The Lost Detective (6 page)

I remember sitting on a bed next to him in the first months we met, listening to him tell me about his Pinkerton days when an officer of Anaconda Copper Company had offered him five thousand dollars to kill Frank Little, the labor union organizer. I didn’t know Hammett well enough to hear the anger under the calm voice, the bitterness under the laughter, so I said, “He couldn’t have made such an offer unless you had been strike-breaking for Pinkerton.”

“That’s about right,” he said.

The idea that he had been a strikebreaker seemed to offend Hellman at least as much as the deadly import of the bribe, but “through the years,” she wrote, “he was to repeat that bribe offer so many times that I came to believe, knowing him now, that it was a kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would murder.”
⁴
Not only was the story true, she decided, it had stamped him permanently. “I think I can date Hammett’s belief that he was living in a corrupt society from Little’s murder.”
⁵

Although he had seen plenty of corruption, chances are Hammett never laid eyes on Frank Little, living or dead, beyond
the autopsy picture and death mask that ran in newspapers that fatal week.
^*
On the face of it, a relatively recent hire out of the Baltimore office would seem an unlikely choice for the assassination of a Wobbly leader; Pinkerton’s secret operatives in Butte were assigned primarily out of its Denver and Spokane offices; and the money (five thousand dollars) seems suspiciously high, even if Hammett was offered the job solo. Little had already survived one attempted lynching, and Anaconda had its pick of dozens of more qualified hired thugs to kill him that summer. The only person who offered the job to Hammett seems to have been Hammett himself, in a bar tale that showed the hallmarks of his writing craft—inserting himself just far enough to be plausible, not claiming he’d been a full party to the killing but elegantly cloaking his story in its atmosphere.

But Hammett didn’t need to see that particular conflict that summer to experience brutality and corruption as a Pinkerton. He’d already served as a paid combatant in other labor skirmishes, learning from these that even when a client was despicable, the detective’s first loyalty was to the job. Retelling the Little incident doubtless evoked some ugly strikebreaking stints of his own.

While assembling material for her memoir,
Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers
(2001), Jo Hammett received several boxes of old family photos, including an uncaptioned group portrait of her father among a tough work crew standing by a railroad siding, one of the men wearing a wide-brimmed hat and brandishing a switch.
⁶
Her guess is that it is probably a
group of Pinkerton strikebreakers, possibly taken in the late teens, hired to go to work on someone with these long, cut switches, or “saps,” a small glimpse of the rough tasks the agency dispatched Hammett to perform in these early years.

There is no evidence beyond his own word that he was in Butte in 1917, but
it is possible he visited in 1920, when he worked for several months out of the Spokane office and Pinkerton’s was employed in yet another battle between the miners and the Anaconda Company.
^**
Later living in one of America’s most beautiful cities, he would place his first novel in a grimy violent boomtown very much like Butte, “an ugly city … set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.”
⁷
In
Red Harvest
the detective burns down much of the town to free it, using hell-raising techniques cribbed from agitators like Frank Little.

* * *

During his first two years as a Pinkerton, Hammett traveled extensively around the South and Midwest, but was still living with his parents and brother and sister in Baltimore when, on April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. As a young, unattached man over twenty-one years old, Sam Hammett qualified for the first round of national
draft registrations on June 5. The registrar inspecting him in Baltimore may have looked skeptically at the young man’s willowy build (noting his “slender” frame on his draft card), but was reassured by his hardy-sounding work experience as a Maryland “private detective” for Pinkerton’s.
^†
Given his quarrelsome relationship with his father, it is surprising that Hammett had not long since left home, unless a combination of economic necessity and basic loafishness kept him home. But on June 24, 1918, fourteen months after America had joined the war, he took his leave from Pinkerton’s and entered the army.

