Hammett saw the world around him as chaotic, without form or design. By the mid-1930’s he had convinced himself that radical politics could provide a sense of order, and that perhaps an ideal “people’s world” was possible. Communism seemed to promise such a world, but he eventually discovered that it was an illusion. In his last years, Hammett realised that there was no apparent solution to world chaos.
Much has been written on the typical “Hammett hero.”
Critic John Paterson claims that he “is, in the final analysis, the apotheosis of every man of good will who, alienated by the values of his time, seeks desperately and mournfully to live without shame, to live without compromise lo his integrity.”
Philip Durham, who wrote the first biography of Raymond Chandler, (races Hammett’s hero back to
a tradition that began on the frontier in the early part of the nineteenth century. This American literary hero appeared constantly in the dime novels of the period, and was ready-made for such Western writers of the twentieth century as Owen Wister and Zane Grey. By the time Hammett picked him up in the pages of Black Mask, his heroic characteristics were clearly established: courage, physical strength, indestructibility, indifference to danger and death, a knightly attitude, celibacy, a measure of violence, and a sense of justice.
Hammett’s most sustained character, the Continental Op (who is featured here in seven stories), reflects the author’s dark world view, but he’s not overtly political, nor is he knightly. He’s a hard-working detective trying to get a job done. The Op describes himself as having a face that is “truthful witness to a life that hasn’t been overwhelmed with refinement and gentility,” adding that lie is “short, middle-aged, and thick-waisted,” and stubborn enough to be called “pig-headed.”
Hammett claimed to have based the Op on the man who had trained him to be a detective, the Pinkerton Agency’s Jimmy Wright of Baltimore. Wright taught young Hammett a basic code: Don’t cheat your client. Stay anonymous. Avoid undue physical risks. Be objective. Don’t become emotionally involved with a client. And never violate your integrity. This code stayed with Hammett; it not only served him while he was a working detective, but it also gave him a set of personal rules that shaped his actions throughout his life.
Of course, despite his age and physical appearance, the Op is Hammett himself in fictional guise. Told in the first person, many of the Op’s adventures are fictionalised versions of actual cases that Hammett worked on during his sporadic years as a detective. When young Hammett first joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the headquarters were in the Continental Building – clearly the source for the Op’s fictitious agency.
Hammett deliberately kept his character’s biographical background to a minimum. As critic Peter Wolfe notes, “he tells us nothing of [the Op’s] family, education, or religious beliefs.” Of course the Op has no religion in any traditional sense of the term; his religion is the always dangerous game of manhunting, a trade he pursues with near-sacred zeal.
If one sifts carefully through the canon (some three dozen stories), it is revealed that the Op joined Continental as “a young sprout of twenty” (Hammett’s age when he became a Pinkerton operative), that he held a captain’s commission in wartime military intelligence, that he speaks some French and German, eats all his meals out, smokes Fatima cigarettes, enjoys poker and prizefights, and avoids romantic entanglements (“They don’t go with the job”). Pragmatic, hard-souled, and tenacious, he resorts to physical violence when necessary and uses a gun when he has to, but prefers using his wits. He is as close to an actual working detective as Hammett could make him.
Hammett featured the Op in his earlier long works, Blood Money (also known as The Big Knockover), Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse, all of which were revised from Black Mask novellas.
His next major fictional creation was San Francisco private eye Samuel Spade, to whom Hammett gave his first name. (As a Pinkerton, he had always been called Sam. When he turned to writing, he became simply Dashiell Hammett.) Spade made his debut in The Maltese Falcon, a five-part Black Mask serial that Hammett carefully reworked for book publication by Alfred A. Knopf. Most critics rate this “saga of a private detective” as the finest crime novel written in this century. Describing his character for a Modern Library edition of Falcon, Hammett stated:
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… 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 get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.
Indeed, this was precisely the way Hammett wrote Spade in The Maltese Falcon – able to match wits with the crafty fat man, Casper Gutman, in tracking down the fabled bird of the title; able to handle the intrusive police; and able to fend off the advances of seductive Brigid O’Shaughnessy in solving the murder of his partner, Miles Archer.
Hammett never intended to make Spade a continuing character; in completing The Maltese Falcon he was “done with him.” Yet he had not foreseen the book’s wide and lasting popularity, nor that it would become a supremely successful radio series, nor that no less than three motion pictures would be produced based on the published novel.
The public demanded more Spade stories, and Hammett’s literary agent pleaded with the author to come up with new adventures. Hammett was reluctant, but he was also short of money. He made vast sums in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, but he squandered every dollar as quickly as he earned it. Money was for spending and Hammett always felt that more of it would magically appear as needed. Finally, he sat down to rap out three new Spade stories, placing two of them with The American Magazine and the final one with Collier’s.
All three are in the present collection: A Man Called Spade, Too Many I lave Lived, and They Can Only Hang You Once. The tales are crisp, efficient, and swift-moving.
The other stories assembled here demonstrate Hammett’s bold experimentation with language and viewpoint. Compare the fussy, ornate narration in A Man Named Thin (featuring a poet-detective) with the crude, uneducated narration of the young boxer in His Brother’s Keeper. Both are told first-person, but they are leagues apart. Hammett tackles a female point of view in the superbly written Ruffian’s Wife, and brings off a neat twist ending in The Second-Story Angel (note the understated humour in this one).
Both Afraid of a Gun and The Man Who Killed Dan Odams are set far from his usual San Francisco locale and demonstrate the wide range of Hammett’s fiction. Gun takes place in the high mountain country, and Dan Odams is a semi-modern Western set in Montana. They represent Hammett in top form.
While the majority of pulp writers in the twenties and thirties were grinding out stories for money, Hammett worked as a dedicated artist. He gave each story the best of himself, labouring over each sentence, each turn of phrase. And he was constantly seeking new ideas and new characters. His protagonist in The Assistant Murderer is a prime example. With Alec Rush, the author created a detective described as incredibly ugly, a radical departure from the usual magazine hero. Hammett was striking out in a fresh direction with this story, which involves a complex case solved not by Rush but by the killer’s confession.