The Lost Detective (10 page)

That summer of 1922, when William Pinkerton sermonized the reporter, Sam Hammett had been making small steps toward assembling a career as an ex-detective. Since the birth of his daughter in October 1921, he had been sleeping alone, as advised due to his TB, in a Murphy bed in the hallway of their Eddy Street apartment, to keep safely apart from the baby. The family had been kept out of total poverty by a small, grudging loan made by his father. The fact that Hammett would even overrule his pride to ask such a favor of Richard Hammett shows how desperate things had become. While often kept home by his health, since February he had also been taking secretarial courses at the Munson School on Sutter Street. In addition to learning how to take quick notes, he was mastering touch typing, with which he turned out both the stories and poems he sent to magazines and the meticulous letters of outrage he wrote to the Veterans’ Bureau about changes to
his pension. He kept writing, when he could, at a table in the kitchen and sometimes in the big sunny reading room at the public library.

Reporting would eventually have presented some of the same physical challenges as detective work as he ran down stories.
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He needed work he could do at home—or, when at his worst, even flat on his back. Though bedridden much of each day, Hammett somehow continued to combine hustle with the understandably fatal view that TB would someday finish him off. “He would have done whatever he had to do to make a buck,” says David Fechheimer. “He was never a very good invalid.”
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He had to come up with a less physically taxing way of making money.

Without any surviving manuscripts before he was in his late twenties, it is hard to date exactly his decision to become a writer, let alone what kind of writer he wanted to be. He may not have respected the mystery story as it was then practiced, but he did not set out to reinvent it, either. His first attempts at writing actually were short, droll pieces, allegories, poems, character sketches, and what he called “legit” fiction, a form he never gave up the dream of returning to even after the success of his crime stories. His early efforts were more literary than “hard-boiled,” a recent term for skill under fire popularized by the ghastly war.

That spring of 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, he typed up a draft of his first short story, “The Barber and His Wife,” on
his new black Underwood at the kitchen table. The story features a brawny, well-dressed husband and his unsatisfied wife to whom he gives hardly a thought; a brother with recognizable lung trouble; and a cultured young man who takes the wife to the movies. It reads a bit like a lesser Sherwood Anderson story until a coolly observed scene of violence when the husband visits the young suitor’s office:

He stopped before Becker’s desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.

“Is this Mr. Becker?”

“Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”

“No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up.” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Stemler!”

His debut story was rejected before finally finding a home that fall, but in June or July of 1922, Hammett had his first sale of a sardonic parable of fewer than a hundred words called “The Parthian Shot,” bought for
The Smart Set
by its famous editor H. L. Mencken, the most celebrated graduate of the school Hammett had attended through eighth grade, Baltimore Polytechnic. It was impressive for anyone to receive a letter from the great Mencken, but especially thrilling if you had grown up living in Baltimore, where he was the godlike driving force at the
Sun
. This first sale did not go far toward paying the Hammetts’ bills, but it allowed the struggling family to do something comparatively lavish—to order in dinner to celebrate. The little dinner must have been a highlight of that summer in which Hammett’s mother died, on August 3, 1922.

His first crime story, “The Road Home,” was bought by a magazine of a lower rank,
The Black Mask
, which ran it that December of 1922. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had founded this magazine just two years earlier as one of several vehicles for funding their true love, the more rarefied
Smart Set.
(These fund-raising vehicles included an erotic sampler,
Saucy Stories
, and something called the
Parisienne.
) When
The Black Mask
debuted in 1920, crime and detection were only a part of the splashy mix that also featured adventure, romance, cowboys, mystery, and occult. Mencken, despite his love of street slang as a brilliant chronicler of the American language, did not publicize his connection to
The Black Mask
and kept his name off the masthead altogether, and he and Nathan sold the magazine after its first eight issues.

