Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (79 page)

Crime fiction magazines and dime novels grew steadily in popularity through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. By the 1920s, there were more than 20,000 magazines in circulation in the United States. Pulp titles like
The Nick Carter Weekly, Detective Stories, Girl’s Detective, Doctor Death, Argosy
, and
Police Gazette
dominated newsstands during Prohibition, giving rise to a class of working writers who earned about a penny a word, some using several pseudonyms so they could publish more than a million words per year. Hammett wanted to be a part of it.

In late 1923 he arrived at
Black Mask
magazine, which printed “Stories of Detection, Mystery, Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism.” Earlier that year, the magazine had published a story by Carroll John Daly called “Three Gun Terry,” considered the first authentic “hard-boiled” detective story. Yet although he didn’t invent the style, Hammett quickly dominated it. Over the next seven years he wrote more than 50 stories for
Black Mask
, becoming its premier writer, and helping it become
the
premier magazine of hard-boiled fiction. Hammett’s influence was such that other writers accused the magazine’s editors of forcing them to copy him.

DASHIELL HAMMETT, P.I.

So how was Hammett able to bring such an impressive realism to his characters? Experience. Before becoming a writer, he had been a detective—he was an operative with the Pinkerton Agency from 1915 to 1922. Hammett had had many jobs before that: newsboy, freight clerk, laborer, and rail yard messenger, but it was all just to help support his parents and his two brothers.

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SMART KID

Born in 1894, Samuel Dashiell Hammett grew up between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He learned a love of reading from his mother, who was a nurse, and street smarts from his father, who was a farmer, gambler, occasional politician, and notorious womanizer. Although he never finished high school, young Hammett was a voracious reader. And after spending time on the road with his father, he was also streetwise. So when Hammett arrived at the Pinkerton office in Baltimore to take a clerk job, his bosses soon recognized that this 21-year-old kid would make a great field operative. They placed him under the wing of one of their best private eyes, James Wright, who taught Hammett the ins and outs of “tailing a perp and bringing him in.” Wright was the inspiration for the Continental Op, the hero of Hammett’s early stories.

Little is known about Hammett’s days as a Pinkerton operative. Most biographers agree that he embellished his tales to help create a mystique about himself. In his book
Shadow Man
, author Richard Layman says that Hammett “in a half self-serving, half playful manner, characteristically amplified his stories, rewriting, revising, even inventing accounts of his experiences.” What
is
known, however, is that Hammett was a master at tailing suspects. According to one colleague, Dash (as he was known to friends) once followed a man through six small towns without ever being detected. He was quickly rising through the agency ranks, primed to become one of Pinkerton’s best. Everything changed when he chose to fight in World War I.

A LIFELONG CONTRACT

Hammett enlisted in the army in 1919 and served as a sergeant in the ambulance corps, but was discharged a year later when he contracted first tuberculosis and then the Spanish flu. The diseases would plague him for the rest of his life, not only putting a halt to his detective and military careers, but also affecting his relationships with women. (While recovering, he married a nurse named Josephine Dolan, but because TB is contagious, in 1926 she was advised by doctors to take their two daughters and leave him.)

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Hammett did go back to Pinkerton after he recovered, but he grew disillusioned with the Pinkerton style of law enforcement after an incident in Montana. The story goes that he was offered $5,000 to kill Frank Little, a labor boss who was organizing miners. Hammett refused, but Little was ultimately captured by five men—allegedly Pinkerton
ops
(short for “operatives”)—and hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte. Hammett biographer Diane Johnson writes:

Perhaps at the moment he was asked to murder Frank Little, or perhaps at the moment that he learned that Little had been killed, possibly by other Pinkerton men, Hammett saw that he himself was on the fringe…and was expected to be, according to a kind of oath of fealty that he and other Pinkerton men took. He also learned something of the lives of poor miners, whose wretched strikes the Pinkerton people were hired to prevent, and about the lies of mine owners. Those things were to sit in the back of his mind.

Not only was Hammett at odds with his Pinkerton bosses because of his idealism and growing distrust of authority, but his chronic TB made it impossible for him to endure assignments that often took place on long, cold nights. He left the agency in 1922 to find something that required less physical effort.

PEN IN HAND

Unemployed and disabled, Hammett took a job as an ad writer for a San Francisco jewelry store, but found the work unfulfilling. He wanted to write about something that he knew, that he was passionate about. Being a fan of detective stories—but disappointed by their lack of authenticity—Dashiell Hammett decided to create the detective that he was never able to be in real life.

“Your private detective does not,” he said, “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.” So Hammett started pounding out the dark characters and vigilante justice that expressed his cynical views of the world of crime and punishment. Just as he had impressed the Pinkertons with his skill and wit a few years before, he equally impressed the editors at
Black Mask
with his descriptive prose and tight storytelling.

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MEAN STREETS

After Hammett’s highly successful run with
Black Mask
, he published his first full novel,
Red Harvest
, in 1929. Drawing on his strike-breaking experience with Pinkertons, Hammett used his Continental Op character to narrate the tale of a corrupt and lawless Montana mining town in the aftermath of a violent labor clash. Just a few months later, Hammett and the Continental Op were back with
The Dain Curse
. Without stopping for a rest, he then banged out
The Maltese Falcon
in time for a spring 1930 release.

