology in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, “and David Glover’s carefully argued interdisciplinary venture,” Sociology and the Thriller: The Case of Dashiell Hammett. “
But no discussion of Hammett’s critical reception in the 1970s would be complete without mention of two other events: the serial appearance of Lillian Hellman’s three part autobiography (An Unfinished Woman [1969], Pentimento [1973], and Scoundrel Time [1976]) and the 1974 publication of The Continental Op, with its enormously influential introduction by Steven Marcus. Hellman’s memoirs helped to make Hammett, more than a decade after his death, something of a cause celebre. Unfinished Woman, winner of the 1969 National Book Award, included a revised version of Hellman’s introduction to The Big Knockover, and this brought even wider attention to Hammett’s work. 1973’s Pentimento not only continued to keep Hammett fresh in the public imagination but it also continued to add to the posthumous mystique that Hellman was carefully cultivating about her longtime companion. As one critic said in her review of the memoir,” Though he appears infrequently [in Pentimento], Hammett steals every scene he is dragged into “(Duffy 114). Moreover, when Pentimento was made into the 1977 film Julia, millions of Americans were treated to Jason Robard’s Oscar-winning performance as Hammett.
Random House’s decision to publish The Continental Op in 1974 may have indeed been influenced by the growing interest in Hammett that Hellman’s memoirs were creating. The seven stories in The Continental Op had all previously appeared in the 1966 hardcover issue of The Big Knockover. Curiously, however, whereas The Big Knockover was well-received, The Continental Op, which contained no story that was not in The Big Knockover, was met with some disfavor. Leonard Michaels thought many of the stories” absurd—unintentionally absurd, “and predicted that” Sooner or later someone will compare them to the fiction of Kafka, Beckett, Handke, et al., if somebody hasn’t already made that mistake “(1). Moreover, Roger Sale argued that” the stories are inferior work … and [that] those who come to Hammett for the first time via this volume will get only snatches that show why anyone should read him. With a writer who is very limited at his best, this kind of exposure is especially unwelcome “(74). The merits of the stories aside, the lasting importance of The Continental Op is to be found in its introduction. Here, in twenty pages, Steven Marcus changed the direction of Hammett studies, bringing to his analysis of Hammett’s work a sensibility shaped by recent developments in literary theory. In what has become perhaps the most influential approach to Hammett’s fiction, Marcus set out” to construct a kind of ’ideal type’ of a Hammett or Op story “(xviii). Here is what he discovers:
The Op is called in or sent out on a case. Something has been stolen, someone is missing, some dire circumstance is impending, someone has been murdered—it doesn’t matter. The Op interviews the person or persons most immediately accessible … Guilty or innocent, they provide the Op with an account of what they know, of what they assert really happened…. What [the Op] soon discovers is that the “reality” that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a construction, a fabrication, a fiction, a faked and alternate reality—and that it has been gotten together before he ever arrived on the scene. And the Op’s work therefore is to deconstruct, decompose, deplot and defictionalize that “reality” and to compose or reconstruct out of it a true fiction, i.e., and account of what “really” happened, (xix)
But were this all, Marcus contends, the Op—and Hammett— would be doing nothing different than what we find in the classical detective story. Called in to” deconstruct, decompose, deplot, and defictionalize, “however, the Op never achieves the kind of” disambiguation “arrived at by the classical detective. Instead, the Op replaces the” fictions “of the criminals with his own” fiction, “which” may also be ’true’ or mistaken, or both at once. “Thus Hammett, through the Op, is not only trying to” make the fictions of others visible as trying to suggest that “what is [finally] revealed as ’reality’ is still a further fiction-making activity…. [nothing but] a narrative, a coherent yet questionable account of the world” (xxi). Several reviewers of The Continental Op found these conclusions a bit pretentious—Sale called Marcus’s observations a “fancy way to say something pretty obvious” (75) and another reviewer called them simply “pompous” (Review of The Continental Op 74)—but the ideas expressed in this introduction have exerted enormous influence ever since. Marcus’s metafictional and mildly-deconstructionist approach to Hammett has been embraced and developed further by a number of perceptive critics, including Sinda Gregory, Jasmine Yong Hall, David J. Herman, Carl Freedman, Christopher Kendrik, and, most recently, Bruce Gatenby. Two decades after its publication, Marcus’s introduction continues to suggest productive avenues for inquiry, and no understanding of the critical reception of Dashiell Hammett is complete without it.
Despite these advances in critical response and exegesis, Hammett entered the 1980s as a neglected figure in American literary studies. But if he entered the decade as such, he exited it in a completely different fashion. During the 1980s, three major biographies were published: Richard Layman’s The Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett (1981), Nolan’s Hammett: A Life at the Edge (1983), and Diane Johnson’s Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983). Moreover, within five years five book-length studies appeared: Peter Wolfe’s Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett (1980), William Marling’s Dashiell Hammett (1985), and Sinda Gregory’s Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (1985). In addition, John S. Whitley and Paul Skenazy each issued monographs comparing Hammett and Chandler (Detectives and Friends: Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key” and Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” [1981] and The New Wild West: The Urban Mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler [1982]), and several books contained helpful chapters or essays on Hammett (Edward Margolies’s Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross Macdonald [1982], Stoddard Martin’s California Writers [1983], Bernard Benstock’s Art in Crime Writing [1983], Cynthia Hamilton’s Western and Hardboiled Detective Fiction in America [1987], and Brain Docherty’s American Crime Fiction [1988]). Furthermore, articles on Hammett appeared in academic journals as diverse as the Centennial Review, the South-west Review, Proteus, and the Journal of American Studies, and Robert F Skinner published an important secondary bibliography, The Hardboiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald (1985).
The three biographies were met with everything from high praise to outright disdain. Like Nolan’s 1969 casebook, Layman’s Shadow Man was written without Lillian Hellman’s assistance— or, as Layman puts it, “written without her assistance and without hindrance from her” (x). In his preface, Layman promises his readers that “Facts are important things,” and that “Research has taken precedence over invention and speculation” in the preparation of his biography. As a result, of the three biographies Shadow Man contains the most accurate and thorough information. Several reviewers, however, lamented the fact that, in sticking only to facts, Layman never really tried to get at Hammett’s true character. According to Mary Cantwell, “Mr. Layman’s biography is a stream of facts and critical exegeses, but it is devoid of interpretation. Hammett remains opaque, less a celebrity in need of a biographer than a character in need of a novelist” (20). Paul Grey agrees in part, but he is more accurate in his assessment of Shadow Man: “Layman avoids speculation and sticks to the facts. This approach inspires both trust and a question: What kind of man, finally, was Hammett? …. Shadow Man tells a fascinating and tantalizing story. It also suggests just how cleverly the old detective covered his tracks” (73). Despite its self-imposed limitations Shadow Man provides detailed information about many lesser-known parts of Hammett’s life (for instance, his stint as advertising manager of Samuel’s Jewelry Company in 1926, or his role as editor-in-chief of The Adakian during the Second World War). In addition, Layman proves to be a perceptive and opinionated critic of Hammett’s fiction, especially the short stories. Layman’s title suggests he was well aware that his subject would be, in the end, elusive, and, if one considers the speculative excesses of Diane Johnson’s later biography, Layman’s decision to err on the side of caution makes his work, while limited, certainly the most reliable to date.
Nolan’s Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge is not a mere updating of his 1969 volume. As Nolan said of his first book, “Its purpose was to serve as a basic reference on Hammett’s writing.” The new book, however, is an attempt “to bring Hammett, the man as well as the writer, out of the shadows, to render him in full dimension for the reader” (xii). Nolan’s biography is less scholarly than Layman’s and, as can be expected, there is a good deal of overlapping information, but the two books complement each other well. Nolan’s biography has more of a narrative turn than Layman’s, and its lighter tone and style do allow for a some-what different portrait of Hammett to emerge. Like Layman, Nolan is careful with his facts and reads the fiction with an appreciative but discerning eye. And yet, as one reviewer observed, “[While] Mr. Nolan writes perceptively of the novels … [and] exhaustively of the events in’Hammett’s life … Hammett himself remains a shadowy figure. It is as if one knew everything, and nothing, about this strange and gifted man” (Review of Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge 97). The problem, of course, is less with Nolan or Layman than with their elusive subject. If Hammett somehow escapes these two biographers it is not because they have not done their research, but rather because Hammett seems to have wanted it this way. Read in tandem, however, these two biographies give us the best picture of Hammett we have and, we may have to admit, the best picture we are likely to get.
