The Lost Detective (12 page)

As James McKenna, McParland began a terrifying acting job of nearly three years undercover. His approach (later popularized in Allan Pinkerton’s
The Mollie Maguires and The Detectives
) has inspired every book or movie since in which a daring agent impersonates a thug to enter a criminal gang—swaggering into their pub headquarters to buy drinks all around, picking a fight with the largest man at hand, charming the gang’s leader with a political bar song, and bragging of his out-of-town scrapes with police to gain the thugs’ confidence.

The nervous weeks and months spent among his rough cast of new friends caused McParland to drop weight and lose his hair; he finally covered his head with a blond wig. Although he had become a Molly officer, he attempted to quit his Pinkerton’s assignment after information he had sent his contact was leaked and led to reprisal killings, including the shooting death of the wife of a Molly. But he was persuaded to stay on undercover, even though this event had cast suspicion among the miners that he was a detective. Eventually McParland had to make his nighttime escape by sleigh ahead of an armed and vengeful gang. Although it put his life further in jeopardy, in 1877 he testified in nine of twenty-three trials; nine Mollies were executed based directly on his testimony, twenty hanged overall.

After the gang had been decimated, McParland tracked down Western train robbers for Pinkerton’s before taking charge of the Agency’s Denver offices, which he ran almost to the end of his life (although, in 1903 he did write to New York for permission to finally take Sundays off). His fame crested with the 1907 murder case against leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, a conspiracy prosecution McParland seemed to model, rightly or wrongly, on his experience with the Mollies. A secretary at the Denver office later called him, without admiration, “the Dean of Black Sleuthdom.”

Hammett’s famous Op story “Flypaper” contains a conversation at the Continental office about other celebrated arsenic cases, and the Old Man knowledgeably references various techniques he has seen. In fact, McParland had once solved a nationally known Colorado case—the arsenic poisoning of Mrs. Josephine Barnaby, a widow visiting Denver from Rhode
Island who died in April 1891 after drinking whiskey she had received as a gift in the mail. Unable to lay hands on the likely killer, Mrs. Barnaby’s physician and adviser, Thomas Thatcher Graves, who remained safely back east, McParland wrote the culprit a brilliantly fraudulent telegram inviting him to come west to testify and help put away someone else for his own crime. The killer packed at once and was indicted shortly after his arrival in Denver.
⁵

Hammett was not the first to use McParland for fiction. The plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel,
The Valley of Fear
(1915), hinges on the career of a former operative named Douglas. It is a hybrid work: a typical Victorian murder mystery set on an English country estate with its own drawbridge gives way to a second tale after the discovery of an ugly American weapon, a sawed-off shotgun traced to Pennsylvania. At one point Holmes hands Douglas a cigar after the former op has given Dr. Watson a manuscript he has written about his undercover days in the Pennsylvania coalfields, a travail that has haunted the rest of his life. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Holmes,” says ex-detective Douglas. “I never guessed that I should meet you. But before you are through with that [manuscript] you will say that I have brought you something fresh.” The honor is clearly a mutual one for the two sleuths, and the scene makes an odd acknowledgment of the “fresh” true story that Watson (Conan Doyle) borrowed to complete the book. (The latter part of the novel, Douglas’s savage tale of his undercover life among the American miners, contains neither Holmes nor Watson, who reappear only in the epilogue.)

The inspiration for the novel allegedly struck Conan Doyle when he met William Pinkerton on an Atlantic crossing, the
real-life detective entertaining the English author by the fireside with the story of how his agency’s super-operative James McParland had brought down the Molly Maguires. Leaning heavily on the earlier account published by Pinkerton’s father, Allan, Conan Doyle produced
The Valley of Fear
, an act of appropriation for which William Pinkerton never forgave him. “The entire second part of that book of Doyle’s was taken from a book written by my father,” he told a reporter. “When I read it I dug up an old copy of my father’s book and sent it to Sir Arthur with my compliments. I never received a reply.”
^‡

If McParland inspired the characters of both Douglas and the Old Man, then he is the rare real person whose likeness appears in both Hammett and Conan Doyle, a human bridge of sleuthing worlds from the genteel to the hard-boiled.