He was twenty-four years old when he reported as a private to Camp Meade, a newly established cantonment outside Baltimore. He was less than twenty miles from his family but leaving home at last. Although there were just five months before the Armistice, Hammett would be as dramatically affected by his months in the military as would Ernest Hemingway, who that spring had suspended his own apprenticeship as a reporter for the
Kansas City Star
to join the Red Cross ambulance volunteers in Italy. Each man would spend much of his war in a hospital bed. “I contributed practically nothing to the Allied victory,” Hammett assured a reporter. “I came out of my uniform with tuberculosis.”

*
These are today on file at the beautiful Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, a bright converted fire station building on West Quartz Street, along the uphill route of Little’s funeral procession.

**
The strongest argument I’ve come across is the one advanced in a 1982 paper by the Moscow, Idaho, bookstore owner Robert Greene: A detective named Hammett takes part in the death of a suspect in Upton Sinclair’s 1920 protest novel,
100%: The Story of a Patriot
. But even if the two men had met in the teens and Sinclair heard it from Hammett’s own lips, it would not prove that he took part in the crime or that he was even in Butte that summer. Still, Greene’s view of Hammett as a writer seeking absolution for his crimes is an interesting one also taken up by the crime writer James Ellroy.

†
Hammett’s draft registration card is from June 5, 1917, when he was unattached and well of age at twenty-three, and was not a member of an essential occupation excused from the first round of registration. Unlike the later draft that used the mails, most men registered for the system in person, on designated registration days, and then entered the services after their number was later posted. Hammett’s draft card is one of two legal documents where he names Pinkerton’s as his employer.

Camp Meade was only months old, one of sixteen army cantonments thrown up in a patriotic frenzy of digging, sawing, and hammering in the weeks after Wilson’s appeal to Congress that spring. It still smelled of fresh wood when the first new draftees began reporting even before many outbuildings were finished, and by October 1917, some twenty-three thousand men filled the camp, where more than a hundred thousand soldiers would be trained by war’s end.

Hammett arrived at Camp Meade as a private. On July 12, following basic training, he was assigned to Motor Ambulance Corps Number Forty-Nine and began helping to shuttle sick and wounded soldiers, many returned from Europe, to the hospital. Out of this job would come two formative tragedies.

The big boxy Fords and GMs outfitted for the army’s new ambulance corps were an improvement over the horse-drawn wagons they were replacing, but they were also clumsy for driving, even in camp, far from the European front; their high wheels were good for crossing streams in a hurry but left the vehicles tippy when stacked full with patients. Volunteers operating the motor ambulances close to the European fighting
employed some tricky maneuvering; to get around the challenges of the Ford’s gravity-fed gasoline system, which made it prone to stall on steep grades, some drove uphill in reverse. The brakes were also not designed for mountains, according to an army historian: “Drivers kept an eye peeled for strategically placed trees that could stop them if necessary. Sometimes patients had unforgettable rides.”
¹

Sometime that summer or early fall, Hammett would remember, he was driving an ambulance filled with wounded soldiers when it flipped over, with a terrible result: the men were thrown out onto the roadside. “He hit a rock or something and dumped the patients and he never touched a car after that,” remembered his daughter Mary, born well after the war. “He refused to drive, absolutely refused to drive.” As hazardous as these ambulance coaches were to maneuver, however, nine decades later no record can be found of Hammett’s traumatic accident at Meade. But the fact remains that, after the war, he almost never got behind the wheel if he could avoid it, citing this painful memory. Whatever the reason, something spooked him about driving, and in later years the wartime incident may also have served as a more manly sounding explanation when his illness left him too weak to safely operate a car.

Of the second episode at Meade there can be no doubt, since it was part of a much wider calamity that came on the heels of the world war: a deadly influenza in 1918–19 that killed many times more human beings than the Great War itself, claiming between twenty and forty million victims worldwide. It infected more than a quarter of all Americans, of whom some 675,000 died—a virus unprecedented for its deadly range,
striking down people in their prime more than just the very young and old. A feverish young boy could go to sleep comforted by his mother, only to wake hours later to find she had been taken by the flu instead. It was a nightmarish, wracking death, from which victims often died after turning dark blue from choking on what a doctor called “a blood-tinged froth.”