Neither Layman nor Nolan had access to the letters and manuscripts possessed by Lillian Hellman. Diane Johnson did. According to Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life “could not have been written without the cooperation of Hammett’s friend and executrix, Lillian Hellman” (xiii). Because of this, many expected Johnson’s work to be the definitive biography, the study that would finally bring the shadow man into the light. For the first time Hammett’s letters—both professional and personal— were to be made public, and because of the special access provided to her by Hellman’s blessing, Johnson was able to solicit interviews with many people who had heretofore remained silent. But of all the biographies, Johnson’s is the most disap-pointing. Certainly, the biography has champions. In a front page appraisal in the New York Times Book Review, George Stade hailed it as “cool, steady-eyed, and engrossing” (1), concluding that “This biography is better written and more shapely than its predecessors…. [Johnson] adds many new facts and gets very few of the old ones wrong” (35). In Newsweek, Peter Prescott agreed, noting that “Johnson had done her research well … [and] she writes her biography as a fiction writer would—which is to say with appropriate twists and a breezy style” (86). Others, how-ever, attacked Johnson for both her facts and her style. Julian Symons called Johnson’s biography a “deeply disappointing book” whose “failure springs from Johnson’s inability to order and shape the material at hand.” “The book’s chief weakness, apart from the sloppiness of the writing,” Symons concludes, “is that it is a portrait of Nick Charles rather than Dashiell Hammett” (“The Daring” 8). In his own review, William Nolan had fewer problems with the style of the biography than with the facts it contained. In “Setting the Record Straight on Dashiell Hammett: A Life,” Nolan lists more than two dozen factual errors in the work, claiming that Johnson has written a “biography that distorts rather than illuminates, a book riddled with factual errors and wrong-headed conjectures” (38). Even a sympathetic reviewer such as Constance Casey, who prefers Johnson’s biography to either Layman’s or Nolan’s, feels compelled to draw attention to the errors in the biography (639). In the den, Johnson’s book reads too often like a collage of primary materials (sometimes chapters appear to be nothing more than a compilation of one letter or one interview after another). In addition, she has little to say about Hammett’s fiction—at times, in fact, she seems determined to ignore it—and when she does discuss it she gets some fundamental facts wrong (such as her assertion that Donald Willsson in Red Harvest is killed by his father). But the most disturbing fact of her biography is her decision to move freely in and out of the minds of her subjects, like a third-person omniscient narrator. Such movements lead her to repeatedly speculate on what it was this or that person must have been thinking at this or that given moment. For a novelist, this is fine; for a biographer, it is very risky. This is not to say Johnson’s biography is without merit—there is information here that one cannot get anywhere else, letters and draft fragments and personal notes that, in the right hands, may lead to some perceptive reevaluations of Hammett’s fiction. But the general reader must approach this biography with great care.
Dealing with the work rather than the man, the five critical studies from the 1980s exhibit diverse ambitions, concerns and conclusions. Both Wolfe and Dooley devote nearly half their studies to Hammett’s short fiction, Wolfe because the stories “remain the least read and least understood of the canon” (44), Dooley because “It was here [in the short stories] that Hammett honed his craft as a writer and first explored many of the themes and techniques and fictional situations that were to preoccupy him throughout his career” (xiii). Both books, of course, discuss the five novels (Wolfe in greater.detail than Dooley) but, unlike Wolfe, Dooley is guided by a specific premise, an attempt to elaborate Hammett’s “moral perspective.” For Dooley “Hammett’s deeper concerns … are essentially spiritual in nature—a fact that has not sufficiently been noted” (xv) by previous critics. Dooley and Wolfe differ not only in their approaches, but also their conclusions. Dooley claims that “As a writer [Hammett] asked important questions and ventured some bold answers … and he showed us things about our society and our very language—the way we talk and the way we think about our lives— that have become a permanent part of what we know” (xv). Wolfe, while still admiring Hammett’s achievement, reaches a less laudatory conclusion, stressing not what Hammett was able to say, but what he refused to say, focusing not on Hammett’s moral perspective but on his lack of moral vision:
He would write about his experiences, but not about how they touched his heart. His feelings he kept to himself, but at the cost of relegating his works to the ranks of minor fiction. Major literature, always a combined self-exploration and self-discovery, conveys the author’s feelings about both himself and his environment. Hammett didn’t test himself deeply enough to give his work this finality and scope. Moral vision qua psychological thrust exists but marginally in the canon. (4)
In his 1983 study, William Marling reaches a conclusion somewhere between Dooley and Wolfe, positioning Hammett just below the major writers but well above the minor ones. According to Marling, Hammett “stands, as Malraux tried to argue, between the realism of Dreiser and Crane and the modernism of Hemingway and Pound. Though not the equal of these writers, he stands above James M. Cain, John O’Hara, or James T. Farrell. He had the ability, as major writers do, to break genres and make something new of them” (128). Marling’s study was the first to benefit from Layman’s Shadow Man, and the opening and closing chapters of his work have a biographical focus. The middle four chapters—“The Short Stories,” “The Black Mask Novels,” “Falcon and The Key,” and “Lillian and The Thin Man”—focus on the fiction. While the format of the Twayne Series usually demands a good deal of plot summary, Marling manages to offer insightful readings of the fiction while still giving the plot coverage his format calls for. His section on the short stories is limited to what he terms “the best of the anthologized pieces,” but in limiting his scope he allows himself the space to elaborate on the merits of the stories he has chosen. In this chapter, his reflections on Hammett’s style are especially keen, and in a few short pages he makes a strong case that Hammett’s “was a made, not a found, style” (46). Overall, Marling’s study mixes biography and criticism, coverage and close reading, in a concise and persuasive manner.
Sprinkled throughout with movie stills, news photos, and handsome snapshots of first editions and paperback reissues, Julian Symons’s Dashiell Hammett is intended for a popular audience. Though little concerned with Hammett’s life before he became a writer, Symons’s study is still more biography than criticism, and although there is little new information in this book, its lucid and occasionally witty prose make it perhaps the best general introduction to Hammett. On the other hand, Sinda Gregory’s Private Investigations is clearly intended for an academic audience. Unlike the other book-length critical works from this decade, Gregory’s study focuses only on the novels, contains only cursory biographical information, and concerns itself primarily with aesthetic and metafictional issues. Examining “the interplay between form and content” (28) in Hammett’s novels, Gregory follows an “analysis of the principle formal features of the novels” with an analysis of “how these features contribute to the development of Hammett’s main thematic interests—the nature of personal relationships, the limits of reason, the concept of order, and various metafictional issues” (29). With such an approach Gregory reads Red Harvest as “an ethical inquiry into system making” (60), The Dain Curse as “a novel about how we impose a fictional sense of order in our lives and in our literature” (61), The Maltese Falcon as “a declaration of the omnipotence of mystery and the failure of human effort… to ever dispel it” (88), The Glass Key as an unsuccessful attempt to “affirm the circumfluent quality of mystery that must always overpower our attempts to order and interpret our lives” (116), and The Thin Man as a work of “metaphysical skepticism” (171). Informed but not overwhelmed by literary theory, Gregory’s work is the most accomplished of all the book-length studies. Moreover, in her conclusion Gregory asks, and then answers persuasively, a series of suggestive questions about Hammett.
[G]iven the predisposition to dismiss [the hard-boiled detective story] as incon-sequential literature, why did Hammett write only in this form? Was he hesitant to attempt a “serious” novel because he doubted his skill? “Most puzzling of all, why would a writer who insisted so resolutely on the ultimate mystery of the human experience work within the very medium most committed to solving and eliminating mystery? The answer seems to lie in Hammett’s conviction that the notion of mystery’s supremacy is best illustrated by showing its power to withstand our attempts to dismantle it. (178)
In addition to all these biographies and book-length studies, the 1980s produced nearly a dozen important journal articles and book chapters that deserve more attention than can be given here. These studies include John S. Whitley’s” Stirring Things Up: Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op” and David Glover’s rebuttal “The Frontier of Genre: Further to John S. Whitley’s ’Stirring Things Up: Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op’” (1980-81), James E Maxfield’s “Hard-Boiled Dicks and Dangerous Females: Sex and Love in the Detective Fiction of Dashiell Hammett” (1985), Robert Schulman’s “Dashiell Hammett’s Social Vision” (1985), John Anderson’s “The World of The Maltese Falcon” (1988), Gary Day’s “Investigating the Investigator: Hammett’s Continental Op” (1988), Christopher Bentley’s “Radical Anger: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest” (1988), William Murray’s “Riddle of the Key” (1989), and two pieces by William Marling (“The Hammett Succubus” [1982] and “The Style and Ideology of The Maltese Falcon” [1989]).
The 1990s have yet to produce any book-length studies or new biographies, but an important body of work reflecting diverse critical approaches has already emerged in the first few years of the decade. For instance, in “Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest” (1991), Carl Freedman and Christopher Kendrick combine Marxism and post-structuralism in their attempt to show not only how the Op’s primary “labor” is “dialogic” but also how “the generic composition of the novel” has “political resonances and implications” (210). In “Jameson, Genre, and Gumshoes: The Maltese Falcon as Inverted Romance” (1990), Jasmine Yong Hall blends Northrop Frye’s archetypal structuralism with Fredric Jameson’s speculative Marxism. As a result, she looks at the novel “through the filter of romance in order to highlight the historical differences between the romance structure which originates in a Christian, feudal society, and the novel which is produced in a capitalist, monied one” (110). David J. Herman approaches Hammett’s fiction from a feminist perspective informed by deconstruction. In “Finding out about Gender in Hammett’s Fiction: Generic Constraints or Transcendental Norms?” (1991), Herman examines Hammett’s “syntactic laws of gender,” especially the ideologically complex images of androgyny in the early fiction, and makes a strong case that “the absence of androgyny in the later works represents not an increased conservatism about gender, but rather an interpretive code according to which gender itself becomes multiple and complex” (6). In “Dashiell Hammett and the Challenge of New Individualism: Rereading Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon” (1990), Christopher Metress situates Hammett’s novels within cultural discourse about individualism that dominated the first three decades of this century. Placed alongside such works as Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, Herbert Hoover’s American Individualism, and John Dewey’s Individualism Old and New, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon emerge as texts in which Hammett, like the social and political philosophers of his day, “examines the possibility of refashioning the inherited impulses of nineteenth-century individualism into a ’better, brighter, broader [new] individualism’ which seeks, either through allegiance and/or willing submission, to promote collective rather than individual needs” (246-47). Finally in two essays written specifically for this collection, Bruce Gatenby reexamines The Dain Curse through the postmodernism of Lyotard and Derrida, and Larry Anderson, in the only essay to date on Woman in the Dark, investigates Hammett’s manipulation of romance and convention in this unjustly-forgotten 1933 novella.
