The Lost Detective (19 page)

Nothing about
The Thin Man
seems especially dangerous, just as its protagonist is retired from the active line of fire himself. The comedic mystery was new when Hammett produced his final published novel, which opens with Nick waiting in a Fifty-Second Street speakeasy while Nora shops at Saks and Lord &
Taylor with the dog. The Charleses are too sophisticated for a classic suspense story.

“Listen, Mac, I haven’t been a detective for six years, since 1927.” He stared at me. “On the level,” I assured him, “a year after I got married, my wife’s father died and left her a lumber mill and a narrow-gauge railroad and some other things and I quit the Agency to look after them.”
¹³

As witty as its characters are,
The Thin Man
has an undercurrent of sadness beneath its partying façade. It is a novel whose larger setting is fame. Nick Charles, like Hammett, seems a bit adrift in New York society, the more so because people he meets admire him for things he did in a harder life years ago. He does love calling for the newspapers to be sent up to the couple’s hotel room, to see how reporters have written him up. Recovering from the last bleary months, typing in his cheap rooms at the Sutton, Hammett wrote about fancy hotels and wealthy women and being newly famous. Nora was Lillian, he told her, but then she was also the crazy young blonde and the “villainess,” too. He dedicated the book “To Lillian.”

The novel’s false start, the original sixty-five pages he wrote and abandoned in 1930, had been set in San Francisco, with a darker plot and more conventional detective and a tubercular writer as the killer. When Knopf delayed
The Glass Key
from fall to spring publication, Hammett put this new manuscript aside. By the time he returned to the book, he moved the action east and made it about an ex-detective on vacation with his heiress wife in New York when a crime comes to his attention that demands a few of the skills from his old days at
the Transcontinental Detective Agency in San Francisco. Nora insists he investigate; otherwise, he would stay retired.

Knopf published
The Thin Man
in January 1934, and it was quickly sold to MGM for twenty-one thousand dollars. The first chapters had actually made the magazine rounds without a bite for several months—turned down by one editor after another over the book’s apparent hard-drinking lewdness and amorality—before
Redbook
bought the rights for twenty-six thousand dollars and ran it in December 1933. The magazine exercised its right to expurgate, making one deleted exchange infamous and central to Knopf’s winking advertisement in the
Times
: “Twenty thousand people don’t buy a book within three weeks to read a five-word question.” The deleted “question on page 192” was Nora’s: “Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?”

Having an urbane pair of highballing sleuths who solve mysteries accompanied by their schnauzer wouldn’t have quite fit in the rugged, action-driven
Black Mask
, where Hammett built his name. Nick Charles in his new society life was about as much a detective anymore as Hammett himself.
The Glass Key
had been a gritty Depression-era book;
The Thin Man
was an escape story for hard times, a lighter kind of mystery that had not been tried before, told by a recognizably cynical narrator who only recently became one of the swells. It proved an enormous hit.
^‡

In February 1934, just after Knopf published
The Thin Man
, Hammett and Hellman headed south to spend four days in
Miami. While drinking one night with his friend the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, Hammett even managed to get himself arrested for tossing concrete rubble through a window of a Burdine’s department store. “I hate Burdine’s,” he explained to Johnson, who raised his bail.

From Miami, he and Hellman traveled forty miles down the Keys, to a fishing camp on Key Largo. “The place I am now is an island off the coast of Florida, with coconut trees and all sorts of things,” he wrote his daughters. “Yesterday I went fishing out in the Atlantic trying to catch a sailfish, which is about seven feet long … [A]ll I caught was a grouper (a fat ugly fish that looks something like a catfish) and a couple of barracuda, which are fish with great big teeth like dogs.” He and Hellman stayed a happy few weeks fishing, swimming, reading, and (despite sober declarations in his letters) almost certainly drinking. He told his daughters he was going to bed each night at ten and rising at six, was “as sunburned as a Zulu,” and “feeling better than I have felt for years.”
¹⁴

It may have been one of the happier times of his life, with a new book selling well and a movie adaptation opening soon; a Modern Library edition of
The Maltese Falcon
due in bookstores and his own comic strip that he scripted (at least at first),
Secret Agent X9
, running with great fanfare in Hearst papers since January. After some hard years, there was almost more money coming in than he could throw away. When he returned north that June, to New York, the
Thin Man
movie had opened, starring Myrna Loy and William Powell as Nick and Nora Charles, clinking glasses and hurling boozy repartee much like his own imagined banter with Hellman. In time he would come to despise his two creations, writing to Hellman that
“nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters,” but the first
Thin Man
film opened with Hammett’s surprised blessing. Riding the train from New York to Los Angeles, he sent off a cable to Lillian from Kansas City and signed it “Nicky.” The year he turned forty was as fine as any he had had.

By October 1934, his new franchise had brought him back to Hollywood, where, after the
Thin Man
movie had proved so surprisingly popular with audiences and critics, a sequel was expected. The executives at MGM, conceding that Hammett was crucial to the sensibility of its hit film, lured him back west at two thousand dollars per week while he finished a new screen story, but stipulating that he obey all “reasonable” studio regulations as he worked. Once ensconced again in Hollywood, he wrote a short mea culpa to Alfred Knopf, who was looking forward to seeing his contracted sixth novel:

Dear Alfred—

So I’m a bum—so what’s done of the book looks terrible—so I’m out here drowning my shame in MGM money for 10 weeks.

Abjectly,

Dash

The sixth novel would never come. Nick and Nora Charles still needed his attention.