The war and its network of army camps, featuring large clusters of men and their frequent deployments, sped the contagion along. “One in every sixty-seven soldiers in the army died of influenza and its complications,” the historian John M. Barry has pointed out, “nearly all of them in a ten-week period beginning in mid-September.”
²
First appearing in the Midwest that spring, the virus infected men at Camp Funston in Kansas before traveling to the port city of Brest, France, loosed in a country where two million American servicemen were stationed. A more virulent strain returned to the States that fall. In early September, sick sailors aboard the
Harold Walker
left Boston for the Philadelphia Navy Yard, with others sailing on to deliver the virus to New Orleans and Mexico. By October 4, almost five thousand men were sick at Illinois’s Camp Grant, with four hundred and five hundred deaths daily; while at Camp Devens, outside Boston, fifteen hundred soldiers were reported ill on a single day. After seeing dozens of soldiers die, an army physician laid out the flu’s awful stages for a colleague:

Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face until it is difficult to distinguish the colored men from the white.
³

In mid-September, the influenza had turned up at Camps Dix and Meade, the two cantonments nearest the wildly infected city of Philadelphia. Working in the ambulances, Hammett of course would have been regularly exposed to the virus as he delivered feverish soldiers to the infirmary. On October 6, three weeks after the virus reached camp, he fell ill himself, reporting a high temperature and chronic cough. (His medical report lists pneumonia, situated in his lower right lung.) He was shortly transferred from a field to a base hospital, where he spent eight days unable even to sit up in bed. After twenty days, he was returned to active service, weak and emaciated, his rib cage wracked and lungs frayed; but unlike the scores of soldiers carried from infirmaries to morgues, he was unmistakably alive. He had survived what was then his closest brush with death, yet had little idea the full extent to which it had broken down his body.
⁴

“I have always had good health until I contracted influenza,” he would tell an army clinician. By February 1919, he was back in the camp hospital with “acute bronchitis,” complaining of a lasting cough and morning soreness in his throat. The symptoms were treated straightforwardly as lingering inflammation, an aftereffect, and Hammett returned to duty after four days in the hospital. By late April, he had made sergeant. In the group photo taken that month with the men of his ambulance corps he looks almost healthful, his face not especially gaunt beneath the rim of his doughboy hat. But he was back in the hospital on May 29, his breathing labored and leaving him dizzy. He had night sweats.
⁵

This time doctors pronounced his condition untreatable: he had tuberculosis, they said, caught during his army service. He
was judged 25 percent disabled, and a medical discharge was recommended that same day.

In fact, though he likely contracted it in the army, Hammett had possibly been exposed to the disease first as a child. His mother’s cough was a familiar sound around the house, leading some to speculate that his wartime bout of influenza had possibly weakened him enough to waken a long dormant strain of TB. “Primary” TB, however, as opposed to “reactivation” TB, starts in the lower lobes of the lungs, as Hammett’s seemed to, attacking his already weakened respiratory system.
⁶
Certainly the army believed he had contracted it in camp. On May 30, 1919, he left the army as a sergeant with an honorable discharge and a small pension, a twenty-five-year-old former shadow man now too short-winded to climb a set of stairs. Hammett came home a disabled veteran of a war he had never seen, whose fighting he had heard about from wounded men in his ambulance. He was back with his parents after less than a year, his health wrecked, but hoping somehow to return to work as a detective.

At the time of his diagnosis, tuberculosis was no longer the romantic-sounding “consumption” that had taken John Keats, the affliction that sent patients for enforced rest in the country, where they often died out of sight. Ever since 1882, when Robert Koch spotted “beautifully blue”
tubercle bacilli
among the brown animal tissue under his microscope, it had been known as an often deadly communicable disease of the poor, transmitted among passengers in steerage, tenants packed in overcrowded slums, or, in Hammett’s case, from cot to cot in a teeming army hospital. It was no less deadly a disease than before Koch’s discovery, but now carried a more shameful
stigma because of its communicability. It was the mark of the patient’s marginality, and even if a person’s health seemed to return, there was always the specter of a hacking end in which the body withered and the lungs filled with blood.