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Dashiell Hammett

kevinburtonsmith

Pseudonyms include Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett
(1894-1961)

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons.”
— Raymond Chandler

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, on May 27th, 1894, and died January 10, 1961, in New York, New York.

In between, he was one of the seminal creators in crime fiction; a distinctive and influential stylist. As if creating the archetypical private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon wasn’t enough, he was also responsible for The Continental Op and The Thin Man, the novel that introduced husband and wife sleuths Nick and Nora Charles to the world, and became the basis for a string of incredibly popular movies. His name appeared in the credits to The Fat Man, and other radio shows featuring his characters, and alongside Alex Raymond’s on the private eye/spy daily comic strip Secret Agent X-9.

He grew up, a working class kid, on the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. He became a detective at the ripe old age of nineteen when he joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, housed in the Continental Building. His family needed the money.

So Hammett not only talked the talk but he  walked the walk — he actually was a private detective. He learned the racket from an older man, a short, squat, tough-talking fellow operative whom Hammett came to idolize and mythologize as “Jimmy Wright” (and who would later supposedly serve as the inspiration for The Continental Op).

Certainly, detecting was no easy racket. Years later, playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s off-and-on friend and lover, who also occasionally had an off-and-on relationship with the truth, wrote of “the bad cuts on his legs and the indentations in his head from being scrappy with criminals.”

Perhaps most notorious of Hellman’s claims about Hammett are that in 1917, while dispatched to Butte, Montana as a strikebreaker during a particularly brutal miners strike, the young detective turned down an offer of $5,000 to murder labour organizer Frank Little. Many believe that Pinkerton agents had played a significant part in Little’s lynching and murder, and that it was this incident that hastened Hammett’s departure from Pinkerton’s (and partially served as the inspiration for Red Harvest). But most researchers doubt Hammett’s actual involvement, citing the lack of primary material regarding his career with the Pinkertons.

Hellman did like to spin the truth, of course. And Hammett himself wasn’t above stretching the truth about his exploits on more than one occasion. plus, the story fits well with Hammett’s left-leaning views (which later got him into so much trouble with McCarthy and his thugs in the 1950’s).

Hammett left the Pinkertons in 1918, and enlisted in the Army, serving in the Motor Ambulance Corps, but tuberculosis contracted while in service prompted his medical discharge less than a year later. It was while he was a patient at Cushman Military Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, that he met a nurse, Josephine “Jose” Dolan, whom he married on July 7, 1921, in San Francisco. They had a daughter, Mary Jane in 1921.

Somewhere around this time, Hammett briefly rejoined the Pinkertons, working out of their San Francisco office, but he soon left to pursue his writing. In the March 1923 issue  of The Smart Set, there is a rather fanciful account of some of the more peculiar cases Hammett was involved in while he was a Pinkerton Op, including his confession that he knew a man who once stole a ferris wheel.

 Shortly after the birth of their second child, Josephine, in 1926, the Hammetts were told that, due to his tuberculosis, Hammett should move out. They rented a home in San Francisco, where Hammett could visit on weekends, until he “got better.” He never really got better, and the marriage soon fell apart, with the child support only occasionally trickling in. His tuberculosis and alcoholism, though, stayed with him for the rest of his life.

But let me get one thing straight. It isn’t because of his backstory as a REAL! LIVE! PRIVATE EYE! that we read Hammett these days, or it shouldn’t be.

The reason people still read him today isn’t because of his biography — as fascinating and at times dubious as it may be.

Nope, it’s because he was a great writer.

* * * * *

By 1922, Hammett was a fledgling professional writer in San Francisco, seeing his first short story, “The Parthian Shot,” published in the October 1922 issue of The Smart Set, and shortly after, “The Road Home” in the December 1922 issue of a relatively new pulp mag, Black Mask. His third Black Mask-published story, “Arson Plus,” in the October 1, 1923 issue, introduced his ground-breaking character, The Continental Op — the nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency.

Hammett may not have been the first to write about a hard-boiled private eye, but, as our pal Jim Doherty notes:

Carroll John Daly was undoubtedly first to publish a short story featuring a hard-boiled sleuth who defines his profession as a private detective (“Three-Gun Terry“ in the May 15, 1923 issue of Black Mask), beating the first Op story, “Arson Plus” into print by a few months… But there’s no reason to suppose that Hammett would never have created the Op had not Daly created Mack . In fact, it’s possible the two stories were being written simultaneously. Daly, being a less careful writer, may have simply beat Hammett to the mailbox.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of reason to suppose that Chandler wouldn’t have created Marlowe, Macdonald wouldn’t have created Archer, Nebel wouldn’t have created Donahue, etc., etc., etc., had Hammett not first created the Op.

Hammett’s experience with the Pinkerton’s and his knowledge of how detectives really work, that it involved stake-outs, interrogation of suspects and long, endless tail jobs as well as gun battles and fistfights, was something new in the pulps. It gave Black Mask the much-needed grit of credibility.

Encouraged by the pulp’s ambitious new editor, Captain Joseph Shaw, who had lured the ailing writer back into the fold after a dispute about money (Hammett wanted more) with former editor Philip Cody, Hammett became one of the true stars of that pivotal pulp. Hammett’s Continental Op eventually appeared in over three dozen stories, some of which formed the basis for the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both published in 1929.

