He was kidding, of course.
Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today’s e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It’s a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.
J.M.R.
INTRODUCTION
The Later Years: 1926–1930
Dashiell Hammett served his apprenticeship under editors Sutton and Cody, but by the end of 1925 he had outgrown them. When Cody refused his demand for more money, Hammett quit the magazine, and in March 1926 he took a job as advertising manager at Albert S. Samuels Jewelry Store in San Francisco, “the House of Lucky Wedding Rings.” The pay was $350 per month (about $55,000 per year in 2015 dollars), double his monthly income from writing for the pulps. It was his first full-time job in at least three years and, more likely, since he left the army. At Samuels he impressed his boss with his energy and ingenuity, working from 8 to 6, six days a week—but it was too much. Five months later, on 20 July, he was found collapsed in his office, lying in a pool of blood. His younger daughter Josephine was not quite two months old. Eight weeks later, Samuels wrote a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau certifying that Hammett had resigned his position due to ill health. His earnings, now reduced to disability payments, dropped to $80 per month plus payment for some part-time work he did for Samuels. Moreover, the Veterans Bureau nurses insisted that Hammett live apart from his wife and children, which meant two rent payments. Within three months, he moved to 891 Post St. (the address of Sam Spade’s apartment in The Maltese Falcon) and Jose and the girls stayed first in an apartment in San Francisco, then across San Francisco Bay in Fairfax in Marin County. Hammett, meanwhile, tried to revive his advertising career from his apartment, publishing how-to articles in Western Advertising.
Meanwhile, a shakeup was materializing at Black Mask. Circulation was decreasing sharply, and Cody, whose attentions were divided among other Pro-Distributors projects, needed a new editor to revitalize the magazine. The successful applicant was a fifty-one-year old aspiring mystery writer who had submitted his first story to Black Mask in summer 1926. Joseph Thompson Shaw was a most unlikely candidate to edit a pulp detective-fiction magazine. He was a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he was a member of the editorial board for the school literary magazine. He was a four-time national sabers champion. He had worked as a journalist at The New York World, as a clerk at G. P. Putnam’s publishing company, and as editor of American Textile Journal, before embarking on a successful career in the textile business. Then he opened his own office to sell securities on the stock exchange. He wrote a history of the textile industry, From Wool to Cloth (American Woolen Co., 1904), and a travel book, Spain of To-Day (NY: Grafton, 1909). During WWI he served as a captain in the army and after the war as an officer in the American Relief Administration in France, and as director of the Bureau for Children’s Relief in Czechoslovakia. And he was socially connected. In February 1925, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that he was a member of the Pinehurst Country Club in Brooklyn, where he was frequently seen taking tea and dancing with his wife after polo and golf matches. Shaw’s first mystery story, “Makings,” was published in the December 1926 issue of Black Mask, the month after he took over from Cody as editor.
Shaw was the first full-time editor of Black Mask, and he took his job seriously. Though he had no experience in pulp magazine publishing, he was an excellent businessman and a superb promoter. His primary goal was to separate Black Mask from the rest of the pulp-fiction field by virtue of the quality of its fiction, detective fiction. Upon assuming the editor’s chair, he read through back issues of the magazine to identify the authors he wished to cultivate. He chose four, whom he called his “backfield,” employing a football metaphor: Erle Stanley Gardner, J. Paul Suter, Carroll John Daly, and Hammett, his favorite among them; for the line he named “a splendid nucleus” in Tom Curry, Raoul Whitfield, and Frederick Nebel. In the introduction to a 1946 anthology of stories from Black Mask, Shaw recalled his first days as editor:
We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective story differing from that accredited to the Chaldeans and employed more recently by Gaborieau, Poe, Conan Doyle—in fact universally by detective story writers; that is, the deductive type, the cross-word puzzle sort, lacking—deliberately—all other human emotional values. …
So we wrote to Dashiell Hammett. His response was immediate and most enthusiastic: That is exactly what I’ve been thinking about and working toward. As I see it, the approach I have in mind has never been attempted. The field is unscratched and wide open. …
We felt obligated to stipulate our boundaries. We wanted simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief. We wanted action, but we held that action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three-dimensional form.
Hammett’s enthusiasm was amplified by Shaw’s check for $300, the money Hammett felt Cody had owed him earlier in the year. Shaw also passed along what he represented as lavish praise from Cody and Gardner. By February 1927 Hammett was back in the fold. He responded with his most accomplished short fiction to date, the “The Big Knock-Over,” the linked story “$106,000 Blood Money,” and “The Main Death,” all Op stories and his only submissions to Black Mask for the next year, totaling just under 45,000 words. They are also his most violent.
