Raymond Chandler, the man who walked through the door Dashiell Hammett kicked open, paid him the sincerest homage. In his oft-quoted essay on the American detective story, “The Simple Art of Murder,” the creator of Philip Marlowe wrote that the creator of Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles “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.”
Chandler was crediting Hammett with creating a new kind of crime story that contrasted sharply with the genteel formula fiction of Edgar Wallace and Agatha Christie. In “The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett,” Nathan Ward shows that Hammett’s innovative style did not, as it may have seemed, spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Ward shadows the author of “The Maltese Falcon,” “Red Harvest” and “The Thin Man” from a Philadelphia and Baltimore boyhood to his years out West as a Pinkerton detective to California as a writer of crime novels and screenplays.
Hammett’s last book was published in 1934, but as Ward puts it: “(T)he lasting mystery of Dashiell Hammett was not why he stopped writing. … It was how he came to the writing life at all.” He was born Samuel Dashiell Hammett in southern Maryland in 1894. His mother called him “Da-SHEEL”; to most of his friends he was Sam. Sam was a voracious reader, everything from classic European literature to American pulp. He joined the already legendary Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915, taking leave in 1918 to enlist in the Army. A case of Spanish flu developed into tuberculosis.
His illness, thought his daughter Jo, “caused him to conclude that it was useless to take good care of himself …. (He) sneaked out to town and smoked drank, and helled around,” believing that his disease “respected toughness, a quality that my father admired greatly.” This attitude fit right into the Pinkerton mold. The ideal detective, thought agency founder Allan Pinkerton, was “a knight who could pass as a rogue.”
With deft investigative work, Ward shows how much of Hammett’s fiction owed to Pinkerton reports. “A private detective,” Hammett once explained, “does not want to be an erudite solver of riddles, 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.”
But Hammett grew jaded with experience. His other daughter, Mary, was shocked to find out that her father didn’t care “if his clients were bums. He was strictly out to do his job.”
His illness, coupled with his increasing dislike of the Pinkerton’s politics — strike breaking, for instance, was contrary to his radical political views — led him to pursue a literary career. He had the luck to sell one of his first crime stories to The Black Mask, which had been started by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. The magazine left him free to pursue a new kind of sensibility where “the puzzle isn’t so interesting … as the behavior of the detective attacking it.”
Inevitably, Hammett’s writing became more violent and nihilistic. An early draft of his novel “Red Harvest” (about a detective dealing with corrupt police, union heads and mine owners in an unnamed Western town) drew a comment from an editor that “the violence seems piled on too heavily; so many killings on a page I believe make the reader doubt the story.” It was precisely Hammett’s dark talent, though, that made the blood spilling seem realistic and exciting.
By the time he created Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” (1929), his protagonist had wised up and worked for no one but himself. “Spade had no original,” Hammett told an interviewer. “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.” The novel was filmed three times; John Huston’s 1941 version with Humphrey Bogart as Spade is seminal to the history of film noir.
When his most popular creations, “The Thin Man’s” Nick and Nora Charles, made it to the screen, they had to be toned down from the book’s hard-bitten originals. Writing to his longtime companion Lillian Hellman, Hammett revealed the contempt he had come to feel for the Charleses: “(N)obody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters.”
Ward, who is also the author of a superb account of crime on the New York waterfront, “Dark Harbor,” has written a lively, witty account of how Hammett came to be Hammett — a portrait of the artist, if you will, as a cynical man. He lets Chandler have the last word: “(Hammett) did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”
Allen Barra writes about books and the arts for The Daily Beast and Salon.com.
“The Lost Detective”
By Nathan Ward, Bloomsbury, 215 pages, $26