*
The title was spelled as
The Big Knock-over
in the original 1924 publication, but has been spelled throughout as it was in later reprints.

**
He spelled it “McParlan,” like generations of his family in Ireland, until sometime in the 1880s, when, perhaps tiring of people hearing the
d
in his name anyway, he decided to legally add it, a small change compared to how so many other immigrants simplified their family names to “Americanize” their identities.

†
The agency was famously stingy with praise for its employees, and McParland’s later internal file (from 1880) does not reflect any increased value for his heroism: While his “General deportment and appearance” were considered those of a “genteel Irishman,” and he could “readily adapt” to all classes of people, he was rated “not good” as a shadow and his “knowledge of criminals” was considered poor.

‡
Whenever William Pinkerton visited London, the tabloids hailed him as the American Sherlock Holmes; while Pinkerton knew the comparison was meant to be honorable, few things displeased him more. Good detecting, he repeated, was based on “common sense,” not brilliance.

The day is past when I’ll fight for the fun of it. But I’ve been in too many rumpuses to mind them much.

—“T
HE
W
HOSIS
K
ID
” (1925)

On February 9, 1924, a nurse sent by the U. S. Public Health Service visited the Crawford Apartments at 620 Eddy Street in San Francisco. Upstairs she found an underweight reddish-haired young man waiting for examination. He complained of weakness and of being easily tired, according to her report, and looked undernourished and lacking in muscle development. Sam Hammett admitted he was still not able to be a detective; he’d given up the part-time work almost exactly two years before that day’s appointment, when another specialist visited him in the Pinkerton offices downtown. But despite his complaints that were all too familiar, this latest interview was not all discouraging.
¹

Something distinguished today’s physical from so many others Hammett had endured since the army. For his profession the ex-detective reported he was working about four hours a
day as a short story writer for magazines, and that his wages depended upon work accepted. Even though his sales at this time can’t have been much more than fifty dollars per month,
²
the report lists him as self-employed as a “story-writer.” While admitting he was too sick for conventional work, Hammett was proud enough of his recent success to boast of it to a government nurse, even if it threatened the calculation of the pension that fed his family.

As sick and poor as he was, Hammett had a right to brag about his growing career writing for magazines. Despite his health, in 1923 he had published sixteen stories and essays in six separate magazines. Some of it was subpar work, highlighting an understandable hunger for steady sales, but there were also longer stories showing the writer he could become, with situations and themes he would revisit in his novels.

Following his secretarial course all the way through would have trained him to be a stenographer. He had completed enough training to learn what he needed of touch typing, and since his hospitalization the previous October, his disability had been restored to 50 percent. If he could keep at it, he now had skills for working faster and longer in what he hoped was his new profession.

In July 1923
The New Pearson’s
published a rare autobiographical sketch of his called “Holiday,” a short third-person story about a day in the life of a young lunger named Paul Hetherwick, who leaves his San Diego hospital with a day pass and visits Tijuana, where he gambles on horses, drinks with a veteran “subharlot” at one bar, and then with a younger red-headed woman whose attractiveness unnerves him in the tumbledown setting. At the end of the night, he heads home to
the hospital broke but well-oiled, pleased to be riding up top on the night coach. This unaffected little story remains the most successful writing Hammett published that was drawn directly from his own life: on his day away from the doctors, Paul smokes cigars, drinks himself nearly insensible, and rides home coughing into the chilly fog, defying his condition in a way that Hammett thought the disease respected. The following year, he would send his Continental Op to revisit the seedy strip of Tijuana saloons and their rugged hostesses in “The Golden Horseshoe.”