*
They could have met or noticed each other briefly at other Hollywood gatherings before their fateful evening. While Hellman and Diane Johnson (
Dashiell Hammett: A Life
) put the introduction at Musso and Frank restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, Richard Layman, writing seventeen years later in the
Selected Letters
, defies his own 1983 biography (which defers to Hellman’s memoir) and puts it confidently at the Zanuck party. Chances are they at least glimpsed each other before this, since they traveled in the same circle of friends and Hammett knew Hellman’s husband.

**
The rights reverted to Hammett, who later sold the screenplay to Universal, where, once the main character was renamed with the initials T.N.T., it was reborn as
Mister Dynamite
in 1935. In an influential lawsuit later brought by Warner’s over ownership of the
Falcon
characters, Hammett prevailed.

†
While originally a schnauzer in the novel, Asta became a white terrier in the
Thin Man
films.

‡
The last of the six
Thin Man
films came out in 1947.

“Don’t you ever think you’d like to go back to detecting once in a while just for the fun of it?”

—N
ORA TO
N
ICK, IN
T
HE
T
HIN
M
AN

On April 1, 1935, Hammett was staying in a plush suite at his favorite Los Angeles hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, when he received a curious telegram he thought was an April Fool’s hoax. It came from a Beverly Hills socialite named Lillian Ehrman, who was giving a Hollywood party that night honoring the visiting writer Gertrude Stein. Despite a guest list that already included Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and a number of Hollywood producers, Stein especially wanted to meet Hammett, whom she admired as the master of the modern detective story.

Stein’s affection for detective novels was well known to friends. “I never try to guess who has done the crime,” she wrote, “… but I like somebody being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more.”
¹
Months into a well-publicized homecoming lecture tour of America,
Stein’s interest in crime had already led her to spend a rainy night touring Chicago in the back of a squad car, searching for homicides with her companion, Alice B. Toklas. She had been disappointed when the only killing her police guides could turn up nearby was “a family affair,” she noted, and so was “not interesting.”

Despite his first suspicions about the Ehrmans’ party, Hammett decided to attend. Gertrude Stein looked, according to one columnist that spring, like Queen Victoria, but with gray, mannish hair. She was listening to Charlie Chaplin hold forth on the use of rhythm in film before she turned to ask Hammett about something she found historically “puzzling.” In the nineteenth century, she argued, men wrote very inventively about all varieties of men, while female novelists largely “made the women be themselves seen splendidly or sadly or beautifully or despairingly.” She continued: “Now in the twentieth century it is the men who do it … [T]hey are always themselves as strong or weak or mysterious or passionate or drunk or controlled but always themselves as the women used to do in the nineteenth century. Now you yourself always do it now why is it.”
²

According to Stein, who remembered things in her own rhythms, Hammett agreed with her observation and told her the answer was that nineteenth-century men had been confident, and the women were not, but twentieth-century men “have no confidence and so they have to make themselves as you say more beautiful more intriguing more everything and they cannot make any other man because they have to hold on to themselves not having any confidence.”
³
In fact, having posed for the cover of his latest novel, Hammett fleshed out Stein’s point quite well.

That spring night, he told Stein he was working on a new novel about fathers and sons. But he would not finish it or the many others he announced—as if to force himself to focus on his growing struggle at the typewriter—to friends, drinking partners, family, and gossip columnists over the coming years. The book projects had titles such as “There Was a Young Man,” “My Brother Felix,” “Toward Z,” “The Valley Sheep Are Fatter,” “December 1,” “The Hunting Boy,” and “Tulip,” the last a twelve-thousand-word autobiographical fragment told by a tubercular old writer who is blocked.
⁴

He was often cheered by the hope of new projects, “the pre-writing period when all is grand and vast and majestic.”
⁵
But more and more in the 1930s, he retreated to Hollywood, which he knew would be crowded with many other distractions—all of them more pleasurable than sitting in a room trying to write novels. Writing movie dialogue at least still came easily to him, and paid quite well. “Yellow fellow that I am,” he wrote Alfred Knopf after one of his escapes west, in June 1935. “I turned tail before the difficulties the new book was presenting and scurried back here to comparative ease and safety.” But even if he had never written another line, what he had achieved with the stories and five published novels had unleashed a generation of crime writers, and with the third adaptation of
The Maltese Falcon
, John Huston’s faithful movie version starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade in 1941, would inspire the hard-edged, fatalistic cinema style the French named “film noir.” Scores of later radio and TV detectives were streetwise echoes of the Op Hammett had created during Prohibition.

One of those writers who followed him out of the pulps was the novelist Raymond Chandler, for whom Hammett had “made
the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues.” Chandler may have met him only once, at a photographed West Coast gathering of
Black Mask
contributors in January 1936, but in 1944, in the
Atlantic Monthly
, Chandler wrote the most famous and eloquent tribute to Hammett ever published, a passionate brief for the accomplishments of the realist crime school, “The Simple Art of Murder.”

Chandler saw Hammett as part of a larger triumph of the American language, a “revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction” that had its roots as far back as Walt Whitman. Hammett, though, had “applied it to the detective story, and this, because of its heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudogentility, was pretty hard to get moving.” Once he got it moving, however, Hammett moved murder out of the drawing room and into the alley and “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 hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” While accomplishing this, “he 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.”

Chandler concluded that while Hammett “did not wreck the formal detective story,” he showed that “the detective story can be important writing.
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. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it
could
be even better.”
⁶
Chandler set his Philip Marlowe novels all over Los Angeles and had written quite successfully for Hollywood by 1944, yet apparently he never encountered Hammett again
after their one recorded meeting. A casual reader of his
Atlantic
essay might be pardoned for assuming that the writer Chandler was lionizing was dead.