{"id":129314,"date":"2018-09-14T11:07:44","date_gmt":"2018-09-14T15:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129314"},"modified":"2018-09-25T14:23:32","modified_gmt":"2018-09-25T18:23:32","slug":"dashiell-hammetts-strange-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/14\/dashiell-hammetts-strange-career\/","title":{"rendered":"Dashiell Hammett’s Strange Career"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Dashiell Hammett<\/p><\/div>\n

In a 1929 interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle<\/em>, Dashiell Hammett described his first attempts at \u201cbreadwinning.\u201d After dropping out of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at 14, he worked as a messenger boy for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then as a junior clerk (\u201cvery junior\u201d) in an advertising office, a stockbroker, a timekeeper in a cannery and a machine shop, and a stevedore until it became \u201ctoo strenuous\u201d\u2014at which point he responded to an \u201cenigmatic want-ad\u201d and was hired as an operative in the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. From 1915 to 1918 and from 1920 to 1922, Hammett worked as an op. Despite the modest pay, he \u201cliked gumshoeing better than anything I had done before\u201d and \u201csleuthing\u201d even more. In 1921, at 27, he got married and had a child. He needed money, and so he \u201cdecided to become a writer,\u201d he told the Eagle<\/em>. \u201cIt was a good idea. Having had no experience whatever in writing, except writing letters and reports, I wasn\u2019t handicapped by exaggerated notions of the difficulties ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

There would be difficulties ahead, one of which would be maintaining that pragmatic attitude towards writing. But when he gave this interview, things were going well. His first novels, Red Harvest <\/em>and The Dain Curse<\/em>, had been published by Knopf, and he had turned in a manuscript of The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, which he told his editor was \u201cthe best thing I\u2019ve done so far.\u201d Reviewers praised Red Harvest<\/em>\u2019s liveliness and dialogue, and The Dain Curse<\/em>, though not as celebrated, made the New York Times<\/em> Christmas list. The books were selling well. Hollywood was interested.<\/p>\n

In The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett<\/em>, Nathan Ward considers \u201cexactly how he made his famous transformation from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story.\u201d Why is equally important. The simple answer is that Hammett was chronically ill and couldn\u2019t do much else. By the age of 28, he had suffered a series of ailments. In June 1918, at 24, he had enlisted in the army and was stationed at Camp Meade, outside Baltimore. In October, he caught the Spanish flu, which caused (or possibly provoked a latent) tuberculosis, and in May 1919 he was honorably discharged. He spent the next year living with his parents, either in bed or out on the town, smoking, drinking, and \u201chelling around.\u201d In a period of good health, he moved to Spokane, Washington, and worked at a Pinkerton outpost before he fell ill again: he was short of breath, and at six foot one inches and around 130 pounds, he was weak and emaciated. He was sent to a Tacoma hospital, where he met Josephine Annis Dolan (who went by Jose), a pretty nurse from Anaconda, Montana. Hammett was transferred to a hospital outside San Diego, from which he wrote her fervent letters: \u201cI didn\u2019t intend doing this\u2014writing you a second letter before I got an answer to my first\u2014but that\u2019s the hell of being in love with a vamp, you do all sorts of things.\u201d Jose soon discovered she was pregnant, and within a few months they were married and living in San Francisco. Hammett went back to sleuthing, but his \u201chealth continued to go blooey,\u201d his weight dropped further, and in February 1922, he quit Pinkerton and took up writing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There is an accidental, unromantic quality to Hammett\u2019s career that is at odds with the teleology so common to artistic biography. Ward wonders how Hammett came to writing \u201cso late, seemingly without the customary years of practice and ambition.\u201d He suggests that composing \u201cscores of operative reports\u201d for Pinkerton taught Hammett \u201cto write pithily and with appreciation for the language of street characters,\u201d and having his \u201creports edited or rewritten by supervisors\u201d provided \u201ca kind of literary training.\u201d But the notion that it is \u201ccustomary\u201d for writers to have \u201cyears of practice\u201d rests on certain assumptions about class and calling. None of the familiar models of authorship\u2014romantic genius, modernist genius, mass-market hack\u2014can \u201cexplain\u201d Hammett. He was an inspired craftsman on the border of the popular and the belletristic. The fact that Hammett was \u201ca poor boy with a grade-school education,\u201d as Diane Johnson put it in her 1981 biography, makes his achievements impressive, but it doesn\u2019t help us place them. There is plenty that is interesting about Hammett\u2019s childhood, and the part most relevant to his success as a writer isn\u2019t his poverty or his limited education but his wide reading. He was, in Ward\u2019s description, \u201can incorrigible reader and prowler of public libraries whose tastes ran from swashbucklers and dime Westerns to edifying works of European philosophy and technical expertise.\u201d Biographers and critics are awed by Hammett\u2019s going so far with so little formal education, but his reading, confidence, and adventurousness offset any deficit in schooling.<\/p>\n