Hammett’s best-known, and arguably best novel, however, was his third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), also serialized in Black Mask, which introduced Sam Spade. It was a smash; an almost instant best seller. Hammett had made it, and he started palling around with other literary types like Dorothy Parker and William Faulkner, and started hanging around trendy nightspots.

Unfortunately, Hammett’s long-struggled-for financial success also allowed him to indulge in a multitude of weaknesses–a perennial man-about-town, he was a cad and a bon vivant, a gambler, and a womanizer, often making plays for the wives of friends, including perhaps that of his Black Mask pal, Raoul Whitfield. But most troubling of all was his accusation by an actress friend, Elise De Viane, that Hammett had beaten and raped her in 1931 after dinner in his Los Angeles apartment. She sued for $35,000 in damages in Superior Court, and Hammett, by now 3000 miles away in New York City, neither denied nor could be bothered to contest the charges. Judge Joseph McCall found for the plaintiff, and only awarded De Viane $2500 in damages. Hammett could have easily afforded it.

The Maltese Falcon was a bestseller right from the start, after all Of course, a big part of the novel’s popularity now can be traced to the classic film that was adapted from it in 1941, directed by John Huston, and starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade, but that was years away. But Hammett’s next two novels,  The Glass Key (featuring the gangster Ned Beaumont, 1931), and The Thin Man (with Nick and Nora Charles, 1934) were also best sellers; and went on to become successful films; and in the case of The Thin Man, a whole string of films.

By 1934, despite the money rolling in, Hammett’s career as a published writer was essentially over. The previous autumn, he had met Lillian Hellman, a script reader with ambitions to be a playwright, and they would soon embark on a long, tumultous and often tawdry relationship, full of high drama and cocktails, politics and art. Alas, very little of the art was Hammett’s.

He never wrote another novel, and he only squeezed out few short stories. Always looking for money, he took a whack at scripting a comic strip, Secret Agent X-9, but his involement with that enterprise only lasted a year. He wrote a few things for radio, or at least lent his name to them. Thanks to the success of the film versions of his work, his reputation preceded him in Hollywood, and he dashed off a handful of screen stories, more for the money than anything.

He also became quite involved in Hellman’s work, acting as a sounding board and editor, at least, and — it’s been suggested by many — a co-writer. He and Hellman also became quite active in politics and both eventually joined the Communist party sometime in the late thirties, an event that would prove troublesome down the road. (Those who deny Hammett was ever actually a card-carrying member would do well to know that he once showed his party membership card to his daughter Jo — a story confirmed via her daughter Julie Rivett, and related in Sally Cline’s 2014 biography Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery. So, yes, Hammett was a member).

In 1942, swept with patriotic fever, Hammett, then forty-eight, enlisted in the American Army and was stationed in the Aleutians. Lillian and he had always been active in leftist politics, lending their names (and donating money) to various progressive causes, but with the end of WWII, the political pendulum had definitely swung the other way.

By the late forties, suspicions about Hammett’s politics began to spread, and Hammett and his work were more or less blacklisted. The popular The Adventures of Sam Spade radio show, starring Howard Duff and Lurene Tuttle, was abruptly cancelled in 1950.

In 1951, Hammett was called to testify before HUAC in the trial of four communists accused of conspiring against the U.S. government. He declined to “name names,” and went to prison for five months, despite his failing health. He was fifty-seven at the time.

Hellman herself was also eventually hauled before HUAC, and ordered to testify and to name names. Likewise defiant, she let loose with a powerful speech condemning the entire process, and the senators backed down.

Dashiell Hammett died on January 10, 1961.

He may never never written anything of true significance after 1934 (or at least, nothing close to the magnificense of his earlier work), but the myth of the private eye turned writer lives on. In the seventies, Joe Gores, another San Francisco private eye turned writer, wrote Hammett, a fictitious account of Hammett chucking the writing gig and going after a friend’s killer. It was as much a loving tribute as it was a fictionalized biography, and was probably as true as fiction can get. It was eventually also made into a pretty interesting film.

Raymond Chandler described Hammet’s writing style in his classic essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”:

“Hammett wrote… for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse … He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

Or, as Ross Macdonald put it, in a a MWA Anthology in 1952,

“We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”

But perhaps the last word should go to Hammett himself who once confessed to his daughter Josephine:

“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.”

* * * * *

UNDER OATH

OH, THE STORIES I COULD TELL…

SHORT STORIES

NOVELS

   

COLLECTIONS

NON-FICTION ARTICLES BY HAMMETT

POETRY BY HAMMETT
(The mind boggles!)

FILMS

SCREEN STORIES

RADIO

TELEVISION

COMICS

COMICS COLLECTIONS

OPERA (No, really!)

REFERENCE
Arranged chronologically

WORLD-WIDE HAMMETT: FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith, with a special thanks to James Stephenson for a lot of the info on this page. Also, thanks very much to William Denton and the Hammett Bibliography on Rara-Avis, and Marc LaViolette for helping me plug the holes. Illustration of Hammett by Canadian illustrator Jay Stephenson.

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