Dashiell Hammett

[BlackAdder]

I've lately gotten into a Hammett rereading kick and have done a web page on it: Hammett,
But I'll throw in my 2-cents worth on the five novels in separate postings in this thread.

[BlackAdder]

This, his first novel, is very disappointing, being an episodic compilation of short stories set in the corrupt mining town of Personville ('Poisonville'), modelled on Butte, Montana. The Continental Op has taken on the task of cleaning up the town, and his method is to set the different gangster factions against each other. It is sheer pulp fiction, with something like two-dozen or so killings, mostly shoot-em-ups of Keystone Kops freneticism in which practically every major character ends up dead. A couple of 'real' murders are solved by the Op using detection, but otherwise this does not rank as a detective novel. His dialogue is good, however, and some of the characters are well-drawn (especially the floozy Dinah Brand and the corrupt Sheriff Noonan). It is best to read this book as a parody of the gangster fiction of the time.

Note: Hammett published in Black Mask Magazine, and his novels first appeared as serials there, hence the episodic format. There had to be a sub-plot that could be covered in one issue, with the overriding common theme uniting the stories.

[BlackAdder]

For those who are tired of reading too many modern 500-page mysteries that are padded out with kinky sex, bloodthirsty insanity, and protagonists crippled by angst, it will be a pleasure to pick up "The Dain Curse". 160 pages or so of beautifully contrived workmanship. If you'll allow the analogy, it is like the old mechanical Timex watch I had for twenty years as compared with my new answering machine. The watch that never failed vanished into the hands of a mugger many years ago -- one does not sentimentally hang onto something like that when a knife is being held to your throat by a drug-addicted kid who'd kill for a Big Mac hamburger. The answering machine, bought to replace the one that recently died of old age at the age of five, which is about the life expectancy of modern miracle machinery, is about the size of a paperback book and has one button that does all (meaning it does nothing any reasonable person would expect it to do -- the Timex, of course, only needed to be wound, and adjusted when the clocks changed for summer time); I've persuaded it at least to answer messages, but at the expense of having a working telephone that can be used when the machine is on: compromise deal with it now is to disconnect it when I'm home, put it on when I go out, which means unplugging and replugging all the different connection wires each time.
Is that business about 'technology' a pointless diversion? No, I don't think so. "The Dain Curse" is both thriller and mystery, and hard-boiled of course. The difference between hard-boiled and traditional detection becomes a moot point when dealing with great writers like Hammett and Chandler who purposely denigrated 'cosiness'. You will find the same literary elements and narrative skills in both approaches to mystery writing when they are well done -- and quite a lot of overlap when it comes to fair clueing and a reasonable level of erudition. But what is most admirable about Hammett is the stripped-down and straightforward narrative, spiced with excellent dialogue of a terse and often witty sort. Yes, the plot might be absurd, as is "Silence of the Lambs" as a modern example, yet works not by overwhelming the attention span by long passages of obfuscation and psychology but by punching and jabbing like Ali in his heydey. The 'rope-a-dope' style of detection. Within the first hundred pages you get a full murder mystery, solved with improbable but perfect logic by the Continental Op (whether modern police methodology would allow a private eye to walk all over procedure these days the way he did is a matter of societal and cultural changes); then follows the aftermath, two more murder mysteries involving the poor 'cursed' Dain girl, all tied together
by the overriding plot involving a superbly rendered villain, with excellent provision of clues. The economy and complexity of this process is inspiring, everything that needs to be said is said or presented, there's no nonsense or unnecessary diversion. Characterization? Bah! Enough is presented to make the people live, even poor old Leggett, the French escapee from Devil's Island who has made a new career in San Francisco as a research chemist, but is all too soon a murder victim. Gabrielle, the morphine junkie with the elfin, foxlike face, who thinks she is cursed, is a marvellous character.

A comment on customs: As we all know, sex, drug addiction, passion, and greed have existed throughout human history. That they are not presented graphically in this book is a matter of the editorial policy of the time -- any adult reader can fill in between the lines. What is more interesting for people with an interest in such things is the 'periodicity', for example, the Op having to take a ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley because the Bay Bridge hadn't been built then (let alone BART). Prohibition was in full swing and the casual flouting of the law taken for granted. This adds appeal in the way the Philo Vance books do for New York. Then of course there is always the behavior of the cops, and also what would be considered blatant racism these days -- Civil Libertarians would have a fit now. I know some NYC cops, and their attitudes are really no different from what they would have been in the 1920s; it's just the procedures and the way of expressing opinions that have changed.