With “The Big Knock-Over” Hammett’s writing took on a new energy. The language was sharper than before; the plotting was more interesting; the dialogue was surer; and the dramatic scenes were more vivid. There was more action than in Hammett’s earlier stories, and the action was linked to real-life crime, as Shaw reminded readers in his introductory blurb, which mentioned the Illinois gang wars and a recent mail-truck robbery in Elizabeth, New Jersey that netted more than $800,000 and eventually left six people dead: “Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness–yet can anyone be sure that it isn’t likely to occur?” The Op’s comment in “The Gutting of Couffignal” about M. P. Shiel’s The Lord of the Sea well describes Hammett’s stories for Shaw: “There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats … It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.” Readers agreed.
The star of Shaw’s backfield produced, and the new editorial formula worked. In May 1927 Shaw announced that the circulation of Black Mask had increased 60%: “BECAUSE IT’S GOT THE STUFF! The stories in it are the best of their kind that can possibly be gotten, written by men who not only know how to write, but know what they are writing about.”
Unlike his predecessors, Shaw nurtured his authors’ careers and he took a special interest in Hammett’s. In January 1927 Hammett became the mystery-fiction reviewer for The Saturday Review of Literature. Co-founded in 1924 and edited by Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby, who also chaired the editorial board of the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club, The Saturday Review was regarded as the most influential literary magazine in the United States. Hammett did not then have the cachet to land that job, but Shaw did. A fledgling literary agent as well as an ed
itor, he had the social and business connections to recommend his star writer. Book reviewing was significant to Hammett’s literary development. In his tough criticism of current mystery publications, he was forced to articulate his editorial standards, and that effort showed in the increased care he took with his own stories and his growing confidence that he could make detective fiction, which he regarded as subliterary in the hands of its most popular practitioners, respectable.
At Shaw’s urging, Hammett began planning his foray into novel writing and book publication. The first installment of his four-part serialized novel, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” appeared in Black Mask monthly from November 1927, one year after Shaw became editor. In February 1928, when the last monthly installment was published, Hammett sent what he called his “action-detective novel” to the editors at Alfred A. Knopf, who published Conrad Aiken, Willa Cather, H. L Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and an array of classical literature. Since at least 1918, Knopf had maintained an imprint called The Borzoi Mysteries under the direction of Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, but little attention had been paid to that line until Hammett arrived and Shaw began feeding Black Mask authors to the firm. Mrs. Knopf offered Hammett a three-book contract if he would change the title of his first novel, and in February 1929 she published Red Harvest—dedicated to Joseph Thompson Shaw—which received glowing reviews, followed in July by Hammett’s second Continental Op novel, The Dain Curse, also first serialized in Black Mask. Encouraged by Hammett’s success, Knopf published Shaw’s novel Derelict, in 1930, along with two books by Raoul Whitfield, Green Ice, a crime novel, and Silver Wings, a collection of juvenile “Flying Ace” stories.
After publication of Red Harvest, Hammett began to attract international attention as an important new novelist whose modernist literary sensibility set him apart from the genre writers associated with the pulps. He was compared favorably to Ernest Hemingway by Herbert Asbury in the Bookman, and the New Statesman in London called him an author of “obvious intelligence.” Meanwhile, he attracted the attention of Hollywood studio heads in need of talented writers who could handle dialogue to prepare scripts for the new talking movies, introduced commercially the year Red Harvest was published. Hammett accommodated them, confiding to Blanche Knopf that he would concentrate on writing more fiction that could be adapted to the screen.
By 1931, Hammett had written two more novels, both serialized in Black Mask before book publication by Knopf—The Maltese Falcon, introducing Sam Spade, and The Glass Key, about the political fixer Ned Beaumont. The last Op story, “Death and Company,” was published in November 1930. That story marked the end of Hammett’s interest in his fat, laconic detective and the end of his tenure at Black Mask. He had learned how to write fiction in his Op stories, and now his fiction had made him rich. He moved to New York, where he was the toast of the town.
R.L.
CREEPING SIAMESE
Black Mask, March 1926
I
Standing beside the cashier’s desk in the front office of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch, I was watching Porter check up my expense account when the man came in. He was a tall man, raw-boned, hard-faced. Grey clothes bagged loosely from his wide shoulders. In the late afternoon sunlight that came through partially drawn blinds, his skin showed the color of new tan shoes.
He opened the door briskly, and then hesitated, standing in the doorway, holding the door open, turning the knob back and forth with one bony hand. There was no indecision in his face. It was ugly and grim, and its expression was the expression of a man who is remembering something disagreeable.
Tommy Howd, our freckled and snub-nosed office boy, got up from his desk and went to the rail that divided the office.
“Do you—?” Tommy began, and jumped back.
The man had let go the doorknob. He crossed his long arms over his chest, each hand gripping a shoulder. His mouth stretched wide in a yawn that had nothing to do with relaxation. His mouth clicked shut. His lips snarled back from clenched yellow teeth.
“Hell!” he grunted, full of disgust, and pitched down on the floor.
I heaved myself over the rail, stepped across his body, and went out into the corridor.
