Op Art

A new volume in The Library of America series of American classics is always worth a word of welcome. These are definitive texts of the major works of major writers in attractive volumes on good paper at bargain prices; one can find Henry James’ prefaces, for instance, or the memoirs of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant or the collected novels of Zora Neale Hurston: There are so far 113 volumes in the series. Dashiell Hammett is a deserving and maybe even belated addition. Hammett is credited with being, after Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the American detective story and is the absolute master of the so-called hard-boiled school which has become the norm for the American, as distinguished from the British, variant of this genre, represented by Agatha Christie et al. (Raymond Chandler, though English, was, one could say, of the American school.) Hammett published the first four of the five novels collected here (“Red Harvest,” “The Dain Curse,” “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Glass Key”) between 1929 and 1931, written while he was living in San Francisco, and the last of them, “The Thin Man,” in 1934, when he moved to Hollywood after the success of the earlier books. Reading them consecutively gives a clearer impression of their evolution and artistry than reading any one alone. Transcending the detective genre they helped create, “The Glass Key” and “The Maltese Falcon” are surely among the great American novels of any sort. Yet Hammett’s works taken together do not provide a clue to their central mystery: How did they evolve from the episodic, Black Mask corpse-a-page style toward the perfection of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Glass Key”? After “The Thin Man,” he would live another 27 years, trying agonizingly to write and producing virtually nothing. What factors precipitated this silence? Did the writer know when he could do no better and obey some internal injunction to stop? Does the explanation lie in the external circumstances of his life--in Hammett’s case success, money, drink, poor health or even, as some suggest, his acquaintance with Lillian Hellman, which, coincidentally or not, picked up at the same time he stopped writing? His first novel, “Red Harvest,” is little more than a longer version of the Black Mask magazine stories that he had started with, for which he had invented an appealing main character, The Continental Op, a 5-foot, 6-inch, plain and plump, tough detective who in physical respects was Hammett’s opposite and in reflective but taciturn nature may have been Hammett’s alter-ego. With its broadly allegorical names (the town the Op has to clean up is called Poisonville), “Red Harvest” was enthusiastically claimed by critics of a certain period as expressing Hammett’s Communist leanings and indignant sympathy with the working classes, and it did undoubtedly reflect his experiences as a Pinkerton detective, especially as a strike-breaker. “Red,” however, more obviously refers to the bloody harvest of corpses--19 or 20 in the course of the short work--as the Op cleans up a rough corrupt Western town. As in the Black Mask, the bad guys mean to die as they had lived; the police are almost always corrupt; the streets are awash with drugs and bootleg liquor. The gothic “The Dain Curse,” also featuring the Op, reflects an increasing interest on Hammett’s part in the psychological development of the characters and in the craft of writing: There is a novelist character who describes his business as being about “souls and what goes on in them.” And there is abundant evidence of the young Hammett’s wide reading and intellectual curiosity, with references to parapsychology, genetics, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cults and ghosts. One of the villains rails against the concept of the unconscious (“a set of false whiskers for the charlatan”), and the mad bad heroine thinks she has a blood curse. Luckily the Op is up to the task of sorting out the troubled Dain family, including in a revealing scene in which he weans the heroine from her morphine habit, not denying that he may know something about it from personal experience. “The Maltese Falcon” is an almost perfect blend of the hardboiled tale perfected by Hammett with the romantic elements of a treasure quest: an enormously valuable falcon, the legacy of Maltese knights, and the charmingly sinister characters who seek it, more or less inseparable by now from Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, who incarnated them in the classic film, along with Humphrey Bogart’s Spade and Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Spade is a straight shooter, the honest, pragmatic tough guy who won’t be bribed or pull something shady, if only because it doesn’t pay in the long run: “[T]he next time I tried to put over a fast one they’d stop me so fast I’d swallow my teeth. Hell with that . . . I’m business here.” And the famous line, with its echo of Hemingway’s mannered repetitions: “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.” Hammett claimed not to have been influenced by Hemingway and vice versa, but modernism was in the air, with its reaction to the voluptuous discursiveness and rumination of Victorian prose. Hammett’s prose, sometimes irritating today for its outmoded slang, however appropriate to the criminal milieu of the time (“Got the roscoe?”), prefigures the determined objective style of later writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet. One could argue that the influence of the hard-boiled style has not always been salutary. The fact that the thoughts of the characters are never revealed gives the writing a cinematic quality that was, of course, recognized early by the film industry and explains why “The Maltese Falcon” could be filmed nearly as it was written. Spade “set the edges of his teeth together and said through them ‘I won’t play the sap for you,’ ” exactly as Humphrey Bogart did in the film. We must infer the inner life of Spade or of Ned