Appearance: The Continental Op is the anonymous precursor to Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective. But little things leak out. Did you know, for example, that he was only five-feet-six tall, but weighed in at 190 lbs.? Somehow one's first impression is that he's the Incredible Hulk, the way he comes across (but doesn't behave, always being very polite), but he is actually a generic version of George Smiley or Father Brown. Lorre, not Bogart. This was intentional on Hammett's part, I think, before Sam Spade. He was just trying to represent a 'real' detective of the Pinkerton sort, not Sherlock. I have never met a private detective, but in reality they probably resemble bank clerks. Seedy, but not excessively so, plodding but not jerks by any means. Inconspicuous, but capable of displaying power when needed. This would fit the times -- likely nowadays a PI would more resemble a computer nerd with goggle glasses and a dirty T-shirt. (Apart from the boss of the agency, of course, who would dress like a professional basketball coach to impress the customers. The Op's 'Old Man' is like that, always concerned about full reporting and not running over budget.)

[BlackAdder]

Hammett's most famous detective is Sam Spade, who appears only in this novel and three short stories. This mystery became John Huston's classic movie with Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, et al, and lifted dialogue intact from this book--that's how vividly written it is. One of the early but hardly surpassed (if ever) hard-boiled detective stories. The mood of this masterpiece puts it right up there with the best of the 'noirs' (cf. Ambler and Thompson). [It can be fun to point to later movies like 'Chinatown', 'Bladerunner', and yes, 'Batman', that sort of capture a similar mood.]

{More on this book later, after I have reread it....}

[BlackAdder]

Ned Beaumont is the hero of this grim novel; he is the Fixer (nowadays he'd probably be called an Expediter) for a corrupt political boss, Paul Madvig. (Does that name remind you of Ludwig of Bavaria? Probably no coincidence.) While the main story is a murder mystery (who killed the Senator's son?), the episodes concern the ambitions, hatreds, rivalries, cowardice, and spite of the various opponents, lackeys, and women connected with Madvig -- especially the gangster Shad O'Rory, Madvig's political rival. Ned Beaumont plays a central role in each sub-plot, behaving in a very ambiguous way, making it hard for the reader to determine what he is really up to until it happens. This is Hammett's intent, of course, showing the onion-skin complexity of human behavior, and the fact that good is often achieved by evil intentions and vice versa. We are never allowed to know what any character is thinking at the time, just what he/she does or says (often acting 'out of character' in the way that is normally shown in a book). The first episode, setting the scene, is an elaborate scheme set up by Beaumont to recover $3250 he had won on a horse from a bookie who fled town as one of the murder suspects (it is important to be aware that Beaumont only extracts that amount of money and doesn't otherwise rip the guy off); this is a funny side-dish that leaves a nasty aftertaste. The other episodes involve poison-pen letters, torture, frame-ups, blackmail, betrayal, you name it, until everything gets wrapped up, perhaps too neatly, with the obligatory surprise ending. Note that the author always refers to the hero as Ned Beaumont fully spelled out ('Ned Beaumont entered the room', 'Ned Beaumont said', etc.), which he only occasionally does with the other characters, who are referred to, with the usual convention, as Doolan, Jack, Janet, etc.; possibly this is done to distance the reader, a warning not to become sympathetic with the protagonist or regard him as a normal human being one can think of as Ned or Beau. Beaumont is a strange person, and this is Hammett's darkest novel.

A comment by Barry Ergang of the Golden Age of Detection News Group:

"The most effectively brutal and wrenching scene I've ever come across in ANY piece of fiction I've read so far is the one in which Ned Beaumont and Eloise Mathews flaunt their carnal interest in one another in front of Eloise's husband, after which he commits suicide. I've only read the book once -- a long time ago -- but I've never forgotten that scene....
This is the work in which, for what my opinion is worth, Hammett outdoes Hemingway at his own over-touted game."

In case you are curious about the title, it derives from a dream the 'heroine' Janet Henry narrates to Ned Beaumont, in which they were together in the woods, Hansel and Gretel or Goldilocks fashion, lost and starving. They find a locked cabin and spot a table laid out with food through the window, and finding a key under the doormat they open the door only to find the floor crawling with poisonous snakes and quickly relock the door.... At the end of the book she finally admits, "In that dream -- I didn't tell you -- the key was glass and shattered in our hands just as we got the door open..."/ He looked sidewise at her and asked: "Well?"/ She shivered. "We couldn't lock the snakes in and they came out all over us and I woke up screaming." This sort of metaphorical dream sequence is something Hammett used fairly frequently (as in "The Dain Curse") and it works quite effectively without being overwhelmingly 'literary'.