The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett is the first collection of critical essays devoted solely to Hammett. Containing almost twenty complete essays, as well as more than thirty reviews and short commentaries, this collection surveys sixty-five years of critical response to one of America’s most widely-read authors. The collection is divided into six chapters (followed by a selected bibliography of further criticism). Each of the first five chapters focuses on a specific Hammett novel, while the sixth chapter contains more general essays. This sixth chapter is arranged chronologically, beginning with an excerpt from Howard Haycraft’s 1941 Murder for Pleasure and ending with Anderson’s 1994 essay on Woman in the Dark. The five chapters which focus on the novels open with selected book reviews. Following these reviews, I have placed short commentaries lifted from larger works. Sometimes 1 have selected these commentaries because they happen to come from important writers (Gide, Wilson, Rex Stout, James M. Cain, Donald Westlake, etc.) But more often than not these passages have a thematic focus. For instance, the short commentaries on Red Harvest each discuss the extent of the novel’s Marxist politics, the selections concerning The Maltese Falcon focus on the heroism or anti-heroism of Sam Spade, the passages on The Thin Man defend or attack the artistic merits of the novel. These short commentaries are followed by two, sometimes three, full-length essays which represent the best in Hammett criticism. While the present volume stands as the most comprehensive collection to date, various limitations prohibit inclusion of many worthy critical pieces, most notably David Glover’s “Sociology and the Thriller: The Case of Dashiell Hammett,” Philip Durham’s “The Black Mask School,” and two pieces by William Marling, “The Style and Ideology of The Maltese Falcon” and “The Hammett Succubus.” Bibliographical information about these and other works is included in the “Additional Readings” section at the end of the collection.
When Andre Gide praised Dashiell Hammett in the 1944 essay cited at the very beginning of this introduction, he offered the following apology: “If I speak of Hammett it is because I seldom hear his name mentioned” (186). Today, of course, no such apology is necessary. With three biographies, five critical studies, and more than fifty book chapters and journal articles devoted to his work in the last fifteen years, there is no longer a shortage of critical response to Dashiell Hammett. But this increase in attention has by no means secured him a place within the American canon. Despite all the recent gestures toward diversity and inclusiveness in literary studies, and despite the fact that more than ninety percent of his work remains in print, Hammett is, at best, a shadow man in the American academy. For instance, none of the major college anthologies—Norton, Heath, Macmillan, etc.—include a single selection by Hammett. However, as courses in genre fiction continue to increase in popularity on American campuses, the deceptively simple art of Dashiell Hammett should begin to reach a wider academic audience. And as this art is studied in greater detail, teachers may come to realize that The Maltese Falcon belongs not beside The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but The Great Gatsby, that The Dain Curse explores the same epistemological issues as The Crying of Lot 49, that The Glass Key predates by more than two decades the themes and techniques of the French nouveau roman. Whatever the outcome of his critical reputation, we can, with apologies to Raymond Chandler, know one thing for certain: the last sixty years have shown us that Dashiell Hammett is both a common writer and an unusual writer, the best in his genre, and a good enough writer for any genre, any time, any place.
WORKS CITED
A. Alvarez, “The Thin Man,” Spectator, 11 February 1966, pp. 169-170;
Herbert Asbury, Review of Red Harvest, Bookman (March 1929): 92;
David T. Bazelon, “Dashiell Hammett’s Private Eye: No Loyalty Beyond the Job,” Commentary, 7 (1949): 467-472;
Anthony Boucher, Review of The Big Knockover, New York Times Book Review, 26 June 1966, p. 22;
Walter Brooks, Review of Red Harvest, Outlook and Independent (13 February 1929): 274;
Brooks, Review of The Dain Curse, Outlook and Independent (31 July 1929): 552;
Brooks, Review of The Maltese Falcon, Outlook and Independent (26 February 1930): 350;
Mary Cantwell, “The Lady and the Pinkerton,” New York Times Book Review, 23 August 1981, p. 9;
Constance Casey, “Downhill All the Way,” Nation (17 December 1983): 639-641;
John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976);
Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1944): 53-59;
Will Cuppy, Review of The Dain Curse, New York Herald Tribune, 11 August 1929, p. 11;
Cuppy, Review of The Maltese Falcon, New York Herald Tribune, 26 April 1931, p. 13;
Dennis Dooley, Dashiell Hammett (New York: Ungar, 1984); Donald Douglas, “Not One Hoot For the Law,” New Republic (9 April 1930): 226;
Martha Duffy, Review of Pentimento by Lillian Hellman, Time (1 October 1973): 114;
Philip Durham, “The Black Mask School,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), pp. 51-79;
Robert I. Edenbaum, “The Poetics of the Private Eye: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett,” in Tough Guys of the Thirties, edited by David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), pp. 80-103;
Elliott, Emory, ed:, Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988);
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein & Day, 1966);
Carl Freedman and Christopher Kendrick. “Forms of Labor in Red Harvest,” PMLA, 106 (1991): 209-221;
Frederick Gardner, “The Return of the Continental Op,” Nation (31 October 1966): 454-456;
André Gide, “An Imaginary Interview,” translated by Malcolm Cowley, New Republic (7 February 1944): 184, 186;
Gide, The Journals of Andre Gide (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1987);
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. The Long Week-end: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 (London: Faber, 1941);
Paul Gray, “He Was His Own Best Whodunit” Time (20 July 1981): 73;
Sinda Gregory, Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985);
Leo Gurko, Heroes, Highbrows and the Popular Mind (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958);
Jasmine Yong Hall, “Jameson, Genre, and Gumshoes: The Maltese Falcon as Inverted Romance,” in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 109-119;
Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941);
David J. Herman, “Finding out about Gender in Hammett’s Detective Fiction: Generic Constraints or Transcendental Norms?” Genre, 24 (Spring 1991): 1-23;
Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life. (New York: Random House, 1983);
William Patrick Kenney, “The Dashiell Hammett Tradition and the Modern Detective Novel,” Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1964;
Paul F. Kress, “Justice, Proof, and Plausibility in Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett,” Occasional Review, 7 (Winter 1977): 119-143;
Richard Layman, Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981);
Richard S. Lochte, “Who’s Afraid of Nero Wolfe?: An Interview with Rex Stout,” The Armchair Detective, 3 (1970): 211-214;
Steven Marcus, Introduction to The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett (New York: Random House, 1974);
William Marling, Dashiell Hammett (Boston: Twayne, 1983); T. S. Matthews, “Mr. Hammett Goes Coasting,” The New Republic (24 January 1934): 316;
Somerset Maugham, “The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story,” in his The Vagrant Mood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 101-132;
Christopher Metress, “Dashiell Hammett and the Challenge of New Individualism: Rereading Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon,” Essays in Literature, 17 (1990): 242-260;
Leonard Michaels, “The Continental Op,” New York Times BookReview, 8 December 1974, pp. 1, 20, 22, 26;
H. H. Morris, “Dashiell Hammett in the Wasteland,” Midwest Quarterly, 19 (Winter 1978): 196-202;
Leonard Moss, “Hammett’s Heroic Operative,” New Republic (8
January 1966): 32-34;
A. E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Story (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958);
William Nolan, Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (Santa Barbara: McNally & Loftin, 1969);
Nolan, Hammett: A Life at the Edge (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983);
Nolan, “Setting the Record Straight on Dashiell Hammett: A Life,” The Armchair Detective, 17 (1984): 360-367;
Russell Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse (New York: Dial, 1970);
Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled American: The Lurid Years of the Paperbacks (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981);
Dorothy Parker, “Oh Look—Two Good Books!” New Yorker (25 April 1931): 83-84;
Robert B. Parker, “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald,” Dissertation, Boston University, 1971;
Paul Prescott, “The Original Thin Man,” Newsweek (17 October 1983): 86;
Peter Quennell, Review of The Thin Man, New Statesman (26 May 1934): 801;
Bruce Rae, Review of The Dain Curse, New York Times Book Review, 18 August 1929, p. 16;
Rae, Review of The Maltese Falcon, New York Times Book Review, 3 May 1931, p. 23;
Review of The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett, introduction by Steven Marcus, The Critic, 33 (March-April 1975): 74;
Review of Hammett: A Life at the Edge by William F. Nolan, Economist (17 September 1983): 97;
Roger Sale, “The Hammett Case,” in his On Not Being Good Enough (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 73-80;
Elizabeth Sanderson, “Ex-detective Hammett,” Bookman (January-February 1932): 516-518;
Richard Schickel, “Dirty Work,” Book Week (28 August 1966): 14-15;
Bernard Schopen, “From Puzzles to People: The Development of the American Detective Novel,” Studies in American Fiction, 7 (1979): 175-189;
Robert Schulman, “Dashiell Hammett’s Social Vision,” Centennial Review, 29 (Fall 1985): 400-419;
George Stade, “Mysteries of a Hardcase,” New York Times Review, 16 October 1983, pp. 1, 34-35;
Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences (New York: Schocken, 1973);
Symons, “The Daring and the Chatter,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 January 1984, p. 78;
George J. Thompson, “The Problem of Moral Vision in Dashiell Hammett’s Detective Novels,” The Armchair Detective, 6 (1972): 153-156;
Thompson, “Conclusion: The Problem of Moral Vision in Dashiell Hammett’s Detective Novels,” The Armchair Detective, 8(1974): 124-130;
Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” New Yorker (14 October 1944);
Peter Wolfe, Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980).