Nothing in his childhood predicted his success. Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 at his family\u2019s tobacco farm in rural Maryland. He was named after his paternal grandfather, Samuel Biscoe Hammett, and his mother\u2019s Huguenot ancestors, the De Schiells. Until his late twenties, he went by Sam. His father, Richard, struggled to hold a job. After losing a county election, Richard moved the family to Baltimore, where he worked as a tram conductor and started a seafood business that never amounted to much. Sam\u2019s mother, Annie, worked occasionally as a private nurse, but weakness and a chronic cough kept her at home most of the time. Richard, who drank heavily and was known as a sharp dresser and a ladies\u2019 man, abused Annie. In financial distress, he pulled his son out of school in order to help the family. Sam worked a series of odd jobs while passing his free time fishing, hunting, drinking, and seducing. In 1915, the year he started at Pinkerton, he caught gonorrhoea for the first time. His formative years, spent not in elite institutions and circles but in labor and leisure, did not give rise to the kind of elaborate psychodrama that the modernist generation perfected\u2014that all came only after he was famous.<\/p>\n

When, in 1922, Hammett started writing for The<\/em> Smart Set<\/em>, founded and edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, he showed off his sophistication and sensitivity to language. In his delightful, aphoristic piece \u201cFrom the Memoirs of a Private Detective,\u201d he recalled a supervisor changing \u201cvoracious\u201d to \u201ctruthful\u201d on the grounds that the client might not understand the former, and changing \u201csimulate\u201d to \u201cquicken\u201d for the same reason. (Hammett seems to have misremembered or mistyped the original words: are they not more likely to have been \u201cveracious\u201d and \u201cstimulate\u201d?) Whether these particular edits actually happened, Hammett knew the strength of his own writing. \u201cI was a pretty good sleuth,\u201d he told his Eagle<\/em> interviewer, \u201cbut a bit overrated because of the plausibility with which I could explain away my failures, proving them inevitable and no fault of mine . . . Thanks to my ability to write pleasing and convincing reports, my reputation was always a little more than I deserved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plausibility would be central to Hammett\u2019s career in fiction: as a former op, he knew\u2014or claimed to know\u2014more about crime, detection, and the mechanics of both than any other writer in the genre. Hammett\u2019s first crime story, \u201cThe Road Home,\u201d appeared in The Black Mask<\/em> (also founded by Mencken and Nathan) under the pseudonym Peter Collinson. (Peter Collins was an old carnival name meaning nobody, so Hammett had made himself the son of nobody.) By 1924, he was hailed by the magazine\u2019s new editor, Phil Cody, as \u201cone of our most popular authors.\u201d What distinguished Hammett\u2019s stories is that they were \u201ccloser to earth\u201d (as he would describe one of his plots) than Sherlock Holmes-style tales. His detectives weren\u2019t gentlemen solving riddles but tough, slangy, sometimes sordid types who worked hard, paid attention to the right things and weren\u2019t afraid of violence. The nameless Continental Op, a \u201clittle block of a man\u201d who narrates twenty-eight of Hammett\u2019s stories as well as his first two novels, says things like: \u201cI don\u2019t like eloquence. If it isn\u2019t effective enough to pierce your hide, it\u2019s tiresome, and if it is effective enough, it muddles your thoughts.\u201d Hammett\u2019s style was in the jokes and in the pace. His detectives were a step ahead of readers not because they were innately smarter but because they\u2019d been doing this for a while.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found I could sell the stories easily when it became known I had been a Pinkerton man,\u201d Hammett said. \u201cPeople thought my stuff was authentic.\u201d He claimed to have been involved in several high-profile cases, including a mission to break up the Anaconda Copper miners\u2019 strike in Butte, Montana; an investigation into the theft of gold aboard the SS Sonoma; and the defence of Fatty Arbuckle, who was charged with the rape and murder of Virginia Rappe. In his 1981 biography, Richard Layman called Hammett’s stories about this period \u201cimplausible\u201d and \u201csuspect,\u201d and Ward goes further, concluding, with the support of archival research, that Hammett either had a minor role or was, owing to his infirmity, not involved at all.<\/p>\n