Likewise, Hammett kept his own name off his debut in
The Black Mask
, using the pseudonym Peter Collinson, and allegedly saving his real name for poetry.
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But if he saw publishing in
The Black Mask
as slumming it, he certainly got over this view with time, writing mostly for lower-paying crime magazines by the mid-twenties.

“The Road Home” had no tricks or acts of genius in its detection, but an American view of crime acquired by the writer as a Pinkerton: A lean “manhunter” named Hagedorn has spent two years tracking his subject to a jungly corner of
Burma. Hagedorn intends to bring back his prisoner to New York, but Barnes, who’s claimed a local gem bed worth a criminal fortune, offers Hagedorn a piece of his kingdom if he’ll return home with false proof of the crook’s death. Instead of the detective following clues to snare his man, Hammett begins mid-showdown on a river, Barnes shouting out his bribe offer and Hagedorn quietly considering the criminal’s invitation to take his share of the gems. Barnes escapes ashore, forcing the issue; Hagedorn hesitates, then follows him into the trees, saying, “Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewels of his.” It’s left unclear whether Hagedorn will do the right thing or even survive his trek into the jungle, a challenge to the pieties of the detective story. “The puzzle isn’t so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it,” Hammett would say.

“The Road Home” is flavored with words that its author, who had never been overseas, clearly dug out of the public library (
muggar
,
Mran-ma
,
jahaz
), but the premise derives from his firsthand knowledge of Pinkerton work: The situation resembles a less exotic story Hammett liked to tell of himself, of shadowing a suspicious jewel salesman named Finsterwald from Philadelphia to Savannah, only to have the thief finally approach him in a public park as looking vaguely “familiar” and offer him a share of his swindle. (Hammett turned him in.) This proposition was dramatically interesting, especially if the reader was left unsure of the detective’s answer, a daring step into the jungle for this kind of fiction.

A writer without Hammett’s work experience might have shied away from a two-year manhunt overseas as too bold a plot to be believed. But Hammett would have heard plenty such
tales around the detectives’ room: William R. Sayers’s two years spent chasing a man through Europe were hardly the toughest part of a career in which he also rode with the Pinkerton crew that ran down the Wild Bunch gang. (And William Pinkerton himself had worked months in London and Havana to bring back the brilliant English forger Austin Bidwell.)
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Hammett continued to cover all his bases as a struggling freelancer, sending out an ambitious range of apprentice work—poems, essays, sketches. It is probable, though, as the writer Vince Emery suggests, that his researches in the public library led him to create a series character, inspired both by his irritation with the hackneyed detective fiction he saw in the pulps and on the theory that stories with a known character would eventually command a better price.

His next crime story, “Arson Plus,” had a striding confidence that his other work lacked, from its opening sentence in which a detective rolls a cigar across the desk of a fat small-town sheriff to earn his cooperation. The story introduced a savvy little hero whose adventures allowed Hammett to exploit both his detecting experiences and growing knowledge of San Francisco. His narrator was unnamed but spoke in the style of the classic op reports, tracing his days and nights of methodical plugging—interviewing comely nieces and elderly house servants, matching alibis against hotel registers, visiting a dead man’s grocer, and even checking his final laundry ticket. Of all the available ways to write about detecting since Edgar Allan Poe’s Parisian investigator C. Auguste Dupin first appeared in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Hammett opted to do something that grew out of what he had actually been trained for: creating elevated stories from the characters and
situations he knew well, instead of adding to the fiction club of gentleman puzzlers or quick-draw artists. This approach would eventually set crime writing on its head.

* * *

Hammett’s nameless Op first appeared in October 1923, when
The Black Mask
published “Arson Plus” (again by “Peter Collinson”). Its narrator resembles many of the operatives whose dispatches are collected in the Pinkerton archives at the Library of Congress, only unlike most of the standard op reports Hammett knew well, “Arson Plus” begins to make literature out of the tedium of investigation:

Having ruined our shoe-shines, McClump and I got back in our machine and swung off in a circle around the place, calling at all the houses within a mile radius, and getting little besides jolts for our trouble.