LITERARY TRADITION
The most common literary grouping with which Hammett is associated are the hard-boiled detective writers. The hard-boiled writers are typically divided into generations. Those innovators in Hammett’s generation are mostly forgotten, with the exception of Erle Stanley Gardner, remembered primarily because of the Perry Mason television show based on his fictional lawyer. Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield—those writers whose careers developed as Hammett’s did—are available now only in anthologies of Black Mask fiction. In the 1930s, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, 1939; Farewell My Lovely, 1940; and The Long Goodbye, 1954) inherited Hammett’s mantle as the dean of hard-boiled fiction. He, along with James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934; and Double Indemnity, 1936), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, 1935, a hard-boiled novel without a detective), and Mickey Spillane (I, The Jury, 1947) continued the tradition. Ross Macdonald with his detective Lew Archer (The Galton Case, 1959; The Goodbye Look, 1964; The Underground Man, 1971) and John D. Mac-Donald with his more than sixty novels featuring detective Travis McGee took hard-boiled fiction to the present generation. Robert B. Parker, with his series character Spenser, and James Ellroy (L. A. Confidential, 1990, and American Tabloid, 1995) are the most respected contemporary hard-boiled writers.
Hammett is also included in an overlapping, but larger grouping of tough-guy novelists, which includes Hemingway, early works by John O’Hara, and so-called noir writers, whose works portray a dark view of life. The French, particulary appreciate the flat objectivism of such fiction, which portrays characters alone in a pitiless world.
Hammett is firmly established as one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century, if only on the basis of his best-known work, The Maltese Falcon. That novel is generally acknowledged as a classic, not only of detective fiction, but of American literature. Upon publication, The Maltese Falcon was compared favorably to Hemingway’s novels, which at that time included The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Fare-well to Arms (1929). The comparison still holds. In his best novels, Hammett tells entertaining stories that resonate with meaning. His understanding of the criminal mind and his description of criminal behavior was not restricted to the era of Prohibition. Nor was his treatment of the struggle to find order in a chaotic world limited to the work of a private detective. The genius of Hammett’s novels is his ability to show a well-motivated person trying to make sense of the world without guidance from powers outside himself. He does not impose a morality on his characters. He allows them to find their own values. Hammett’s heroes are unequivocal individuals. They must find within themselves the resources to cope with whatever situation faces them. They may make mistakes; they may seem to be outlaws themselves; but they do the best they can. Hammett’s best novels portray the individual as memorably as any American writer ever has, and that is why he will be read as long as independence of the spirit is treasured.
CRITICISM
The articles that follow are important assessments of Hammett’s literary achievement that laid the foundation for the work of later critics. David Bazelon’s “Dashiell Hammett’s ’Private Eye’” was among the first academic considerations of Hammett’s work. John G. Cawelti’s article is excerpted from his book Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, an evaluation of the formulas employed by genre writers and an appreciation of those writers whose achievement was not limited by their subject matter.
David T. Bazelon, “Dashiell Hammett’s ‘Private Eye,’” in The Scene Before You: A New Approach to American Culture, edited by Chandler Brossard (New York & Toronto: Rinehart, 1955), pp. 180-190.
The figure of the rough and tough private detective—or the “private eye,” as we have come to call him with our circulating library knowingness—is one of the key creations of American stands, he looks out at us grimly from the moving-picture screen, his masterful gutter-voice echoes from a million radios: it is hard to remember when he was not with us. But he is only some twenty years old. His discoverer—his prophet—is Dashiell Hammett.
In the chief critical history of the detective story written by a fellow-believer—Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure (1941)— Dashiell Hammett is placed centrally in “the American Renaissance of the late twenties and early thirties.” Except for the fact that this “Renaissance” started a bit late and ended a bit soon, it coincides with a much larger cultural and social impulse that (except for the depression and the consequent preparation for war) was the most significant feature of the inter-war period. Culturally, this impulse would include, defined in the most general way, the productions of Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Farrell; the critical work of Edmund Wilson; the “brain trust” aspect of the New Deal; and the whole complex of expression connected with the diffusion of Marxist ideas and the growth of political consciousness.
But what began as a revolt of the individual sensibility against the whole ideological pattern allied with American participation in the First World War (the great “debunking”) ended in bureaucracy, Stalinism, proletarian literature, lots and lots of advertising-Hollywood-radio-popular-magazine jobs, and—another war.
The relation between Popular Frontism and popular culture is not accidental; the kind of mind that is able to construct commercial myths without believing in them is the same kind of mind that needs to construct one great myth in which it can believe, whether it is the myth of Abraham Lincoln-Franklin Roosevelt-Walt Whitman-John Henry, or the myth of the Socialist Fatherland, or some incongruous mixture of the two. And the tenacity with which the creator of popular culture holds to this myth—in the face of all the facts which precisely his “sophisticated” mind might be expected to understand—is the measure of the corruption that this one great “ideal” is supposed to cover. Nor is it accidental that these members of the “working class,” when threatened with the loss of their fantastically lucrative jobs, should be able to speak in all sincerity of being threatened with starvation because of their political convictions. For what holds this uneasy psychic structure together for the living individual is that American Nirvana—the Well-Paying Job. In America a good job is expected to be an adequate substitute for almost anything; in an industrial society, the job is the first and last necessity of life. And American society is not only more industrialized than any other, it also embodies fewer traditional elements that might contradict the industrial way of life.
The ascendancy of the job in the lives of Americans—just this is the chief concern of Dashiell Hammett’s art. When tuberculosis forced him to return to writing, it was his job experience that he drew upon; his knowledge of the life of detectives could fit easily into a literary form that had at least as much in common with a production plan as with art. As soon as he got a “better” job, he stopped writing. And, as we shall see, the Job determined the behavior of his fictional characters just a much as it has set the course of his own life.
The most important fact in Samuel Dashiell Hammett’s biography is that he worked off and on for eight years as an operative for the Pinkerton detective agency. Hammett claims that he was pretty good as a detective. (He was involved in several “big” cases, including those of Nicky Arnstein and “Fatty” Arbuckle.) We may take him at his word, since detective work is the only job—including his writing—at which he ever persevered.
Hammett seems to have come from a farm—his place of birth is specified only as St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and the date is May 25, 1894. But he received his slight education in Baltimore, leaving school—the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute—at the age of thirteen. His jobs, in more or less chronological order, were: newsboy, messenger boy, freight clerk, stevedore, railroad laborer, detective. During the First World War, he served in Europe as a sergeant in the Ambulance Corps and contracted tuberculosis. He spent two years in hospitals; and his disease finally forced him to abandon his career as a private investigator. Until he began to write in 1922, he worked as advertising manager for a small store in San Francisco.
Apart from one tubercular hero and one dipsomaniac (both of whom are also investigators), Hammett’s fictional characters are derived almost entirely from his own experience as a detective.
His first detective stories, built around the nameless figure of the “Continental Op,” were published in pulp magazines—Black Mask, Sunset, and the like. Hammett was one of a group of detective-story writers who had begun producing violent, realistic material in opposition to the refined puzzles of such old hands as S. S. Van Dine. These postwar stories signified a sharp turn from the genteel English tradition toward the creation of a “lean, dynamic, unsentimental” American style (although, as George Orwell has demonstrated, the English too were solving imaginary crimes in new ways and in new settings). Hammett took the lead in this development.
He published five novels between 1929 and 1933. Together with short stories written concurrently and earlier, these novels constitute almost the total body of his work. He has been phenomenally successful: his books are still being reprinted and most of his old stories have been dug up and republished. But he has written almost nothing in the last fifteen years. Since 1932 he has wanted to write a play, to begin with, and then go on to “straight” novels; he has said that he does not admire his detective stories. Hammett has been in Hollywood off and on since the early 30’s.
There is an obvious coincidence between the beginning of Hammett’s sojourn in Hollywood and the de facto end of his literary effort. Moreover, his job in the West Coast magic factories (at a reported fifteen hundred dollars a week) is not strictly a writing one; he is employed as a trouble-shooter, patching up scripts and expediting stories, often when the film is already before the cameras. Until 1938 Hammett seems to have been exclusively occupied with his joy-ride on the-Hollywood gravytrain, but in that year—it was the height of the Popular Front period—he was seized by “political consciousness.” Already forty-four, he had spent six of his best years in Hollywood instead of writing his play, and thus was more or less ready for religion.
Unlike many victims of the Popular Front, Hammett went on following the Communists—up hill and down dale: Popular Front—No Front—Second Front. We can only assume that his need is great. During the war he was president of the League of American Writers and as such occupied himself lining up talent behind war activities in general and the second front in particular. He also joined the army. At present he serves as head of the New York branch of the Civil Rights Congress, a Stalinist “front” organization; most recently his name turned up as a sponsor of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held in New York in March.
The core of Hammett’s art is his version of the masculine figure in American society. The Continental Op constitutes the basic pattern for this figure, which in the body of Hammett’s work undergoes a revealing development.
The older detectives of literature—exemplified most unequivocally by the figure of Sherlock Holmes—stood on a firm social and moral basis, and won their triumphs through the exercise of an English gentleman acting to preserve a moral way of life. The question of his motives never arises, simply because it is answered in advance: he is one of the great army of good men fighting, each in his own way, against evil. Who needs a “motive” for doing his duty? (Holmes’ love for his profession is never contaminated by any moral ambiguity: he is not fascinated by evil, but only by the intellectual problem of overcoming evil.) With Hammett, the moral and social base is gone; his detectives would only be amused, if not embarrassed, by any suggestion that they are “doing their duty”—they are merely doing.