Even if Hammett had done everything he said he did, he still wouldn\u2019t have been able to write about it\u2014not directly, at least. Pinkerton was skittish about former employees writing about their work. Ward tells of Charlie Siringo, an ex-op whose attempts to publish a memoir were stymied by the agency. Citing the confidentiality agreement Siringo had signed, the agency demanded that he give another name to his employer. When Siringo finally published A Cowboy Detective <\/em>and Further Adventures of a Cowboy Detective<\/em> (1912), about his work for the \u201cworld-famous\u201d \u201cDickenson Agency,\u201d he was so embittered by the meddling that he quickly followed with Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism <\/em>(1915), a damning account of Pinkerton\u2019s corruption (he was paid to commit voter fraud) and its ignominious history of strike-breaking. But Hammett was writing fiction, not memoir, and so names had already been changed.<\/p>\n

During the auspicious beginning to Hammett\u2019s writing career, conditions at home were difficult: in late 1924 or early 1925, his tuberculosis flared up and he began living apart from his wife and daughter. That arrangement that would continue in various forms for many years. In the autumn of 1925, Jose became pregnant with their second daughter. When his editor refused to raise his rate, Hammett placed a classified ad (\u201cand I can write,\u201d it concluded) and was hired as the advertising manager for Albert Samuels Jewellers, which quadrupled the family\u2019s income. Hammett embraced his new occupation (and a fetching red-haired colleague named Peggy O\u2019Toole, the inspiration for Brigid O\u2019Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon<\/em>), but after just five months on the job, he collapsed at the office in a pool of blood: he had hepatitis on top of TB, and the Veterans\u2019 Bureau deemed him 100 percent disabled. Even so, Hammett was intent on building his reputation as an ad man, if also a bit defensive about it\u2014in an essay called \u201cAdvertising is Literature\u201d which he wrote for Western Advertising<\/em>, he argued that \u201cevery man who works with words for effects is a literary worker.\u201d<\/p>\n

