On the trail of detective Dashiell Hammett
New biography shows novelist may have embellished his gumshoe past
The only first-rate crime novelist to have been a real detective was Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). His credentials have acted as a sort of rubber stamp of authenticity not only for his own novels but also for those of the hundreds of desk-bound crime writers who have followed where he led.
Studying his life, one can see why there are so few detectives turned novelists: Hammett’s assumption of that role was the result of an extraordinary run of luck, most of it bad. He was a clever boy and a voracious reader but his father, an aspiring politician who ended up as a streetcar conductor, lived beyond his means and his son was obliged to leave school at 13 to earn his keep. After years of dead-end jobs, aged 21 he answered a newspaper ad for a salesman’s position and found himself being interviewed for a job at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
The four novels on which Hammett’s reputation rests — Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon and, perhaps the greatest, The Glass Key — were written in a creative frenzy and published between 1929 and 1931. In the subsequent three decades before he died, he published no other novels apart from the lightweight The Thin Man (1934).
Now the U.S. journalist Nathan Ward, having long “wanted to read a book that did not exist on Dashiell Hammett’s years as a real detective,” has decided to write it himself.
The difficulty is that there is little evidence of what Hammett actually did as a Pinkerton agent, and so although this is a very short book it is stuffed with digressions only glancingly relevant to its purported theme. A potted history of the life of the agency’s founder Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884) is fascinating but not very germane. An account of how one obsessive fan moved into the apartment Hammett had lived in during the 1920s, and tried to prove it was the model for Sam Spade’s apartment in The Maltese Falcon, is the most boring kind of literary trainspotting.
Ward is a very conscientious gumshoe, but unfortunately most of his truffling in archives serves only to unearth evidence that contradicts the few scraps Hammett gave us about his private eye work. One can’t really be surprised that Hammett’s story about tracking down a stolen Ferris wheel turns out to be a bit dodgy, but Ward dismantles other anecdotes. Hammett’s refusal of a $5,000 offer from a mining company representative to kill the union leader Frank Little has long been seen as the turning point in his life, but Ward convincingly catalogues the reasons why it probably never happened.
Of course, an author whose selling point was that he had lived the life he wrote about might be expected to jazz it up a bit. But Ward also casts doubt on some of Hammett’s contentions about other areas of his life, including his claim that once, during the First World War, the ambulance he was driving tipped over and flung the wounded passengers on to the road.
Ward’s book succeeds best in its breezy distillations of what we already know about Hammett’s life.