The Op is primarily a job-holder: all the stories in which he appears begin with an assignment and end when he has completed it. To an extent, competence replaces moral stature as the criterion of an individual’s worth. The only persons who gain any respect from the Op are those who behave competently—and all such, criminal or otherwise, are accorded some respect. This attitude is applied to women as well as men. In The Dain Curse, the Op is attracted deeply only to the woman who has capacity and realism—and he fears her for the same reason. So Woman enters the Hammett picture as desirable not merely for her beauty, but also for her ability to live independently, capably—unmarried, in other words.
But the moral question is not disposed of so easily. Hammett’s masculine figures are continually running up against a certain basic situation in which their relation to evil must be defined. In Red Harvest, for instance, the detective doing his job is confronted with a condition of evil much bigger than himself. He cannot ignore it since his job is to deal with it. On the other hand, he cannot act morally in any full sense because his particular relation, as a paid agent, to crime and its attendant evils gives him no logical justification for overstepping the bounds of his “job.” Through some clever prompting by the Continental Op, the gangsters—whose rule is the evil in Red Harvest—destroy each other in their own ways. But it becomes a very bloody business, as the title suggests. And the Op’s lost alternative, of perhaps having resolved the situation—and performed his job— with less bloodshed, grows in poignancy. He begins to doubt his own motivation: perhaps the means by which a job is done matters as much as the actual accomplishment of the job.
One of the most suggestive aspects of the situation is that the Op’s client hinders rather than aids him in resolving the evil. For the client is the capitalist who opened the city to the gangsters in the first place, to break a strike. (This ambiguous relation to the client is characteristic in that it further isolates the detectives; suspicion is imbedded like a muscle in Hammett’s characters, and lying is the primary form of communication between them. In two of the novels, the murderer is an old friend of the detective.) If the Op were not simply employed—that is, if he were really concerned with combating evil—he would have to fight against his client directly, to get at the evil’s source. As it is, he confines attention to his “job,” which he carries out with an almost blood-thirsty determination that proceeds from an unwillingness to go beyond it. This relation to the job is perhaps typically American.
What is wrong with the character of the Op—this American—is that he almost never wrestles with personal motives of his own. The private eye has no private life. He simply wants to do his job well. One might think he was in it for the money—but his salary is never made known, is apparently not large, and he isn’t even tempted to steal. Each story contains at least one fabulously beautiful woman—but the Op goes marching on. If he is a philosopher of some peculiarly American acte gratuit, a connoisseur of crime and violence, we never know his thoughts. So, while this character often holds a strong primitive fascination because he represents an attempt at a realistic image of a human being who succeeds (survives not too painfully) in an environment of modern anxiety, he is, ultimately, too disinterested—too little involved—to be real.
It is interesting, in view of the importance of job doing to the detective, to remark the reasons for this lack of personal motivation. What the Op has as a substitute for motives is a more or less total projection of himself into the violent environment of his emotions to the world outside while dissociating them from his own purposeful, responsible self; he becomes a kind of sensation-seeker. So, despite all the Sturm und Drang of his life, it remains an essentially vicarious one, because the moral problem—the matter of individual responsibility or decision making in a situation where society has defaulted morally—is never even faced, much less resolved. The question of doing or not doing a job competently seems to have replaced the whole larger question of good and evil. The Op catches criminals because it is his job to do so, not because they are criminals. At the same time, it is still important that his job is to catch criminals; just any job will not do: the Op has the same relation to the experience of his job, its violence and excitement, the catharsis it affords, as has the ordinary consumer of mass culture to the detective stories and movies he bolts down with such regularity and in such abundance. His satisfactions require a rejection of moral responsibility—but this in itself requires that he be involved in a situation charged with moral significance—which exists for him solely that it may be rejected.
Hammett must have felt the lacks in the Op, for the detective figures that follow—Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key, and Nick Charles in The Thin Man—all represent attempts to give his character a more genuine human motivation. And this attempt to intensify the meaning of his detective was also, naturally, an effort on Hammett’s own part to express himself more deeply.
“Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague— want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander or client.” This statement of Hammett’s in his 1934 introduction to The Maltese Falcon could have applied equally to the Op, except that Spade is more fully realized.
Spade differs from the Op primarily in the fact that he has a more active sexual motive of his own. This sexual susceptibility serves to heighten, by contrast, his basic job-doing orientation. So when Spade, in conflict, chooses to do his job instead of indulging in romantic sex, he takes on more dramatic meaning than does the hero of the Op stories. That is, a new, definite motive has been admitted to the public world, and its relations to that world explored dramatically. But Spade always chooses to be faithful to his job—because this means being faithful to his own individuality, his masculine self. The point of the character is clear: to be manly is to love and distrust a woman at the same time. To one woman, Spade says, “You’re so beautiful you make me sick!”
The very center of Spade’s relation to women resides in a situation where the woman uses her sex, and the anachronistic mores attached to it, to fulfill a non-sexual purpose of her own, usually criminal. It is this situation in The Maltese Falcon, coming as the climax of Spade’s relation to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, that is the supreme scene of all Hammett’s fiction. Its essence is stated very simply by Spade as he answers Brigid’s—the woman’s eternal—“If you loved me you would….” “I don’t care who loves who,” he says. “I’m not going to play the sap for you.”
In his great struggle with Brigid, Spade must either deny or destroy himself. Because of the great distance between his self (summed up in a masculine code grounded in a job) and others whom he loves and does things for (women or clients), Spade is seldom able to act “normally” in significant situations. His choice is usually between being masochistic or sadistic—unless he simply withdraws his inner sentient self from the objective situation. It is his job that so alienates him from life—and yet it is his job also that gives him his real contact with life, his focus. If his emotions released their hold on his job, he would find himself adrift, without pattern or purpose. On the other hand, the job is obviously a form of—not a substitute for—living. This dissociation of the form of one’s life from the content of actual life gratifications is symbolized excellently by the fact that the Maltese Falcon—around which so much life has been expended and disrupted—turns out to be merely a lead bird of no intrinsic interest or value.
Ned Beaumont of The Glass Key is Hammett’s closest, most serious projection, and the author himself prefers The Glass Key to all his other books—probably because it was his chief attempt at a genuine novel.
Loyalty is the substitute for job in The Glass Key. And the factors of masculinity are a little more evenly distributed among the several characters than in Hammett’s more purely detective-story writing. Beaumont is not a professional sleuth, although he occupies himself with getting to the bottom of a murder. Furthermore, the book ends not in the completing of a job but with the hero and heroine planning marriage. We never know whether Beaumont’s motive in solving the murder is loyalty, job-doing, or love. However, because the motivation is more complex, though confused, it is superior to that in Hammett’s other work.
Beaumont is Hammett’s only weak hero. He gambles irrationally, gets nervous in a crisis, and seems to be tubercular. The issue of the masculine code is therefore presented in him more sharply and realistically. Unlike the Op, Beaumont is directly involved in evil since he is sidekick to a political racketeer. His relation to the woman involved is ignored over long stretches of the novel, and when Beaumont ends up with Janet Henry we are surprised because unprepared emotionally—although the development is logical in the abstract. It makes sense as consequence rather than as conscious purpose. All in all, The Glass Key is an expressive but very ambiguous novel. And this ambiguity reflects, I think, Hammett’s difficulty in consciously writing an unformularized novel—that is, one in which an analysis of motives is fundamental.
The ambiguity is also reflected in the style, which is almost completely behavioristic. “He put thoughtfulness on his face”—and one doesn’t know whether he is thoughtful or not. We are given various minute descriptions of the hero’s breathing process, the condition of his eyes, etc. Hammett employs the technique, I presume, as expertly as it can be. But it is a poor one to begin with, being too often a substitute for an analysis of consciousness—being, that is, the distortion of such an analysis. (There is only one story in which Hammett shows us the processes of thought in his characters—Ruffian’s Wife—and it is an embarrassing failure.) But just as consciousness is a weakness for Hammett the man (his conscious mind has been dominated by mere formulas—Stalinism, the detective story, etc.), so analysis of consciousness would appear the same for Hammett the artist. And, of course, he is not wrong. Consciousness is either accepted as an essential, growing factor in the structure of one’s life, or else it suffers continual distortion—not by accident, but inevitably.
Beaumont’s friend, Paul Madvig, is also his boss and his superior in strength and manliness—almost, indeed, a homosexual love-object. The factors that make Beaumont succeed where Madvig fails—in getting Janet Henry—are therefore extemely important: Beaumont has more awareness of the pretensions of higher society; he banks more on cunning than on pure power; he prefers silence to lying; he does not protect the girl’s father-murderer but fights him. Beginning with more weakness than Madvig, with defects in his male armor, he is eventually a more successful male because of his capacity to approach the objects of his desire indirectly—to work upon their relations in the real world rather than remaining fixed on the intrinsic qualitites that his desire attributes to them. This factor of cunning and restraint, of knowing when to talk and when to shut up, when to fight, when to run, appears, then, as the final fruit of Hammett’s brief but not unrewarding engagement in literature. The private investigator’s shrewdness emerges finally as more important—more reliable in a pinch—than his toughness (which in Ned Beaumont is reduced to the power to endure rather than the power to act aggressively).