While a bit clunkier, “Laughing Masks” (which ran in
Action Stories
, November 1923) was his longest (thirteen thousand words) and most ambitious story yet, starring not his Op but a low-level gambler whose investigation of a startling scream draws him into trouble. The story incorporated San Francisco settings of the day with a hint of the writer’s own experiences, such as being hit over the head: “A white flame seared his eyeballs; the ground went soft and billowy under his feet, as if it were part of the fog … Phil sat up on the wet paving and felt his head. His fingers found a sore, swelling area running from above the left ear nearly to the crown.”
³

Evolving from detective to writer, or from Sam to Dash, Hammett had still signed letters to Jose as “Sam” or “S.D.H.” in the early twenties, but became “Dashiell Hammett” to his editors, a second self gradually eclipsing his legal identity. By 1924, the year he turned thirty, he was becoming the emerging voice of
The Black Mask
, which increasingly favored a violent realism over classic detection and was the most significant of the tier of pulp crime magazines Hammett was now mining.
The Black Mask
’s new editor, Phil Cody, hailed Hammett as “one of our most popular authors.”

His stories were getting longer and better. “The Tenth Clew,” his first real jewel of a story, came out in
The Black Mask
in January 1924, earning him his first cover the month before his boastful visit with the government nurse. “The Tenth Clew” presents an unusual challenge for the Op in that he has a misleading surplus of evidence. (As Hammett points out in “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” the fictional detective typically faces “a paucity of clues,” while a real sleuth has “altogether too many” to sort through.) Only by throwing away much of his hard-earned knowledge of the case can the Op get his man, and even so he ends up slugged and thrown overboard from a ferry, which leads to Hammett’s beautiful evocation of coming awake in the dark, foggy bay:

A light glimmered mistily off to my left, and then vanished. From out of the misty blanket, from every direction, in a dozen different keys, from near and far, fog horns sounded. I stopped swimming and floated on my back, trying to determine my whereabouts.

“Zigzags of Treachery” (also from early 1924) is almost too trickily plotted for Hammett’s new kind of realistic action-detective story—featuring an imposter with two wives, a blackmailer, an elaborately faked copy of a newspaper, a shooting death in a study, and a suppressed suicide note—but the Op’s energetic shadowing pulls you along on his gumshoe rounds while his wisecracking nicely masks the fancier sleuthing, “She didn’t buy anything, but she did a lot of thorough
looking, with me muddling along behind her, trying to act like a little fat guy on an errand for his wife.”

As he typed them in his kitchen, Hammett’s Op stories seemed to improve almost with each effort, except for two that were publicly rejected that summer by
The Black Mask
’s editors, who were raising their magazine’s standards and focusing its mission more on a certain kind of action-driven story, a standard inspired by Hammett’s own work. A column for the August 1924 issue, Our Own Short Story Course, was strangely devoted to their decision to slap the hand of their rising star, followed by the writer’s even stranger note of contrition: “The trouble is this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket,” Hammett wrote. “I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.”
⁴

Thanking his editors for “jolting me into wakefulness,” Hammett resolved, “There’s no telling how much good this will do me” and vowed to put the offending stories into a deep drawer. Presumably, it was Hammett’s supplicating answer that inspired the magazine to present the correspondence as a teaching course to warn off lazier submissions. But the low rate
Black Mask
’s editors were still paying their rising star should have been insult enough, without Hammett’s having to apologize for trying to make a living. Needing money more than he needed to feel pure, Hammett sold them a revision of one of the previously rejected tales, “Women, Politics & Murder,” for that fall, although it remained a subpar story. The other, an Op story retitled “Who Killed Bob Teal?” ran in the November
True Detective Stories
with the byline “Dashiell Hammett of the Continental Detective Agency.” The Hammett of three years later would not have wasted his time renegotiating a story sale at pennies per word. As he wrote Alfred A. Knopf’s editors in 1930, irked by someone’s red markings, “I am returning your invoice for excess corrections on
The Glass Key
… [Y]ou’ll see you’re very lucky I haven’t billed you for the trouble I was put to unediting it.”