Four doors away, Agnes Braden, a plump woman of thirty-something who runs a public stenographic establishment, was going into her office.
“Miss Braden!” I called, and she turned, waiting for me to come up. “Did you see the man who just came in our office?”
“Yes.” Curiosity put lights in her green eyes. “A tall man who came up in the elevator with me. Why?”
“Was he alone?”
“Yes. That is, he and I were the only ones who got off at this floor. Why?”
“Did you see anybody close to him?”
“No, though I didn’t notice him in the elevator. Why?”
“Did he act funny?”
“Not that I noticed. Why?”
“Thanks. I’ll drop in and tell you about it later.”
I made a circuit of the corridors on our floor, finding nothing.
The raw-boned man was still on the floor when I returned to the office, but he had been turned over on his back. He was as dead as I had thought. The Old Man, who had been examining him, straightened up as I came in. Porter was at the telephone, trying to get the police. Tommy Howd’s eyes were blue half-dollars in a white face.
“Nothing in the corridors,” I told the Old Man. “He came up in the elevator with Agnes Braden. She says he was alone, and she saw nobody close to him.”
“Quite so.” The Old Man’s voice and smile were as pleasantly polite as if the corpse at his feet had been a part of the pattern in the carpet. Fifty years of sleuthing have left him with no more emotion than a pawnbroker. “He seems to have been stabbed in the left breast, a rather large wound that was staunched with this piece of silk”—one of his feet poked at a rumpled ball of red cloth on the floor—“which seems to be a sarong.”
Today is never Tuesday to the Old Man: it seems to be Tuesday.
“On his person,” he went on, “I have found some nine hundred dollars in bills of various denominations, and some silver; a gold watch and a pocket knife of English manufacture; a Japanese silver coin, 50 sen; tobacco, pipe and matches; a Southern Pacific timetable; two handkerchiefs without laundry marks; a pencil and several sheets of blank paper; four two-cent stamps; and a key labeled Hotel Montgomery, Room 540.
“His clothes seem to be new. No doubt we shall learn something from them when we make a more thorough examination, which I do not care to make until the police come. Meanwhile, you had better go to the Montgomery and see what you can learn there.”
In the Hotel Montgomery’s lobby the first man I ran into was the one I wanted: Pederson, the house copper, a blond-mustached ex-bartender who doesn’t know any more about gum-shoeing than I do about saxophones, but who does know people and how to handle them, which is what his job calls for.
“Hullo!” he greeted me. “What’s the score?”
“Six to one, Seattle, end of the fourth. Who’s in 540, Pete?”
“They’re not playing in Seattle, you chump! Portland! A man that hasn’t got enough civic spirit to know where his team—”
“Stop it, Pete! I’ve got no time to be fooling with your childish pastimes. A man just dropped dead in our joint with one of your room-keys in his pocket—540.”
Civic spirit went blooey in Pederson’s face.
“540?” He stared at the ceiling. “That would be that fellow Rounds. Dropped dead, you say?”
“Dead. Tumbled down in the middle of the floor with a knife-cut in him. Who is this Rounds?”
“I couldn’t tell you much off-hand. A big bony man with leathery skin. I wouldn’t have noticed him excepting he was such a sour looking body.”
“That’s the bird. Let’s look him up.”
At the desk
we learned that the man had arrived the day before, registering as H. R. Rounds, New York, and telling the clerk he expects to leave within three days. There was no record of mail or telephone calls for him. Nobody knew when he had gone out, since he had not left his key at the desk. Neither elevator boys nor bell-hops could tell us anything.
His room didn’t add much to our knowledge. His baggage consisted of one pigskin bag, battered and scarred, and covered with the marks of labels that had been scraped off. It was locked, but traveling bags locks don’t amount to much. This one held us up about five minutes.
Rounds’ clothes—some in the bag, some in the closet—were neither many nor expensive, but they were all new. The washable stuff was without laundry marks. Everything was of popular makes, widely advertised brands that could be bought in any city in the country. There wasn’t a piece of paper with anything written on it. There wasn’t an identifying tag. There wasn’t anything in the room to tell where Rounds had come from or why.
Pederson was peevish about it.
“I guess if he hadn’t got killed he’d of beat us out of a week’s bill! These guys that don’t carry anything to identify ’em, and that don’t leave their keys at the desk when they go out, ain’t to be trusted too much!”
We had just finished our search when a bell-hop brought Detective Sergeant O’Gar, of the police department Homicide Detail, into the room.
“Been down to the Agency?” I asked him.
“Yeah, just came from there.”
“What’s new?”
O’Gar pushed back his wide-brimmed black village-constable’s hat and scratched his bullet head.
“Not a heap. The doc says he was opened with a blade at least six inches long by a couple wide, and that he couldn’t of lived two hours after he got the blade—most likely not more’n one. We didn’t find any news on him. What’ve you got here?”