Now such an indirect road to satisfaction must be supplemented by consciousness—by which I mean a comprehensive hypothesis as to the nature of real life, based on as accurate as possible an understanding of the environment—or else it is likely to become frustrating beyond endurance. We can assume this alliance between our deep desires and a carefully defined world on paper, intellectually; but can it be lived? Or, a less ambitious question, can it subserve the creation of an aesthetically unified novel?
In the case of Hammett, the answer apparently is no—not without great distortion. For Hammett, in The Glass Key, got only as far as the experience of the vital need of knowing (beyond the horizon of the job). He then collapsed—quite completely. Instead of following his literary problem where it was leading him, he preferred to follow his new-found Hollywoodism down whatever paths of pleasure it might take him. He postponed the attempt to resolve those problems with which life had presented him. But it was, it could be, only a postponement, and after a few years he came upon Stalinism—that fake consciousness, fake resolution, perfect opposite of Hollywoodism—and crossed the t’s of his lost art.
Nick Charles, the hero of The Thin Man, spends more time drinking than solving crimes. If he does his job at all, it is only because Nora, his wife, eggs him on for the sake of her own excitement. Nick is as indulgent of his wife’s whims as he is of the bottle’s contents. Ned Beaumont’s weakness, which was at least to some degree a product of moral consciousness, becomes in Nick Charles the weakness of mere self-indulgence, the weakness of deliberate unconsciousness; thus literal drunkenness becomes a symbol of that more fundamental drunkenness that submerges the individual in commercialized culture and formularized “progressive” politics. The Thin Man was very successful, as I have noted. It is a very amusing detective comedy. But whatever the book was publicly, to Hammett himself it must surely have been an avowal of defeat. He had to give up Ned Beaumont, because Ned Beaumont was almost a human being and The Glass Key was almost a novel. It is Nick Charles who survives best in the atmosphere in which Hammett has stifled his talent.
John G. Cawelti, “Dashiell Hammett,” in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 162-173.
In contrast to most hard-boiled detective writers who tend to employ the same detective and the same essential story over and over, Dashiell Hammett’s work is extremely various. Each of his novels presents a different kind of problem and pattern of action. His first two full-length books, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, feature an anonymous professional detective known as the Continental Op, who is also the central figure of most of Hammett’s short stories. Though they share the same detective, these two novels are nonetheless very different in character. Red Harvest is westernlike in its setting and in its violent and chaotic narrative of gang warfare. The Dain Curse resembles a gothic novel with its eerie atmosphere of family curses, drugs, strange religious cults, and twisted motives. Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon, develops a new detective, Sam Spade, who bears some resemblance to the Continental Op but is younger, wittier, and more of a ladies’ man than his predecessor. His story too is different, shaped like a classical detective story complete with complex mystery and hidden treasure. The Glass Key goes beyond the detective story altogether to become a study in political power and corruption. Finally, in The Thin Man, Hammett invests still another detective, the private investigator Nick Charles, newly married to an heiress and transformed into a socialite and successful businessman but still capable of a good bit of detection between parties. Despite this manifold inventiveness, a distinctive Hammett quality pervades all his works. Most critics have summarized this characteristic as the importation into the detective story of a new “realism.” Raymond Chandler, for example, argued that
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 handwrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.1
That there was a new quality in Hammett’s detective stories is certainly the case. Hammett, more than any other person, invented the hard-boiled detective. It is true that there were action-filled, tough-guy detective stories before Hammett came on the scene; in fact, the origins of the formula are lost in the obscurity of early twentieth-century western and action-detective pulps. Several hard-boiled writers emerged more or less simultaneously with Hammett in the pages of Black Mask Magazine during the twenties, but Hammett was the most important. It was he who licked the new story into shape, gave it much of its distinctive style and atmosphere, developed its urban setting, invented many of its most effective plot patterns, and, above all, articulated the hard-boiled hero, creating that special mixture of toughness and sentimentality, of cynical understatement and eloquence that would remain the stamp of the hard-boiled detective, even in his cruder avatars.
The claim of truth or accuracy about people who commit murders and the individuals who find them out is dubious on two counts. First, Hammett’s stories are not that much more realistic than many classical detective stories and, second, Hammett’s power as a writer does not lie in his greater fidelity to the realistic details of crime and punishment but in his capacity to embody a powerful vision of life in the hard-boiled detective formula.
Actually, Chandler’s insistence that Hammett is primarily a “realist in murder” must be seen in its context as a defense of the hard-boiled story against the classical genre of complex puzzles and clues. The main ground of Chandler’s defense is that the classical story lost contact with reality in its development of intriguing and mystifying puzzles solved by a gentlemanly amateur detective whom, as Chandler puts it, “the English police seem to endure … with their customary stoicism; but 1 shudder to think of what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him.”2 But is it really the case that a Hammett novel like The Maltese Falcon, which revolves around a mysterious age-old treasure, eccentric villains, and complex webs of intrigue, is more “realistic” than the detective novels of Dorothy Sayers with their ordinary settings, their relatively plausible motivations, and their rich texture of manners and local color? Such an assertion surely exemplifies that American literary tendency to identify the “real” with the violent, the sordid, and the brutal aspects of life. As Lionel Trilling points out in his analysis of this tendency in Theodore Dreiser and Vernon Parrington, such an identification can be just as arbitrary and limited a view of “reality” as the more philosophical or genteel perspectives it set out to attack.3 If one approaches the Hammett canon without accepting the premise that toughness and violence are supremely real, the fantastic nature of most of his stories becomes clear. The Continental Op creates and controls a revolution in a mysterious Balkan country in a story tougher in style but no more plausible in incident than the popular Graustarkian romances of the early twentieth century. A criminal genius named Pappadoupolous (but clearly a Hammett version of Doyle’s Professor Moriarty) brings an army of gangsters to San Francisco, pulls off a bank robbery that involves a pitched battle with the entire city police force, and then succeeds in killing off the great majority of his henchmen before he is finally brought to bay by the Op. The Op becomes involved in the tangled affairs of the Leggett family, which are so bizarre that they even involve a family curse. In one of the climactic moments of this story the Op confronts a maddened prophet who is about to sacrifice the heroine on the altar of his temple, a setting as gothic as anything out of The Mysteries of Udolpho. To say that such characters, actions, and settings are more realistic than the advertising agencies, country villages, or university quadrangles of Dorothy Sayers cannot withstand serious scrutiny.
Far from being a straightforward realist who rescued the detective story from sterile litterateurs and gave it back to the actual world, Hammett was an extremely literary writer. His work shows both an awareness of earlier literary models and a continual interest in such literary effects as irony and paradox. One of his earliest published works, “Memoirs of a Private Detective,” though based on Hammett’s own experiences as a Pinkerton operative, implies a perspective shaped as much by the elegant, fin-de-siecle cynicism of writers like Ambrose Bierce as by the direct perception of life. Though Hammett probably had more practical experiences as a detective than any other writer of mystery novels, his presentation of his own career takes the form of brief, delicately turned paradoxes that have a flavor something between The Devil’s Dictionary and an O. Henry story.