[BlackAdder]

This book will convince you that Nick and Nora Charles are confirmed alcoholics. At least the Schnauzer Asta stays sober (unlike the St Bernard in "Topper"). Nick keeps denying that he has any detectival interest in the case, that he has given up being a detective and prefers to live off his wife's fortune, and one begins to wonder if he will ever get around to doing anything about the crime. There is, finally, a traditional detective story ending (easily deduced by the reader, though not by the drunken Nick Charles until almost too late). The dialogue is good and breezy, of course, and one can see why the Powell/Loy movies caught on. Most Golden Age fans probably know that the Thin Man is not Nick Charles but rather the prime murder suspect. It was Hammett's last novel; apparently he had burned out as a serious writer, although he went on to work on movie scripts in Hollywood and help out Lillian Hellman with her plays.

[shyster]

Entertaining comments (and I like "Black Adder" as a pseudonym).

However, I have to say that the Continental Op as Smiley or Father Brown seems sort of a stretch. Smiley is primarily a web-puller, while Father Brown would've figured that God would attend to matters or would gently persuade the vile miscreant to take responsibility.

Conversely, the Op is a guy working on the front line and quite conversant with personal violence. Not to say cheerfully inclined to it.

Oh, well, maybe I'm just grousing because I'm about his height and maybe not a whole lot less in weight, which doesn't mean I'm not physically active. I work out one to two hours a day, depending on whether I've a karate class. I've been at the karate for about four years. Prior to that I've done boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu and, in my prime, I regularly did ten mile runs. I don't have the time to run much anymore, but I've regularly done 500 sit-ups and push-ups per diem for near thirty years.

Don't discount the guy's capacity for raising cain just because he's built like a fire hydrant. Give me a hard time and I'll punch you in the kneecap, Randy Newman notwithstanding. My forebears were cops (though I'm not) and built like me. One of 'em got himself killed in 1941 going in unarmed to take a shotgun away from a murderous drunk.

Bogart was short too, incidentally. One of my favorite trivia items regards "The Big Sleep". In the novel, Carmen Sternwood tells Marlowe he's tall for a detective; they reversed it for the Bogart film, with Carmen telling Bogart that he's not very tall for a detective and Bogey responding in his sibilant lisp, "I try to be".

So there. Hmpf.

[Ritzner Von Jung]

Hammett is the worse thing that ever happened to mystery. As a paraphrase of Glenn Gould's famous words about Mozart, I would say Hammett didn't stop writing too soon, he stopped writing too late.

[Dave]

this coming from someone who wore gloves while going to the bathroom

[Ritzner Von Jung]

I have always thought Glenn Gould would have worked quite well as a Golden Age detective. His eccentricities and curmondgeon attitudes were dead in the Holmes pattern.
Back to Hammett, I indeed think he damaged mystery fiction more than any other writer before and after him - even that stupid moron Raymond Chandler didn't hurt as much.

[shyster]

I'd just say that he expanded the genre, whether or not you care for his work or style. And even if you dislike Chandler, calling him a moron is misplaced. His plots are spaghetti, but Ross MacDonald was right about how well he wrote.

[Barry Ergang]

Originally posted by Ritzner Von Jung
Back to Hammett, I indeed think he damaged mystery fiction more than any other writer before and after him - even that stupid moron Raymond Chandler didn't hurt as much.

With no animus implied or intended, I have to second Shyster on this, Ritzner. You're unequivocally entitled to dislike Hammett, Chandler, or any other writer, and I don't condemn you for it, but in this instance I think you're overstating the point. Moreover, you haven't really explained why you think he was so detrimental.

I happen to like a lot of Hammett's work, but that's irrelevant. If you're saying the "damage" he did to detective fiction is based on the hardboiled elements he introduced, then you ought to be damning Carroll John Daly, who was a dreadfully inept prose stylist and who gave us the first hardboiled sleuths (if you can call them sleuths): a nameless "adventurer" in "The False Burton Combs," followed by Three-Gun Terry Mack and the hugely popular Race Williams. Subsequently he created Satan Hall and Vee Brown.

Daly preceded Hammett to the pages of Black Mask by a matter of weeks and is thus credited as being the "father" of the hardboiled detective story. Race Williams was Mickey Spillane's inspiration for Mike Hammer. Daly, for better or worse--and I vote "worse"--came in first in a reader's poll Black Mask conducted, ahead of Erle Stanley Gardner and Hammett.

I've read some of Daly's stories in anthologies, one of his novels, Murder From the East, and own a couple of collections of Race Williams and Satan Hall stories. I've read only a story or two from each of the two collections because I'm not masochistic enough to try to read them cover-to-cover.

Apart from refining the hardboiled qualities Daly introduced and making them more plausible (I won't use the word "realistic" because, as other threads here will demonstrate, it's a loaded one), Hammett in many of his detective stories adhered to a basic "rule" of the genre: playing fair with the reader. How is that so "damaging"? Additionally, his characters tended to be more fleshed-out than those in most other stories, whether hardboiled or traditional.