After poor health made it impossible for Hammett to report to the jeweller\u2019s office, Joseph Shaw, the latest editor of Black Mask<\/em> (he would drop \u201cThe\u201d from the title), lured him back with an offer of a raise and the opportunity to write longer stories. An eight-year period of astonishing productivity began. Hammett dashed off a novella called The Big Knockover<\/em>, which Shaw serialised, and started reviewing mysteries for the Saturday Review of Literature<\/em>. The first chapters of \u201cThe Cleansing of Poisonville\u201d appeared in Black Mask<\/em>, and Hammett sent the full manuscript to East Coast publishing houses. Blanche Knopf replied that they were \u201ckeen,\u201d though they felt he should remove some of the violence and change the \u201chopeless\u201d title. The book came out as Red Harvest <\/em>in 1929, followed by The Dain Curse<\/em> (1929), The Maltese Falcon<\/em> (1930), The Glass Key<\/em> (1931), and The Thin Man <\/em>(1934), along with movie adaptations of Red Harvest<\/em>, The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, and The Thin Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hammett\u2019s aspirations were growing. As early as 1925, he had half-joked to Phil Cody at The<\/em> Black Mask <\/em>that straightening out some confusion over rights would \u201csave my literary executors trouble.\u201d In 1928, he told Blanche that he was \u201cone of the few\u2014if there are any more\u2014moderately literate people who take the detective story seriously,\u201d predicting that \u201csome day somebody\u2019s going to make \u2018literature\u2019 out of it.\u201d He shared his plans for a stream-of-consciousness detective novel that would \u201ccarry the reader along with the detective, showing him everything as it is found.\u201d By 1930, Hammett had become high-handed. When he received an invoice from Knopf for excess corrections on The Glass Key<\/em>, he replied that someone in their editorial department \u201csimply edited the Jesus out of my MS\u201d and they were \u201clucky I haven\u2019t billed you for the trouble I was put to unediting it.\u201d His arrogance was warranted: his influence on crime fiction was immediate, profound, and far-reaching. In 1935, Hammett was invited to a Los Angeles party honoring Gertrude Stein, who wanted to meet the master of the modern detective story. He wasn\u2019t a mere genre writer; he was a modernist innovator. The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, which opens with a beautiful woman walking into a PI\u2019s office with a fat bankroll and a sketchy story, reads as the ur-text of modern American crime fiction. It is what Chandler would describe, in a tribute to his master, as a scene \u201cthat seemed never to have been written before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hammett would soon stop writing\u2014or, as his daughter Jo more accurately put it, stop publishing. Newly rich, he partied hard and spent profligately. And he would just as soon be overshadowed by Chandler, who had more discernibly lofty concerns. Chandler doubted Hammett \u201chad any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had firsthand information about.” This wasn\u2019t exactly the case, but it affirmed Hammett\u2019s image as no-nonsense ex-dick. Writing was the closest thing Hammett had to a calling, but no calling comes without professional demands and anxieties, and Hammett wasn\u2019t sufficiently interested in the rewards to keep up the travails. \u201cI am long and lean and greyheaded, and very lazy,\u201d he wrote to The Black Mask<\/em> in 1924, at 30. \u201cI have no ambition at all in the usual sense of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n

People ask two questions about Hammett: why did he start writing, and why did he stop? Ward answers the first question to the extent that it can be answered, and he wisely avoids the second, to which Hammett already provided an answer, however inadequate: \u201cI stopped writing because I found I was repeating myself. It\u2019s the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.\u201d Hammett didn\u2019t publish anything in the 26 years between The Thin Man<\/em> and his death, but he wasn\u2019t idle: he drank prodigiously; he edited his lover Lillian Hellman\u2019s plays; he joined the Communist Party; he taught a mystery writing class; he joined the army (again); he stopped drinking; he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, found guilty of contempt of court, and sent to prison; he maintained relationships with Jose and his daughters, and with Lillian, who became more of a friend than a lover; he had other lovers; he adored his grandchildren; he fished, and made his own fishing lures; he took up sketching and photography; he read. There is tragedy in his not-writing only in that he tried. He struggled for decades to finish a novel, Tulip<\/em>, and never did.<\/p>\n

He came to writing as it suited him and went away from it as it ceased to. \u2018The heroism of his life lay not in his Horatio Alger success,\u201d Diane Johnson wrote, \u201cbut in the long years after success, when money and gifts were gone. It is the long blank years that prove the spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anne Diebel taught for eight years at Columbia. She now works as a private investigator.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a 1929 interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dashiell Hammett described his first attempts at \u201cbreadwinning.\u201d After dropping out of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at 14, he worked as a messenger boy for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then as a junior clerk (\u201cvery junior\u201d) in an advertising office, a stockbroker, a timekeeper in a 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