Wishing to get some information from members of the W.C.T.U. in an Oregon city, I introduced myself as the secretary of the Butte City Purity League. One of them read me a long discourse on the erotic effects of cigarettes upon young girls. Subsequent experiments proved this trip worthless.4
As he developed as a writer, Hammett lost some of the aroma of the decadence, not so much because his attention focused more directly on life, but because his literary models changed. Hammett’s early stories grew directly out of the pulp tradition and many of them, like Red Harvest, resemble westerns as much as they do detective stories. Even at this time Hammett occasionally experimented with the transformation of other traditional literary types into his won hard-boiled mode. This became a standard practice in his later novels. Thus, The Dain Curse makes use of a wide variety of gothic traditions—the family curse, the mysterious temple with its secret passages and ghosts, religious maniacs, the tragedy on the beetling cliffs—while The Maltese Falcon reflects the great tradition of stories of hidden treasure like “The Gold-Bug” and Treasure Island with Cairo and Gutman playing the role of Long John Silver. The Thin Man embodies a more contemporaneous literary tradition, the novel of high society and urban sophistication. The quality of its dialogue, setting, and general tone of breezy hauteur suggests that it was at least partly modeled on the novels and stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In part Hammett may have felt that his employment of the hardboiled detective in stories that owed so much to established literary traditions added respectability and dignity to the saga of the tough-guy hero in such a way as to make his adventures more acceptable to a cultivated, middle-class reading public. It would not be the first time that a pulp writer had tried to add tone to his creations by wrapping them in a literary toga. Hammett’s contemporary Max Brand (Frederick Faust) even went so far as to construct an entire western called Hired Guns using the plot and characters of the Iliad in cowboy costumes (a ten-year range war between two families that started in an argument over a young lady named Ellen). But this is only part of the story. Hammett’s use of these traditional literary materials is more often ironic than straightforward, satirical rather than serious. Hammett continually builds up conventional literary moods and then punctures them with the flat, rasping cynicism of the private eye who has seen it all before and knows it is phony. In the famous climax of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade unmasks Brigid O’Shaughnessy as the killer, accusing her of having used him to save her neck. Brigid, however, still hopes to capitalize on the romance that has grown up between the two:
“Yes, but—oh, sweetheart!—it wasn’t only that. I would have come back to you sooner or later. From the first instant I saw you 1 knew—
Spade said tenderly:” You angel! Well, if you get a good break you’ll be out of San Quentin in twenty years and you can come back to me then. “She took her cheek away from his, drawing her head far back to stare up without comprehension at him. He was pale. He said tenderly:” 1 hope to God they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. “He slid his hands up to caress her throat.5
Sam’s flat refusal—“I won’t play the sap for you”—shatters the world of romantic illusion that Brigid has woven about the attraction between herself and Sam and dissipates the haze of dashing adventure with which she has cloaked the sordid reality of her pursuit of the falcon. This sort of ironic contrast between romantic fantasies and real violence and ugliness permeates The Maltese Falcon as it does much of Hammett’s work. We see it in the way Cairo and Gutman’s exotic elegance has an underside of petty and sordid ruthlessness, or in the way Spade refuses to accept any of the noble motives that various characters seek to ascribe to him: for example, though Sam insists on tracking down the killer of his partner, Miles Archer, he makes it clear that he does so not out of affection or loyalty, but as a matter of good business:” When one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around—bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. “Perhaps, most powerfully of all, Hammett’s pervasively flat, hard-edged, and laconic vernacular style with its denial of the lyrical effects cultivated by vernacular stylists like Hemingway or, in a different way, by Hammett’s fellow hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler, runs against the breathless excitement of his stories. Even the most fantastic episodes retain the solid, cold, slightly tired tone in which Hammett’s detectives narrate their adventures. Everything is calmly weighed and measured:
It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick walk. It was small, not more than a quarter of a carat in weight, and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began searching the lawn as closely as I could without going at it on all fours.6
He came in, looking and acting as if I were St. Peter letting him into Heaven. I closed the door and led him through the lobby, down the main corridor. So far as we could see we had the joint to ourselves. And then we didn’t. Gabrielle Leggett came around a corner just ahead of us. She was barefooted. Her only clothing was a yellow silk nightgown that was splashed with dark stains. In both hands, held out in front of her as she walked, she carried a large dagger, almost a sword. It was red and wet. Her hands and bare arms were red and wet. There was a dab of blood on one of her cheeks. Her eyes were clear, bright, and calm. Her small forehead was smooth, her mouth and chin firmly set. She walked up to me, her untroubled gaze holding my probably troubled one, and said evenly, just as if she had expected to find me there, had come there to find me:” Take it. It is evidence. I killed him. “
I said, “Huh?”7
The stylistic combination that these passages exemplify—utterly fantastic incidents described in nearly emotionless, lucidly descriptive vernacular prose—has a surrealistic flavor, like those paintings by Dali where flaming giraffes and melting watches are rendered with the most carefully drawn “realistic” detail. This interweaving of flat realism and wild fantasy seems to grow out of Hammett’s basic sense of life: the vision of an irrational cosmos, in which all the rules, all the seeming solidity of matter, routine, and custom can be overturned in a moment, pervades his work from beginning to end. Even the early “Memoirs of a Private Detective” continually reflects this utterly paradoxical sense of the world:
A man who I was shadowing went out into the country for a walk one Sunday afternoon and lost his bearing completely. I had to direct him back to the city.
I was once falsely accused of perjury and had to perjure myself to escape arrest.
I knew a detective who once attempted to disguise himself thoroughly. The first policeman he met took him into custody.
I knew a man who once stole a Ferris-wheel.8
By the time he wrote The Maltese Falcon several years later, Hammett’s whimsical, fin-de-siecle cynicism had developed into a starker vision of cosmic treachery. Early in The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy the story of Flitcraft, a successful businessman in Tacoma who had suddenly disappeared, leaving behind his wife and children. When Sam finally met Flitcraft five years later in Spokane, he was again a successful businessman, had remarried, and settled down to a life identical in all respects to that he had left. Flitcraft gladly explains to Sam the reason for his strange behavior.
One day, walking down the street, he had been nearly killed by a falling beam. This made him realize that life was not fundamentally neat and orderly, but that men “lived only while blind chance spared them.” He felt a need to adjust to this new vision of life and so he went away. But in moving to Seattle, Flitcraft had gradually drifted into the same life pattern he had known before. Sam is obviously fascinated by this story. He tells Brigid that Flitcraft
wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more beams fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.9
In the context of the novel, the Flitcraft story is a kind of warning to Brigid that Sam has adjusted himself to a world that is likely to betray him at any time. As it turns out, Sam needs all his cynical equanimity, for Brigid conceals a devastating treachery behind a facade of beauty and romance. In the end it is only Sam’s total disillusionment that saves him from destruction.
Yet the moral of both stories—that of Flitcraft and of Sam Spade—is more than a little ambiguous. It is true that Flitcraft and Spade manage to survive the falling beam, but for what? Flitcraft goes back to the same respectable middle-class life that he had so suddenly awakened from; Spade returns to his shabby office, having sent the woman he loves off to prison. The price of survival would seem to be a terrible emptiness, a restriction of human possibilities, a cynical rejection of deeper emotion and commitment. Though some critics have suggested that the Flitcraft story is an existentialist parable, it implies something more ambiguous to me. The existentialist believes that recognizing the irrationality and absurdity of the universe can be the prelude to a new spiritual depth. Through such a realization man can pass beyond despair to a freely chosen moral responsibility that gives meaning to an otherwise ridiculous and empty existence. The Flitcraft parable seems to come out at the other end. Only a rejection of all emotional and moral ties can help man survive in a treacherous world.
Instead, the job is the source of value and meaning for Hammett’s hard-boiled hero. When the beautiful Russian Princess Zhukovski offers him money and her body not to turn her in, the Continental Op replies:
“We’ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we’ll throw them out. Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays me a fair salary, hut I could find other jobs that would pay more…. Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because 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. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know 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 tackling puzzles, my satisfaction out of catching crooks and solving riddles. It’s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I’m not going to blow that up.”10
Sam Spade exposes Brigid, the woman he thinks he loves, as a murderess because “when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. … It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him.” The Hammett hero has little of the quixotic knight-errantry or complex inner reluctance of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. He is capable of helping young ladies in trouble or of suppressing evidence so that relatively innocent persons will not be hurt, but his major dedication is to being a good detective and not letting either romantic illusions or the irrational forces of chance catch him off guard. As one of the girls he helps tells him, he is “a monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you’re in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him.”
Hammett’s first full-length novel, Red Harvest, presents the confrontation of the Hammett hero with a world of crazy, irrational violence that nearly catches him up in an orgy of destruction. Only his common sense, his brutal cynicism and disillusion, and his technical skills as a manhunter save him from the torrent of chaos unleashed in the town of Personville by his own investigations. Red Harvest is a prime example of that rhythm of exposure and temptation that was designated in the preceding chapter as one of the major characteristics of the hard-boiled formula. The Op is called to Personville—known as Poisonville to many—by a newspaper editor, Donald Willsson. Before the Op can even see his client, Willsson is murdered. The Op soon discovers that Willsson had sent for a detective in connection with a newspaper crusade he planned to launch against the rampant corruption in Personville. At the center of this corruption lies Willsson’s own father, the violent old mining baron Elihu Willsson. The older Willsson had run the town of Personville like a little kingdom of his own until challenged by the IWW. To break the power of organized labor, Willsson had brought in criminal-dominated gangs of strike-breakers. But, as a former labor leader tells the Op,
old Elihu didn’t know his Italian history. He won the strike, but he lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn’t get rid of them. He had given his city to them and he wasn’t strong enough to take it away from them.11
Finding his city dominated by such disreputable characters as “Whisper” Thaler, Pete the Finn, and Lew Yard, old Willsson gives his idealistic son the Morning Herald in the belief that a newspaper crusade against crime will help him to regain his old power. Willsson’s gangster allies, suspecting his intentions, have apparently murdered his son to stop the crusade. Old Elihu doesn’t show much interest in the connection between his son’s murder and Personville’s rampant corruption until, the next evening, a gangster named Yakima Shorty breaks into his home.
At this point, Willsson decides that his former gangster allies are determined to kill him as well. He commissions the Op to clean up Personville.
The Op proceeds to apply the principle of divide and conquer. With information provided by a woman named Dinah Brand who has been the mistress of several of the men involved in Personville’s gangs, the Op splits the various forces and brings them to a state of open war against each other. Explaining his technique to Dinah, the Op reveals the kind of stoical self-reliance that marks the Hammett hero:
“The closest I’ve got to an idea is to dig up any and all the dirty work I can that might implicate the others, and run it out. Maybe I’ll advertise—Crime Wanted-Male or Female. If they’re as crooked as I think they are I shouldn’t have a lot of trouble finding a job or two that I can hang on them.” …
“So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My God! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.”
“Plans are all right sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.”12
The Op’s stirring-up technique works beautifully at first. As he hears shooting break out all over the city, the Op purrs with satisfaction:
Off to the north some guns popped.
A group of three men passed me, shifty-eyed, walking pigeon-toed.
A little farther along, another man moved all the way over to the curb to give me plenty of room to pass. I didn’t know him and didn’t suppose he knew me.
A lone shot sounded not far away.
As I reached the hotel, a battered black touring car went down the street, hitting fifty at least, crammed to the curtains with men.
I grinned after it. Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn’t keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.13
If this represents the Op’s final attitude toward the Personville situation, only Hammett’s style would differentiate his hero from a bloodthirsty manhunter like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. But legitimating brutal aggression in the name of justice is not exactly Hammett’s intention. Instead, as the violence in Personville mounts, driven on by his own machinations, the Op himself begins to lose his grip, caught up in the bloodlust.
