Tartan Noir, Scandinavian, Nordic Noir, they all share a common root: the American hard boiled detective novel. Long considered the grandfather of the genre, Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels.
Born on May 27, 1894, in the farm country of Maryland, his father was a ne'er-do-well with a fondness for alcohol and the ladies. His mother was a nurse. The family moved to Philadelphia and then Baltimore, where Hammett left school at 13 to support the family. He found work in various unskilled labor jobs before joining the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Baltimore when he was 21.
Starting as a clerk, he was eventually trained as an investigator by James Wright, "a squat little man" who was used as a model for Continental Op in Hammett's early short stories. In 1917 he was sent to Montana to work for the copper mine owners in a dispute with the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. He declined his employer's offer of $5,000 to kill Wobbly leader Frank Little.
Lillian Hellman wrote of this episode's impact on Hammett in Scoundrel Time:
Through the years he was to repeat that bribe offer (to kill Frank Little) so many times, that I came to believe, knowing him now, that it was a kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would murder, and the fact that Frank Little was lynched with three other men in what was known as the Everett Massacre must have been, for Hammett, an abiding horror. I think I can date Hammett's belief that he was living in a corrupt society from Little's murder.
Leaving Pinkerton, he joined the Army during WWI and drove an ambulance stateside for the Motor Ambulance Corps. He developed tuberculosis after a bout with the Spanish influenza that would leave him in fragile health for the rest of his life. He returned to work for Pinkerton after his discharge and moved to Spokane, Washington. While hospitalized once more for TB he met Josephine Dolan, a nurse in Tacoma, WA. They married in San Francisco and had two daughters.
Looking to supplement his tiny veteran's pension, Hammett wrote advertising copy for a jeweler in San Francisco. That work ended when he once again became ill. In 1926, the year his second daughter was born, a nurse suggested that he not live with his wife and young family to avoid exposing them to tuberculosis. He found a house for them north of San Francisco where he visited on weekends from his apartment in the City. They would continue to live apart and although they divorced in 1937, he continued to support his family until his funds dried up.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1929 and soon met the playwright Lillian Hellman. The relationship with Hellman lasted, off and on, for the rest of his life. Together they became fierce anti-fascists, joining with "other literary figures such as Clifford Odets, Michael Gold, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway in supporting the Popular Front government during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1937 he joined the American Communist Party."
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dashiell Hammett, at 48, enlisted once again in the Army. Although his tuberculosis kept him off the front lines, he was sent to the Aleutian Islands were he edited an Army newspaper and mentored young soldiers including Bernard Kalb who went on to become a television news reporter.
Hammett continued his political activism after the war and served as President of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) of New York in 1946. The Civil Rights Congress was a group formed from three groups with ties to the Communist Party USA: the International Labor Defense, the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. It was dedicated to defending those who it felt were framed by the government and promoting civil rights for white and black Americans.
According to the HUAC "Report on Civil Rights Congress as a communist front organization. Investigation of un-American activities in the United States, Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first session. Public law 601 (section 121, subsection Q (2))," the Civil Rights Congress described itself as:
"The CRC is a national membership organization formed by hundreds of national
and community groups from all parts of the country to provide a well-organized,
unified program of action to defend and extend the democratic rights of every
American."
As part of the effort to defend those that the CRC felt were being persecuted by the government, a fund was established to bail out the victims who were detained.
In 1949, 11 Communist leaders were convicted of violating the Smith Act. They were bailed out by the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund committee, which Hammett chaired. When they lost the final appeal in '51, four of the men jumped bail. Hammett was summoned to federal court, where he refused to testify about them or the bail fund contributors. He believed freedom of speech included the right to silence. On his lawyers' advice, Hammett took the Fifth Amendment. He was found in contempt of court and sentenced to six months in jail. SF Chronicle
He was then called to testify by McCarthy's infamous Senate committee in 1953. While he was willing to testify about his own activities, he refused to testify about others and was found in contempt of Congress and was blacklisted in Hollywood.
Meanwhile, the IRS had filed a lien against him for back taxes to the tune of over $100,000.
He died while living in Lillian Hellman's New York apartment on January 10, 1961, broke and suffering from lung cancer.
Little wonder that with a nature and history such as his, he would craft works that exposed the underbelly of American society.
He began writing stories for Black Mask, the pulp fiction magazine in 1922. Eventually he would use these stories to form the base of his novels,
Red Harvest and
Dain Curse. He would also serialize
The Maltese Falcon in the magazine.
A complete list of his work can be found at Authors & Creators
Thrilling Detective Website.
Although everyone probably has their favorite Hammett novel, for me it is
The Thin Man, the last complete novel that he wrote. I prefer it to the movie, although the casting of William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles is ideal and one can't help but see them while reading the novel.
Told almost entirely in dialogue, the story is of the vacation holliday of Nick and Nora Charles. In New York for Christmas, Nick runs into the daughter of a man that he did a bit of sleuthing for before he got out of the detective business to manage his new wife's fortune. Although her parents had divorced, and her mother remarried, Dorothy Wynant is concerned because her father is missing.
Wanting no part of the search for Clyde Wynant, Charles would rather drink alcohol in speakeasies or his hotel room and party with his wife and friends. Events conspire to draw him in, with Nora's urging and copious amounts of booze. The novel travels from the upper class but bizarrely twisted Wynant family, to the street thugs of prohibition era New York.
According to Lillian Hellman,
“It was nice to be Nora,” Hellman wrote in 1965, “married to Nick Charles, maybe one of the few marriages in modern literature where the man and woman like each other and have a fine time together. But I was soon put back in place—Hammett said I was also the silly girl in the book and the villainess.”
And although the movie makes it appear to be a comedy, it really isn't. The novel is darker than the movie, and the dialogue is better. Much was lifted into the movie, but much more remains for the reader in the book. It is witty, it is funny and it is sexy. Surprisingly so for its era. And it is also a little sad.
In the movie we won't find the five word question that helped propell this book into bestselling territory:
NORA: Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?
NICK: Oh, a little.
NORA: (laughing) If you aren’t a disgusting old lecher.
The publisher, Alfred P Knopf, placed this ad in the New York Times on January, 30, 1934. (And although newer editions, including mine on the kindle, have changed the question to read, "didn't you get excited?" the original was enough to get it banned in Canada.)
As a reader I was fascinated to see how Dashiell Hammett managed to tell a three dimensional tale using such sparse exposition. There is almost no description that is not given in dialogue. And the dialogue is written as people speak, with interruptions, run on sentences, and cross talk. It is an almost noisy novel. Much has been made of his influence on Lillian Hellman's work, but this novel feels like his exposure to playwriting has influenced his work.
In a major departure from the book, the movie includes a final dining room gathering of all the suspects during which Charles announces the murderer. There is no such gathering in the novel, although I can understand why Hollywood used that standard plot device and throwback to the older era of mysteries. In the novel, the solution is exposed in a (surprise!) conversation between Nick and Nora, after the police arrest the guilty party.
In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler has this to say about Hammett and his style:
"Hammett wrote... for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse ... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. "
"He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he 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."
Dashiell Hammett took the mystery novel out of the drawing rooms of English country houses and made it uniquely American. Our heroes were the hard boiled, the real people of the street who dealt with the muck and filth of crime and murder while adhering to a code of honor that kept their souls clean. Drawing rooms and fainting ladies were out and a new realism was introduced to the mystery genre. Less manners, more murder.
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule