Discovering Mysteries By Dashiell Hammett

I found my first Dashiell Hammett book by accident. His writing comes in a form that most people don't expect to produce genius--the mystery. Books other than serious novels, it seems, don't "count" in people's minds; at least they aren't remembered and people, in their natural casual arrogance, think of the mystery as a second class literature.

Two summers ago I was in a small town in France, and not particularly happy about being there. In fact, I was miserable: bored, facing a six hour train trip, and tired of trying to struggle through French novels. The few books in English at the railway station newsstand were all mysteries. I had always been very disdainful of mysteries.

They were what bus drivers read before starting a run, not opening up the doors, while you stood outside in the cold. But having no alternative I began to sift through the pile. The authors' names were all unfamiliar, and the cover photos all dirty.

About the fourth book I came to was Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. The blurb on the back cover listed other books by the author, among them The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I guess it is sort of odd that I hadn't gotten into mysteries before, and here was the man that wrote two of the best. Here was a guy who not only understood the plots, but actually wrote them.

By the end of that summer I had read four of the five novels Hammett had written. They were certainly easy to come by. Every bookstore or newspaper stand in Europe seemed to sell them, and in addition to the English editions, I noticed that there were always translations available.

A few months later, I was back in Cambridge, and another reading period mania was settling in. It was just too bleak out to go anywhere, and it was one of those terrible periods when you already knew the last Beatles album by heart, and you knew there wouldn't be another one for months, and you had been to Tommy's so often that it only made things worse.

So I decided to read the one Hammett novel I had been saving, holding in reserve for some emergency. I went to the Coop to buy it, and although they had a whole wall of mysteries, they had no Hammett. Running from bookstore to bookstore, I quickly discovered that there was simply no place in Cambridge that sold Hammett.

You can't take a mystery out of the library. It would be like showing a surfing movie at the Bleeker Street. And so I never got to read that last novel.

I am still not sure why Hammett is so much more popular in Europe than in his own country. Perhaps it is that Hammett, like rock and roll and juke boxes, Ford Galaxies and Johnnie Guitar, is something we assume but never really stop to appreciate.

Yet for the outsider, it is these things that are the good of America, its true creativity. These are the things about America that you aren't ashamed of, that you can love without guilt.

There is a lean, wry quality to Hammett's writing that is unique. There is nothing superfluous. In The Thin Man. Hammett describes the hosts of a dinner party that Nick Charles reluctantly goes to:

Halsey Edge was a small scrawny man of fifty-something, with a pinched yellow face and no hair at all. He called himself "a ghoul by profession and inclination"--his only joke, if that is what it was--by which he meant he was an archaeologist, and he was very proud of his collection of battle-axes. He was not so bad once you had resigned yourself to the fact that you were in for occasional cataloguings of his armourystone axes, copper axes, bronze axes, double-bladed axes, faceted axes, polygonal axes, scalloped axes, hammer axes, adze axes, Mesopotamian axes, Hungarian axes, Nordic axes, and all of them looking pretty moth-eaten. It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat--she perched on things--and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it, and Margot Innes always spoke of her as the gnome, pronouncing all the letters. She once told me that she did not think that any literature of twenty years ago would live, because it had no psychiatry in it. They lived in a pleasant old three-story house on the edge of Greenwich Village and their liquor was excellent.

Hammett established a character type that dominated American mystery writing, and still reappears in one form or another in James Bond, Matt Helm, and the rest of the gang. But Hammett's characters, Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the others, were different from their modern apostles. Because they were more than detectives, smart, tough guys. They were people that you really wanted to meet, to talk to, to learn from, and later go with to the local bar and have a great time.

A Pinkerton detective, and then a soldier in World War I, Hammett started writing in hospitals, while recovering from lung ailments that plagued him to the very end. A quick success. Hammett joined the "Hollywood set" of the thirties, and later became actively involved in left wing politics.

In the early 1950s he went to jail for refusing to give information to a McCarthyite Committee. He died in New York in January 1961.

Probably just because mysteries are what he writes, Dashiell Hammett is one of those people you have to discover. All I want to do is to pass on the word.