The Assistant Murderer was written just before Hammett temporarily left Black Mask for his unsuccessful attempt at a career in advertising. One feels that had he remained with the magazine, Hammett might well have written more stories featuring this offbeat detective.
During the pulp era, editors constantly called for “Action! More action!” Hammett decided to see just how much action he could pack into a single novella. Originally printed in Argosy All-Story Weekly, the title story of this collection, Nightmare Town, is a tour de force in sustained violence. The hero wields an ebony walking stick with devastating effectiveness, cracking skulls and breaking bones in the finest pulp tradition.
An important contribution in Nightmare Town is The First Thin Man, which here achieves its first book printing. This early version of 1930 stands in sharp contrast to the novel Hammett eventually finished for Alfred A. Knopf three years later, with vast differences in basic approach, mood, plot, and tone. A call from Hollywood and the promise of substantial film money had caused Hammett to abandon the original manuscript at sixty-five typed pages. When he returned to it three years later, John Guild, the Op-like working detective – dedicated, stoic, close-mouthed – was replaced by Nick Charles, a hard-drinking, party-loving cynic, an ex-crime solver with no desire to solve more crimes; he just wanted another martini. It was Nick’s wife, Nora (modelled directly on Lillian Hellman), who badgered him into becoming a detective again to solve the case of the missing thin man.
Dashiell Hammett had undergone a major life change between 1930 and 1933, and Nick Charles marked the end of Hammett’s career as a novelist. He had written himself into a blind corner and no longer believed that the criminal ills of society could be dealt with on a one-to-one basis. In Hammett’s view, a lone detective (such as Sam Spade or John Guild) could do nothing to stem the mounting tide of societal corruption. The detective’s code of personal honour could have no effect on a dishonourable world. Hammett’s core bitterness and cynicism, reflected in a less obvious form in his earlier work, had now taken centre stage. He was no longer able to believe in heroes. Even plainspoken, down-to-earth, working heroes.
In 1951, after he was sentenced for contempt because he refused to name names before a federal judge in New York, Hammett spent five months in jail in defence of his political beliefs. But he never believed in political violence and had been shocked when Senator Joseph McCarthy asked him if he had ever engaged in an act of sabotage against the United States. Having served his country in two world wars as an enlisted soldier, he loved America, even as he despised its capitalist politics.
Hammett’s final years, following his release from prison, were sad ones. His name was removed from a film based on one of his characters; his radio shows were cancelled; and a scheduled collection of his fiction was dropped by the publisher. He spent most of his last decade isolated in a small gatekeeper’s cottage in Katonah, New York. On two occasions shots were fired through his front windows, but Hammett bore his exile with stoic acceptance.
Sick and frail, blacklisted as a political pariah, unable to write, and hounded by the IRS for taxes on money he no longer earned, Samuel Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer in 1961, at the age of sixty-six.
He considered himself a literary failure, but, as this book helps prove, he was anything but that. No other writer since Edgar Allan Poe has exerted a greater influence on mystery fiction. His art was timeless and his work has not dated. In the genre of detective fiction, he was a master.
That mastery is evident in Nightmare Town, the largest collection of his shorter works and by far the most comprehensive.
WILLIAM F. NOLAN
West Hills, California 1999
NIGHTMARE TOWN
A Ford – whitened by desert travel until it was almost indistinguishable from the dust-clouds that swirled around it – came down Izzard’s Main Street. Like the dust, it came swiftly, erratically, zigzagging the breadth of the roadway.
A small woman – a girl of twenty in tan flannel – stepped into the street. The wavering Ford missed her by inches, missing her at all only because her backward jump was bird-quick. She caught her lower lip between white teeth, dark eyes flashed annoyance at the rear of the passing machine, and she essayed the street again.
Near the opposite curb the Ford charged down upon her once more. But turning had taken some of its speed. She escaped it this time by scampering the few feet between her and the sidewalk ahead.
Out of the moving automobile a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his gray eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.
The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face – a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.
“I beg y’r par’on,” he said. “’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ‘S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi-eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”
The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.
He stared after her with stupid surprise in his eyes until she had vanished through a doorway in the middle of the block. Then he scratched his head, shrugged, and turned to look across the street, where his machine had pushed its nose into the red-brick side wall of the Bank of Izzard and now shook and clattered as if in panic at finding itself masterless.
“Look at the son-of-a-gun,” he exclaimed.
A hand fastened upon his arm. He turned his head, and then, though he stood a good six feet himself, had to look up to meet the eyes of the giant who held his arm.
“We’ll take a little walk,” the giant said.
The man in bleached khaki examined the other from the tips of his broad-toed shoes to the creased crown of his black hat, examined him with a whole-hearted admiration that was unmistakable in his red-rimmed eyes. There were nearly seven massive feet of the speaker. Legs like pillars held up a great hogshead of a body, with wide shoulders that sagged a little, as if with their own excessive weight. He was a man of perhaps forty-five, and his face was thick-featured, phlegmatic, with sunlines around small light eyes – the face of a deliberate man.
“My God, you’re big!” the man in khaki exclaimed when he had finished his examination; and then his eyes brightened. “Let’s wrestle. Bet you ten bucks against fifteen I can throw you. Come on!”
The giant chuckled deep in his heavy chest, took the man in khaki by the nape of the neck and an arm, and walked down the street with him.
Steve Threefall awakened without undue surprise at the unfamiliarity of his surroundings as one who has awakened in strange places before. Before his eyes were well open he knew the essentials of his position. The feel of the shelf-bunk on which he lay and the sharp smell of disinfectant in his nostrils told him that he was in jail. His head and his mouth told him that he had been drunk; and the three-day growth of beard on his face told him he had been very drunk.