As Hammett’s health improved, Joseph T. Shaw, the new editor of Black Mask, was able to lure him back to the magazine by promising higher rates (up to six cents a word) and offering him “a free creative hand” in developing novel-length material. “Hammett was the leader in what finally brought the magazine its distinctive form,” Shaw declared. “He told his stories with a new kind of compulsion and authenticity. And he was one of the most careful and painstaking workmen I have ever known.”
A two-part novella, The Big Knockover, was followed by the Black Mask stories that led to his first four published books: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. They established Hammett as the nation’s premier writer of detective fiction.
By 1930 he had separated from his family and moved to New York, where he reviewed books for the Evening Post. Later that year, at the age of thirty-six, he journeyed back to the West Coast after The Maltese Falcon was sold to Hollywood, to develop screen material for Paramount. Hammett cut a dapper figure in the film capital. A sharp, immaculate dresser, he was dubbed “a Hollywood Dream Prince” by one local columnist. Tall, with a trim moustache and a regal bearing, he was also known as a charmer, exuding an air of mature masculinity that made him extremely attractive to women.
It was in Hollywood, late that year, that he met aspiring writer Lillian Hellman and began an intense, volatile, often mutually destructive relationship that lasted, on and off, for the rest of his life. To Hellman, then in her mid-twenties, Hammett was nothing short of spectacular. Hugely successful, he was handsome, mature, well-read, and witty – a combination she found irresistible.
Hammett eventually worked with Hellman on nearly all of her original plays (the exception being The Searching Wind). He painstakingly supervised structure, scenes, dialogue, and character, guiding Hellman through several productions. His contributions were enormous, and after Hammett’s death, Hellman never wrote another original play.
In 1934, the period following the publication of The Thin Man, Hammett was at the height of his career. On the surface, his novel featuring Nick and Nora Charles was brisk and humorous, and it inspired a host of imitations. At heart, however, the book was about a disillusioned man who had rejected the detective business and no longer saw value in the pursuit of an investigative career.
The parallel between Nick Charles and Hammett was clear; he was about to reject the genre that had made him famous. He had never been comfortable as a mystery writer. Detective stories no longer held appeal for him. (“This hard-boiled stuff is a menace.”)
He wanted to write an original play, followed by what he termed “socially significant novels,” but he never indicated exactly what he had in mind. However, after 1934, no new Hammett fiction was printed during his lifetime. He attempted mainstream novels under several titles: There Was a Young Man (1938); My Brother Felix (1939); The Valley Sheep Are Fatter (1944); The Hunting Boy (1949); and December 1 (1950). In each case the work was aborted after a brief start. His only sizable piece of fiction, Tulip (1952) – unfinished at 17,000 words – was printed after his death. It was about a man who could no longer write.
Hammett’s problems were twofold. Having abandoned detective fiction, lie had nothing to put in its place. Even more crippling, he had shut himself down emotionally, erecting an inner wall between himself and his public. He had lost the ability to communicate, to share his emotions. As the years slipped past him, he drank, gambled, womanized, and buried himself in Marxist doctrines. His only creative outlet was his work on Hellman’s plays. There is no question that his input was of tremendous value to her, but it did not satisfy his desire to prove himself as a major novelist.
The abiding irony of Hammett’s career is that he had already produced at least three major novels: Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key – all classic works respected around the world.
But here, in this collection, we deal with his shorter tales, many of them novella length. They span a wide range, and some are better than others, but each is pure Hammett, and the least of them is marvellously entertaining.
What makes Dashiell Hammett’s work unique in the genre of mystery writing? The answer is: authenticity.
Hammett was able to bring the gritty argot of the streets into print, to realistically portray thugs, hobos, molls, stoolies, gunmen, political bosses, and crooked clients, allowing them to talk and behave on paper as they had talked and behaved during Hammett’s manhunting years. His stint as a working operative with Pinkerton provided a rock-solid base for his fiction. He had pursued murderers, investigated bank swindlers, gathered evidence for criminal trials, shadowed jewel thieves, tangled with safecrackers and holdup men, tracked counterfeiters, been involved in street shoot-outs, exposed forgers and blackmailers, uncovered a missing gold shipment, located a stolen Ferris wheel, and performed as guard, hotel detective, and strikebreaker.
When Hammett sent his characters out to work the mean streets of San Francisco, readers responded to his hard-edged depiction of crime as it actually existed. No other detective-fiction writer of the period could match his kind of reality.
Nightmare Town takes us back to those early years when Hammett’s talent burned flame-bright, the years when he was writing with force and vigour in a spare, stripped style that matched the intensity of his material. Working mainly in the pages of Black Mask (where ten of these present stories were first printed), Hammett launched a new style of detective fiction in America: bitter, tough, and unsentimental, reflecting the violence of the time. The staid English tradition of the tweedy gentleman detective was shattered, and murder bounced from the tea garden to the back alley. The polite British sleuth gave way to a hard-boiled man of action who didn’t mind bending some rules to get the job done, who could hand out punishment and take it, and who often played both sides of the law.
The cynic and the idealist were combined in Hammett’s protagonists: their carefully preserved toughness allowed them to survive. Nobody could bluff them or buy them off. They learned to keep themselves under tight control, moving warily through a dark landscape (Melville’s “appalling ocean”) in which sudden death, duplicity, and corruption were part of the scenery. Nevertheless, they idealistically hoped for a better world and worked toward it. Hammett gave these characters organic life.
Critic Graham Mclnnes finds that “Hammett’s prose… has the polish and meat of an essay by Bacon or a poem by Donne, both of whom also lived in an age of violence and transition.”
The theme of a corrupt society runs like a dark thread through much of Hammett’s work. The title story of this collection, which details a “nightmare” town in which every citizen – from policeman to businessman – is crooked, foreshadows his gangster-ridden saga of Poisonville in Red Harvest. (The actual setting for his novel was Butte, Montana, and reflects the corruption Hammett had found there with Frank Little’s death in 1917.)