A Continental Op

The woman stared at Nunheim dully and said, "I don't like crooks, and even if I did. I wouldn't like crooks who are stool pigeons, and even if I liked crooks who are stool pigeons. I wouldn't like you." Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett was boru in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, in May of 1894 and died 67 years later a few hundred miles north in New York City. In the intervening years he was a detective, an invalid and one of Faulkner's drinking partners. He annoyed Hemingway, raised the wrath of the McCarthyites, fought in two wars, went to jail and revolutionized the now well-known genre of detective fiction. From Red Harvest through The Maltese Falcon. The Thin Man and a hundred more short stories, he developed and became the epitome of the hard-boiled but literate writer. He started with short stories in H.L. Mencken's The Smart Set, the home of such luminaries as Fitzgerald and Lewis, Huxley and Maugham, and ended up with the federal government trying to have his body removed from Arlington National Cemetery since Communist bones there would presumably pervert the sacredness of row after row of white crosses. His long-time companion, Lillian Hellman, who now runs his estate, refuses to allow anyone access to his papers for biographical purposes--presumably on the grounds that the man had had enough. Still, when Gertrude Stein first came to America, Hammett was the first writer she wanted to meet. Stein was all wrong about a lot of things, but she wasn't about Hammett.

Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not--or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague--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 best anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client.   Dashiell Hammett

Raymond Chandler, himself a hard-boiled writer, learned everything he knew from Hammett, as would Mickey Spillane and the rest of the hacks whose books would sell in the millions from racks in drugstores from sea to shining sea. In most respects they had it a lot easier than Hammett ever would, since Hammett didn't have the luxury of imitation or the luxury of being, like Spillane, a literary conglomerate. Still Chandler knew what the key to Hammett was. He wrote:

Hammett took murder out of the Venetian Vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn't have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post's idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws at a chicken wing.

When Dashiell Hammett returned from World War I--almost completely disabled with tuberculosis--detective fiction was still a relatively new, and relatively genteel thing. The roots of the form don't go back very far in American literature. It was Poe whose "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," started the whol thing in 1841. This was the first of three stories Poe was to write which featured C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur investigator who solved crimes through an extraordinary talent for analytic thinking. The stories were not terribly popular in the United States; indeed, Poe himself was not very popular in the United States (as his subsequent relegation to the boys books bin in local libraries will attest). But in Europe Poe's reputation was up there with the best, and fifty years later, his stories would influence another European, Arthur Conan Doyle, as he tried his hand in the amateur detective mode. When, in 1887, A Study in Scarlet introduced Sherlock Holmes, a whole new era in detective fiction began, one that was both ingenious and literate--a kind of highbrow distraction for the well-educated who didn't necessarily want to delve into Byron.

But Doyle's example aside, back in the U.S. detective fiction was still mired and moored in the melodramatic. Even at the turn of the century, detective books tended to involve a lot of heaving bodices, bloody hands and guilt that showed on people's faces like stigmata. There was lots of madness too, with birch trees whispering in the glens, repeating endlessly the names of hidden killers. All in all, it didn't have a hell of a lot to do with the era of the machine gun, of the celebrity poisonings, of the union-busting towns in the West that were run for and by thugs. Lead ruled in such towns, and in the cities too, and brought all the social amenities usually associated with superior firepower. There was Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone. There was Bonnie and Clyde and J. Edgar Hoover. America was well on its way to becoming the single most violent nation on the face of the earth, and yet mystery writers were still trapped in a Gothic sinkhole.

And it was into this scene that Hammett came. As Chandler said:

Hammett wrote for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude toward 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 and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. 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. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

Hammett was hardly unqualified. He had worked on and off, both before and after the first world war, for the famous Pinkerton detective agency; an agency which had started in the mid-19th century as a sort of freelance secret service, and by the 20s was the single largest and most famous private detective agency in the world. Their labors on behalf of big business, and their often distressing violent strikebreaking now gives the Pinkertons a hated name through much of the United States--but that was still only a small part of their business. Most of what they did was in the work of surveillance. The man you can't see in Hopper's "Nighthawks,"--the one standing just around the corner and made famous in so many noir films with his crumpled hat and his cigarette--was most likely a Pinkerton man. What made them different, and hence what made Hammett's characters different, was that the Pinkertons had a code.

The Pinkerton code, as filtered through such greats as Sam Spade, consisted of three parts--anonvmity, morality and objectivity. None of them were quite what they seemed. A good detective had to be anonymous, but not only so he wouldn't be seen--the less personal information there was, the less anyone could hold against him. A Pinkerton operative, or "Op" as he was known, was identified by number, and his final report to his client was ofter rewritten by someone else entirely. Morality was similarly skewed. In simple terms, his job was to protect good people from bad people--but since he was devoted to tracking down those who didn't play by the rules, he didn't have to either. He could lie, cheat, steal or blackmail--and as long as he did it skillfully enough not to be caught by either the authorities or his own supervisors, he was the better man. Finally, he could never become emotionally involved with a client, since, all the old movies aside, it usually ended up closer to suicide than to love.

It was, and it probably remains, a strange lifestyle and one very close to the self-imposed exile one would need to be a writer. Not much is known about Hammett's work for Pinkerton, aside from the fact that he was involved in the strange case of tracking down a man who had stolen a Ferris Wheel, and that he was involved in the most famous of the 1920s West Coast celebrity trials--the case of Fatty Arbuckle, in which Arbuckle, a famous film comedian, was accused of raping a woman and subsequently killing her by the sheer weight of his enormous bulk rupturing her bladder. It was perfect fodder for the tabloids of the day, but little is known of what Hammet had to do with it. Arbuckle was acquitted.