Considered his finest novel,
The Maltese Falcon
introduced Sam Spade, who became one of America’s best-known fictional heroes during the tough times of the Great Depression. In a decade that saw a high rise in crime—especially in the nation’s cities—readers looked up to Spade. He was tough but full of integrity and got results from playing by his own rules. Spade’s world was violent, unsympathetic, and full of irony and black humor. Readers ate it up. Sam Spade went on to star in radio dramas, comic books, and on film. Three different movies were made of
The Maltese Falcon
; the classic 1941 Humphrey Bogart version was the third.

EASY STREET

The 1930s was a good decade for Hammett. He was rich and famous (and single), hopping back and forth between Manhattan and Los Angeles to attend star-studded parties with the likes of Harpo Marx, Jean Harlow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Hammett drank and partied for days at a time. But he was also writing. He would work on movie scripts, first at Paramount and later at MGM—where he was paid $2,000 per week. In 1934 he published his fifth and final novel,
The Thin Man
, which spawned a series of films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. He wrote script stories for three
The Thin Man
sequels but found writing for Hollywood less rewarding than writing novels. So he worked as little as he could get away with and drank heavily. Result: Hammett garnered an “unreliable” reputation among the film studios. His earlier impressive productivity soon fizzled into nothing. He wanted to get away from detective fiction and write more serious novels, but could never bring himself to do it. “I quit writing because I was repeating myself,” he later explained. “It is the beginning of the end when you notice that you have style.”

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Perhaps Hammett could have written the Great American Novel had he not become such a raging alcoholic. His daughter Jo Hammett recounts in her biography,
A Daughter Remembers
, that the drinking “turned my father maudlin, sarcastic, and mean.” He lost focus, starting many projects and finishing none of them.

But with a steady stream of royalties coming in, he didn’t have to work, so in the 1940s Hammett became involved in leftist politics. Still stung from his strike-breaking days in Montana, Hammett became a civil rights activist and staunch opponent of Nazi Germany. Despite his age—he was in his 40s—he reenlisted to serve in World War II. They shipped him off to the Aleutian Islands (in Alaska), where he spent nearly three years editing a newspaper for the troops and helping train young writers to be good news correspondents. Hammett said later that this was the last happy time of his life.

LEFT OUT

When he returned home, Hammett found himself ostracized from the industry that made him famous. Moving further to the fringe, he became vice-chairman of the leftist Civil Rights Congress in 1948, an organization that the FBI called “subversive.” He also quit drinking that year, but the damage had been done—his immune system was shot, making him continuously sick with a hacking cough that was as unpleasant for Hammett as it was for those around him.

Downtrodden and out of the public eye, in 1951 Hammett was ordered to turn over a list of names of contributors to the Civil Rights Congress. But he refused. Following in the footsteps of the Continental Op and Sam Spade, he remained loyal and didn’t “rat them out.” Taking the Fifth, Hammett was charged with contempt of court and thrown into federal prison for five months. When he got out, he was informed by the IRS that he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. They garnished all his income from new publications or productions of his previous work. His days of being the toast of Tinseltown now seemed like ancient history. Hammett was broke and alone, and his health was deteriorating. He took a job in New York teaching creative writing just to pay the bills.

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THE LAST CHAPTER

In 1953—at the height of the United States’ anti-Communist era—Hammett was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy aide Roy Cohn repeatedly asked Hammett if he was a Communist. Hammett repeatedly said no. “Were you a Communist when you wrote these books?” “No.” “Has any of the money you made from these books financed any Communist organizations?” “Not to my knowledge.” Without an admission or evidence, McCarthy could do nothing to Hammett, but the damage had been done.

Financially in ruin, Hammett had a major heart attack in 1955. He was unable to care for himself, and was taken in by a longtime friend and confidant, writer Lillian Hellman. She moved him into her Park Avenue apartment where she saw to his needs while he edited her plays. Hammett contracted lung cancer and died in 1961 at the age of 67.

EPILOGUE

“He very much wanted to be remembered as an American writer,” wrote his daughter Jo Hammett. “He was always very proud of his heritage, and it shows in his treatment of the language. Few people have written American speech as well as he did.”

But more than just an American writer, Dashiell Hammett wanted to be remembered as a true American. As a veteran of two World Wars, he requested that he be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected but was overruled. Hammett’s headstone, located in Section 12 of the cemetery, simply reads:

Samuel D. Hammett
Sergeant, U.S. Army
1894–1961

*        *        *

TOLD YOU!

Research shows that when people see upside-down writing in a book, 99% of the time they will turn the book over.

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CLASSIC HAMMETT

Dashiell Hammett’s style has inspired so many writers, actors, and filmmakers that it’s nice to go to the source himself to read some of his grittiest crime prose
.

P
oisonville is an ugly city
of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of smelters’ stacks.

—Red Harvest

On Spade’s desk a limp cigarette smoldered
in a brass tray filled with the remains of limp cigarettes. Ragged grey flakes of cigarette-ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current.

—The Maltese Falcon