Beaumont by the way they throw their overcoats on a chair or by the pallor of their faces (“his face was pasty in color, but its lines were strong and cheerful, and his eyes, though somewhat red-veined, were clear. . . .”). It is the “show, don’t tell” dictum beloved of creative writing teachers taken to its extreme and, in fact, to its dead end. In “The Glass Key,” Hammett’s preoccupation with the physical symptoms of the hero, or anti-hero Beaumont, whom we see prefigured in Spade, is especially pronounced. Beaumont is a down-at-the-heels gambler, handsome but shaky, temperamental and in bad physical shape. He is frequently knocked around, sweats nervously backs off from quarrels, and his thoughts must be read through the changes in his physiognomy. Yet an argument could be made for this as the greatest of Hammett’s novels, in which he returns to his preferred theme of corruption in politics with a complicated intrigue involving loyalty and disloyalty among thieves, love and the Hammett-esque subject of family conflict and mistrust, especially a father-daughter conflict that oddly prefigures his own future relationship with his older daughter. But one could also argue that it left Hammett stylistically nowhere else to go, except into the sort of self-parody that Hemingway would in fact fall into. Beaumont and a friend are waiting for a man who owes Ned money: “He ordered a double Scotch, Jack another rickey. Ned Beaumont emptied his glass as soon as it arrived. Jack let his first drink be carried away no more than half-consumed and sipped at his second. Presently Ned Beaumont had another double Scotch and another while Jack had come to finish none of his drinks.” From this we must infer the emotional dynamic, and the meaning, of the scene. The wisecracking Nick and Nora Charles of “The Thin Man” retreat into the film idiom of the period. The intimacy of their relationship ought to give them a fuller possibility for expressive dialogue, but it does not, though the voluble narrator, Nick, is full of detective lore in the manner of the Op. If the republication of Hammett’s novels is welcome, the publication of stories in “Nightmare Town” is less so--though they won’t be without interest to his most passionate fans or those who are particularly interested in Hammett’s development as a writer. But these readers should be sure to look up Hammett’s serious stories, written before his Black Mask period, with a certain degree of literary ambition; they are of particular interest because of their glimpse into Hammett’s own life--for instance, the story of a young soldier in a tuberculosis hospital taking a day trip to Tijuana. Those are serious, personal and naturalistic, and the difference between them and the stories in “Nightmare Town” indicates the extent to which he was writing to a formula for the requirements of Black Mask and other detective magazines, a formula he appropriated brilliantly to his particular talent but that here rather rigorously follows with only average results. The evolving stylistic shift in Hammett’s work is interesting. Steve Threefall, in the early story “Nightmare Town,” reveals his thoughts in a normal indirect interior monologue: “Steve stared at the thin man. This was the man he had accepted on an evening’s acquaintance as a comrade! A man who lay on the street and let his companion do the fighting for both.” Elsewhere he asks himself, “Suppose he had told the truth? Would it have helped justice?” This sort of rumination disappeared and was replaced with simple statements like Spade’s “I won’t play the sap for you.” In the novels, at least, Hammett’s personal method of showing not telling has the luxury of length to show something, which the stories barely do. They do, however, include enjoyable bits of lore that come out of his own experience as a detective with the Pinkerton Agency: “There are four rules for shadowing: Keep behind your subject as much as possible; never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens; and never meet his eye.” These tips are ordinarily given us by the lovable Continental Op. Reading Hammett’s “action” stories, one is struck again by the almost obsessive recurrence of certain themes, especially that of political corruption and the relations between fathers and sons or fathers and daughters. Unlike his own father, a policeman, the fathers are often powerful and evil or corrupt, like the pair of fathers, Madvig and Sen. Henry, in “The Glass Key.” In the little story “A Man Named Thin,” the narrator is the poet son of a relatively benign senior detective, Thin; this and another story, “The First Thin Man,” prefigure “The Thin Man,” his last novel. The three stories in which Sam Spade appears were written after “The Maltese Falcon,” inspired by Spade’s success and Hammett’s chronic need for money. We have the Continental Op here in seven stories. In the case of Hammett, these stories had been published mostly in the detective story magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, but they were early and mannered little genre stories that do not really compare to his great novels. Two earlier collections have appeared. William Nolan’s introduction to the stories is informative and helpful, as are Steven Marcus’ notes to the novels. The bibliographic information in the volume of stories is less complete, in that it doesn’t give the dates of the original publication of the stories. But the recent publication of previously unpublished Hemingway manuscripts in “At First Light” has raised interesting questions about the value of digging up every scrap of even a great writer’s work. Is it important to have everything, no matter how slight, or is it better to follow his own instincts in holding things back? It is certainly possible to argue that everything published in a writer’s lifetime is fair game for republication: One thinks of The Library of America edition of Poe’s stories, for example. But from a reader’s point of view, “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Glass Key” better repay a revisit.