And it was there in San Francisco that Hammett was forced to give up his detective work because of ill health. It was also there that he started working on his detective stories--the most famous of which, the Continental Op stories--were to make him a wealthy and famous man. The Continental Op, of course had all the qualities of a Great American Hero. He was cynical, callous, and streetwise. He was always making seedy jokes, but he harbored the heart of the romantic. Hammett's Op never had a name, but you could never forget the voice. In some ways he was the last bastion of defense for the innocent. Beautiful women, chivalrous old men--they all lived in a dream world far above the thugs and petty schemers who were anxious for the quick kill and wanted to prey on all those nice people in all those nice houses. The Continental Op lived with the thugs, but he aspired, ethically at least, to the Victorian mansions. He would keep the wolves from their doors--and then they could go back to their fantasies. Only the Op knew it was a fantasy that didn't exist anymore, and that there was no such thing as justice.

And he spoke in the voice of the nostalgically hard-bitten. As Hammett wrote of corporate thugs in Red Harvest:

For forty years old Elihu Willsson had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts. He was president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation and along with this piece of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.

Back in the war days the I.W.W.--in full boom throughout the west--had lined up Personville Mining Corporation's help. The help hadn't exactly been pampered. They used their new strength to demand the things they wanted. Old Elihu gave them what he had to give them and bided his time.

In 1921 it came. Business was rotten. Old Elihu didn't care whether he shut down for a while or not. He tore up the agreements he had made with his men and began kicking them back into their prewar circumstances. Of course they yelled for help. They struck.

The strike lasted eight months. Both sides bled plenty. The Wobblies had to do their own bleeding. Old Elihu hired gunmen, strike breakers, national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army, to do his. When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker.

Hammett turned out a ton of these kinds of stories, before The Maltese Falcon was made into three different movie versions and made him famous. After that, he went out to Hollywood and lived the big life for a while, went broke, ran off to New York, lived in a hotel managed by Nathanial West and wrote The Thin Man--the book that would make him his second fortune. Nick Charles is the hero of The Thin Man, and he and his wife, Nora, are witty, urbane detectives who showed how much the sensibilities of the country had grown since Hammett first started. Nick Charles would rather go to a party than investigate--and both he and Nora would rather have had a roll in the hay (not always with each other) than a knock on the head. The Charles were made into movies and a radio series. Hammett revelled in his creation. Mickey Spillane was still doing hard-boiled stuff, of course but Hammett was again ahead of the pack.

And in New York Hammett drank with Faulkner, drinking so much that they often passed out together at swank parties and were steered to the coat room so as not to embarrass the guests. This was in the mid-thirties, and Hammett was at the height of his work--and of his political calling. Ever since Red Harvest his upbringing and sojourns among the scum that preyed on the poor had made him a devoted Marxist and remained devoted, giving time, money and writing to groups which sought to stamp out anti-Semitism and Fascism.

Not surprisingly, then, he begged the Army to take him into World War II. Then in his fifties, he still served for two years. Yet when he got out, and before he could go back to writing--the Red Scare was here. Hammett was called in front of numerous committees to talk about his Communist activities. He spent 26 weeks in jail once for refusing to cooperate with one such committee and though the sentence was only for contempt of court, the time in prison irrevocably destroyed his health. Then, he was out again, only to be hauled in front of more committees. Hammett had always claimed to be a Marxist and a Socialist--and put no faith in the Fascism that increasingly crept into Stalin's Russia. But such subtleties were lost on the zealots. Marxism was considered synonymous with godless, atheist Ivans. The labor movements of the '20s and '30s simply did not translate.

And the proceedings were often ludicrous:

Chairman: Well, now, you have told us that you will not tell us whether you are a member of the Communist Party today or not, on the ground that if you told us the answer might incriminate you. That is normally taken by this committee and the country as a whole to mean that you are a member of the Party, because if you were not, you would simply say, "No," and it would not incriminate you. You see, the only reason you have the right to refuse to answer is if you feel a truthful answer would incriminate you. An answer that you were not a Communist, if you were not a Communist, could not incriminate you. Therefore, you should know considerable about the Communist movement, I assume.

Mr. Hammett: Was that a question, sir?

The Committees could no longer throw him in jail, but they did for all intents and purposes. His livelihood was destroyed by the tax boys, and he spent the rest of his days as a recluse. He kept telling himself he could write again, but there were no jobs and it didn't happen. When he died, the government tried the last ignominy of removing his body from Arlington National Cemetery. Even though he had fought in two wars, the authorities saw him as a disgrace. The attempt didn't work. By the time they got around to it, McCarthy was out and the whole nightmare was over.

And now we have the whole story in Layman's The Shadow Man. Layman's book is the best of its kind around today, and even without the help of Lillian Hellman, he has pieced together the life in a readable, if somewhat stodgy account. It's workmanlike biography of an unworkmanlike man, with none of the flair that marked Hammett's writing and none of the hard sensibilities he made so popular. In some respects, it's not nearly as interesting as Hammett's fiction, since Hammett's Ops have more to say about the state of things in the urban steamvat than any academic ever will. Still, it's worth reading if only for a hint at how right Gertrude Stein was As he said in an early story:

You can go to hell trying to be a hero and nobody will even bat an eye. Nobody will even hear you fall--unless you happen to fall right on top of them. And even then they'll just arrest you for breaking their own, stupid little necks.

He probably didn't even know he was writing his own epitaph.