“This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives. There’s been what? A dozen and a half murders since I’ve been here…. I’ve arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were necessary. But this is the first time I’ve ever got the fever…. Play with murder enough and it gets you one of the two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.”14
Additional ironies compound the ambivalence of the Op’s position. It turns out that the killing of Donald Willsson, which initiated the slaughter, was committed by a bank clerk, jealous of Willsson’s attentions to Dinah Brand. Thus it had nothing to do with underworld intrigue. When Elihu Willsson realizes this, he attempts to call the Op off the case. Moreover, the gangsters soon discover that internecine warfare can only lead to ruin. All parties concerned would like to bury the hatchet. The Op arranges a “peace conference”: at old Willsson’s house where he plays so effectively on the fears and jealousies of the assembled gangsters that a new orgy of violence breaks out almost before the meeting is over. Unlike most of the hard-boiled writers, Hammett does not ignore or evade the vicious implications of his hero’s actions. The Op senses that he, too, is becoming a murderer. Speaking to Dinah Brand, who has become his ally, the Op bitterly explains the significance of what he did at the “peace conference.”
“I could have gone to [Elihu Willsson] this afternoon and showed him that I had them ruined. He’d have listened to reason. He’d have come over to my side, have given me the support I needed to swing the play legally. I could have done that. But it’s easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and, now that I’m feeling this way, more satisfying. I don’t know how I’m to come out with the agency. The Old Man will boil me in oil if he ever finds out what I’ve been doing. It’s this damned town. Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned me.”
“Look, I sat at Willsson’s table tonight and played him like you’d play trout, and got just as much fun out of it. I looked at Noonan and knew he hadn’t a chance in a thousand of living another day because of what I had done to him, and I laughed, and felt warm and happy inside. That’s not me. I’ve got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul, and after twenty years of messing around with crime I can look at any sort of a murder without seeing anything in it but my bread and butter, the day’s work. But this getting a rear out of planning deaths is not natural to me. It’s what this place has done to me.”15
The Op’s personal immersion in violence reaches its climax in a drunken party with Dinah Brand. Trying to escape the emotional tension between his hatred of Personville and his doubts about the bloodlust into which his personal crusade to clean up the city has fallen, the Op gets drunker and drunker. Finally, he asks Dinah for a drink of laudanum and falls into a nightmarish semiconsciousness in which he dreams that he is hunting through a strange city for a man he hates. When he finds the man, he is on the roof of a tall building. The ending of the dream symbolizes the Op’s own destruction in the violence he has sought.
His shoulder slid out of my fingers. My hand knocked his sombrero off, and closed on his head. It was a smooth hard round head no larger than a large egg. My fingers went all the way around it. Squeezing his head in one hand. I tried to bring the knife out of my pocket with the other—and realized that I had gone off the edge of the roof with him. We dropped giddily down toward the millions of upturned faces in the plaza, miles down.16
When the Op awakes in the morning, he finds that he is holding an ice pick in his right hand and that the pick’s “six-inch needle-sharp blade” is thrust into Dinah Brand’s breast. But, instead of being devastated by the realization that he has killed a woman for whom he had begun to feel a real comradeship and affection, the Op becomes once again the detached and cynical professional with a job to do.
I knelt beside the dead girl and used my handkerchief to wipe the pick handle clean of any prints my fingers had left on it. I did the same to glasses, bottles, doors, light buttons, and the pieces of furniture 1 touched or was likely to have touched.
Then I washed my hands, examined my clothes for blood, made sure I was leaving none of my property behind, and went to the front door. I opened it, wiped the inner knob, closed it behind me, wiped the outer knob, and went away.17
At this point in the story, Hammett shifts the narrative focus from the Op as hunter to the Op as hunted. Instead of manipulator of forces and puppet-master of violence, the Op himself becomes a wanted man as the town explodes into a final chaos of violence. Such a shift is necessary to resolve the moral ambiguities of the Op’s role without directly confronting the meaning of violence in such a way as to take Red Harvest out of the moral fantasy of heroic adventure and make it a mimetic action. To remain within the limitations of the hard-boiled formula, Hammett must somehow pull his hero out of the moral dilemma created by his immersion in violence, thus freeing him from the devastating awareness of personal guilt. He does this by a device that has been well prepared for in the course of the novel and, as we saw in a previous chapter, became one of the foundations of the hard-boiled detective formula: the violence and corruption are finally attributed to the city itself, to Poisonville. Through this means, the Op is exonerated, his casual role in so many murders being legitimated as an act of purification. Finally, the Op tracks down the one surviving gang leader, now mortally wounded. This gangster makes a dying confession to the murder of Dinah Brand. With the elimination of the underworld elite and a final clean-up by the National Guard, the Op is able to leave the devastated city. “Personville, under martial law, was developing into a sweet-smelling and thornless bed of roses.”18
Though he finally brings about the exoneration of his hero and the legitimation of his role as agent of destruction and purifying violence, Hammett ironically undercuts this resolution in several ways. All the murder and destruction accomplish very little. As the Op himself realizes, the eventual result of his terrible crusade to purify Poisonville is that the city will be handed back to Elihu Willsson, “all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again.” Purification through violence only prepares the way for another “red harvest.” Moreover, as the orgy of murder reaches its climax, even the Op loses control over the process and the National Guard has to be called in to stand watch over the shambles of a city. This final scene brings to mind the conclusion of Akira Kurosawa’s movie “Yojimbo,” a Japanese analogue of Red Harvest. In the film’s last scene, the samurai hero stands among the smoking ruins and scattered bodies of the town he has cleaned up. Turning to the old man who had originally begged him to break the power of the town’s rival gangs, he says with bitter irony, “Well, old man. You’ll have lots of peace and quiet now.” Though the Op does finally discover that Dinah Brand was murdered by the gangster Reno Starkey, his essential guilt can hardly be escaped. Not only did his determination to purify Poisonville by setting the rival gangs against each other establish the motive for Dinah’s murder, his own actions directly caused the killing. As Starkey tells the Op, he had come to Dinah’s house the night of the murder in order to trap “Whisper” Thaler, but was suspicious that the trap might be for himself:
“I’m leary that I’ve walked into something, knowing her. I think I’ll take hold of her and slap the truth out of her. I try it, and she grabs the pick and screams. When she squawks, I heard a man’s feet hitting the floor. The trap’s sprung. I think…. I don’t mean to be the only one that’s hurt. I twist the pick out of her hand and stick it in her. You gallop out, coked to the edges, charging at the whole world with both eyes shut. She tumbles into you. You go down, roll around till your hand hits the butt of the pick. Holding on to that, you go to sleep, peaceful as she is.”19
Though he may not literally have struck the blow, the Op’s hand held the weapon. Like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the conclusion of the Op’s case requires the destruction of a woman who has offered him a wider range of emotion and fulfillment than the bleak and rigid rituals of the job. And the final irony is that there is not much sense of heroic completion to the Op’s crusade. The final curtain of Red Harvest comes down to the tune of the Op’s boss roasting him for his illegal tactics in Personville: “I might just as well have saved the labor and sweat I had put into trying to make my reports harmless. They didn’t fool the Old Man. He gave me merry hell.”20
In Hammett’s hands what later became the hard-boiled story was a bitter and ironic parable of universal corruption and irrational violence. Red Harvest might be interpreted as a political parable—Personville being a symbol of the exploitative capitalistic society that has reached the point where its internal contradictions keep it in a state of perpetual corruption and chaos. Such a reading might fit the details of the novel and our knowledge of Hammett’s personal ideological commitments, but it seems basically irrelevant to Red Harvest. Instead, the book suggests that underneath his radicalism Hammett was a bleak and stoical pessimist with no more real faith in a revolutionary Utopia to come than in existing societies. Though Red Harvest distantly resembles other “proletarian” novels in which the clash of capital and labor in a gang-ridden company town leads to violence, there is no surge of optimistic hope for the future at the end. Proletarian novels usually ended with the conversion of the protagonist to a vision of the proletariat on the march, but Red Harvest leaves us with a bitter, fat, aging and tired detective who has survived the holocaust only because he is harder and tougher and doesn’t ask much out of life. The enemy that Hammett’s bitter fictions found beneath the decadent facade of twentieth-century capitalist society was the universe itself. More than any other hard-boiled writer, Hammett’s work reflects the vision of a godless naturalistic cosmos ruled by chance, violence, and death that dominates such major twentieth-century writers as Conrad, Crane, and Hemingway. Though his work is shaped by the formulaic imperatives of mystery, suspense, and the victorious protagonist, Hammett’s stories have a philosophical power and seriousness beyond most other writers of hard-boiled detective stories. Like the greater works of Conrad, Crane, and Hemingway, his stories are essentially about the discovery that the comforting pieties of the past—belief in a benevolent universe, in progress, in romantic love—are illusions and that man is alone in a meaningless universe.
NOTES
1. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Howard Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1946), p. 234.
2. Ibid., p. 229.
3. Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America,” in The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1953).
4. Quoted in Haycraft, p. 417.
5. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Perma Books, 1957), p. 173.
6. Hammett, The Dain Curse (New York: Perma Books, 1961), p. 3.
7. Ibid., p. 72.
8. Haycraft, pp. 417, 418, 419, 422.
9. Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, p. 51.
10. Hammett, The Big Knockover (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 28-29.
11. Hammett, Red Harvest (New York: Perma Books, 1956), pp. 6-7.
12. Red Harvest, p. 70.
13. Ibid., p. 96.
14. Ibid., p. 127.
15. Ibid., p. 130.
16. Ibid., p. 135.
17. Ibid., pp. 136-137.
18. Ibid., p. 179.
19. Ibid., p. 178.
20. Ibid., p. 179.
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