A skinny near-convalescent writing about his little man of action, Hammett had created a streetwise yet incorruptible hero who is devoted to the job at hand, however unsavory the client, a code Hammett had absorbed from Pinkerton’s:

“Next morning, at the address McClump had given me—a rather elaborate apartment building on California Street—I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress.” In ordinary circumstances, Mrs. Trowbridge’s appearance would have made it well worth the wait, explains the Op, “But I was a busy, middle-aged detective, who was fuming over having his time wasted; and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty. However, I smothered my grouch, apologized for
disturbing her at such an early hour, and got down to business.” The detective must smother all kinds of distracting feelings to keep his eye on the job.

These lines mark one of many times Hammett’s Op declines to name himself—though he does describe himself as portly, around forty, and five foot six—while slogging his way through twenty-six stories, two linked novellas, and two full-length novels.

In May of that year,
The Black Mask
had published the first story about a “tough guy” private investigator, Terry Mack. Chronologically, Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” ran weeks ahead of Hammett’s debut of his Continental Op that fall. But beyond being set inside a detective’s office, the two stories had very little in common. Daly’s “Three Gun” Terry character was the flashy, sharpshooting opposite of the Op, while another of Daly’s heroes, Race Williams, debuted in the June 1 issue in a timely story about an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, “Knights of the Open Palm.” It was just the kind of thing Hammett was trying to correct in detective fiction, unrealistic action delivered in an unconvincing vernacular: “I’m what you might call a middleman—just a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks. Oh, there ain’t no doubt that both the cops and the crooks take me for a gun, but I ain’t—not rightly speaking.”
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By comparison, Hammett’s Op had wrung some handy knowledge from his rough life of sleuthing: Abductions rarely occur at night or in cities, and those that do more likely are staged by the victim for ransom; no one can strangle you from the front if your arms are free to reach up and snap his pinkies; when a “Chinese” starts shooting, he always empties his gun;
you can shadow anyone pretty naturally if you don’t meet the subject’s eye; it’s best to stand aside of the door during “unannounced” visits in case bullets burst through it; even a light tap to the head with a metal revolver has a surprisingly concussive effect; you can often draw good information or even a confession “out of a feeble nature” by putting your face close to the subject’s and talking loudly; people talk more freely in a room with a closed door; and any hop head who tells you his name is “John Ryan” is not to be trusted (“it’s the John Smith of yeggdom”).

Hammett’s Op is suspicious of brilliance and puts his faith in doing the basic parts of his job well and hoping for occasional “flashes of intelligence.” Though he is hard or congenial as the situation requires, this “little block of a man” sometimes surprises himself with what he’ll do for the job, such as shooting a woman criminal in the leg who had gambled that gallantry would leave him unable to fire as she fled. (“I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.”) If he goes home, he is often interrupted while changing into his pajamas or is jangled awake by a call from his chilly master at the agency, known only as the Old Man. The Op knows his crooks, and strikes the balance of criminal expertise, anonymity, and loyalty to the client that Allan Pinkerton had prescribed.

The idea that he was modeled on a particular Pinkerton drawn from life comes mainly from Hammett, as relayed by one half of the writing team of Ellery Queen, Frederic Dannay, who later edited a number of Hammett paperback collections. Sometime in the late thirties, Dannay had dined with Hammett at Lüchow’s, the cavernous, celebrated German restaurant on Fourteenth Street in New York City known for its house band
and beer garden specialties.
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After talking about many subjects and sampling “various liquids ranging from pale yellow to dark brown,” Dannay remembered, the “amber fluids” at last loosened Hammett’s tongue and he gave up “the lowdown” about his character. The Op was based “on a real-life person—James (Jimmy) Wright, Assistant Superintendent, in the good old days, of Pinkerton’s Baltimore agency, under whom Dashiell Hammett actually worked.”
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