As more informed historians than I have documented, the hardboiled detective emerged as an urban outgrowth of the western hero glorified in the dime novel. Wyatt Earp--at least, his fictional incarnation--cleaned up corruption in Dodge City or Tombstone or wherever. The Continental Op cleaned up Personville.

Is it specifically the "private eye" story that bothers you? Sherlock Holmes may have called himself a "consulting detective," but having no official status, he was effectively a private eye. Others, "traditional" and "hardboiled," followed, along with amateurs like Philo Vance and Ellery Queen, and professionals like Roderick Alleyn and Cockrill.

Is it specifically the American private eye story that irritates because of its hardboiled character? (The only non-American hardboiled P.I. novel I can recall reading was one of the Slim Callahan books by Peter Cheyney, and it was pretty bad.) It's a type of story that developed from a particular historical period and from a trend beginning with Mark Twain that favored the use of the vernacular over a more consciously "literary"--i.e., mannered--prose style.

Chandler may have been a lot of things, but "stupid moron" wasn't one of them. He introduced a romantic and poetic sensibility to the genre, viewing the P.I. as a knight-like figure whose quests for justice and revelation were frequently thwarted or disappointed by human frailty, depravity, and corruption. Like it or not, his prose style became one of the most influential of the 20th Century in American literature--and I don't confine it to the mystery genre.

Finally, I want to add that the detective story would probably have died out long ago if it weren't for some of the innovators like Hammett and Chandler and others who have come along since. I love John Dickson Carr--he's one of my absolute favorites, along with the antipodal Chandler--and any number of other Golden Age writers. But if every traditional whodunit were Carrian and every hardboiled story Chandlerian (Chandler's probably had as many would-be imitators as Doyle), each form would have gotten old, tired, and obsolete a long time ago. I can't imagine reading story after story that adopted an identical formula, written in the same style.

One of the reasons the sonnet survives is because different poets bring different sensibilities to it, and occasionally work variations on the form to refresh it. The same premise applies to other genres, including the mystery story.

[Ritzner Von Jung]

Chandler may have been a lot of things, but "stupid moron" wasn't one of them. He introduced a romantic and poetic sensibility to the genre, viewing the P.I. as a knight-like figure whose quests for justice and revelation were frequently thwarted or disappointed by human frailty, depravity, and corruption. Like it or not, his prose style became one of the most influential of the 20th Century in American literature--and I don't confine it to the mystery genre.

Chandler's talent is not the problem here. I admit he was a skilled writer, with an immediately recognizable style, and had a great influence on later writer, for better (Robert B. Parker) or worse (Lawrence Block). Still, he also was a stupid moron, as evidenced by his infamous essay "The Simple Art of Murder" that I can't describe aptly but by using a four-letter word that I am too polite a man to write here.

[Xavier Lechard]

I am by no means his number one fan yet I agree with previous posters that calling Raymond Chandler "a stupid moron" is going a little too far, even though I despise "Simple Art" as much as you do.

BTW, who are you?

[shyster]

Epithets are not criticisms....and whether you prefer cozy mysteries or not, Chandler's essay did have a point.

In passing, though I read and enjoy both Robert Parker and Lawrence Block, I think Parker is far more influenced by Chandler while Block is a more versatile writer.

Parker has a good wit, but his work is sort of a Simonesque one-trick pony. Practically everything he's written relies very heavily on Chandler...and who did he write that thesis on, hmmm?

Shoot, to me even his attempts at a female P.I. sound like Marlowe in drag (to once again paraphrase a famous criticism of Ellery Queen's female dick in Drury Lane's Last Case).

Block, by comparison, is all over the bloody map. Scudder is not witty or chivalric enough to be Marlowe and Rhodenbarr is more P.G. Wodehouse or maybe Craig Rice than Chandler.

By the way, I was rereading some of the earlier postings and a definitely unimportant thought occurred to me. The prior commentator made a point that Hammett's Asta was at least a non-alcoholic unlike the St. Bernard in "Topper". Gotta point out that you can't blame that dog on Thorne Smith (a very funny, if dated, writer)....Neil the St. Bernard was a screenwriter's creation and not present in Smith's book.

Another Smith (H. Allen) wrote back in the forties that Thorne's books could only be made printable by the publisher's cutting out a vast amount of ripe material---I have sometimes wondered if there'd be a market today for an unexpurgated edition of "Topper".

It'd certainly be entertaining--but probably both too tame and too non-PC for today's readers. Not offensive enough while being too offensive at the same time--I think Thorne Smith would've enjoyed that irony.