WRITER’S PAST GAVE NOVELS LEGITIMACY
But new book explores how Hammett may have overcooked his recollections
Most of the classics of espionage fiction have been written by people with some experience of working in intelligence. But 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 Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
His service in the First World War was confined to driving ambulances in Maryland, but after the war he contracted Spanish flu and then tuberculosis. He returned to Pinkerton’s but frequent periods of ill health forced him to find less strenuous employment, and he began to channel his experiences into stories for pulp magazines.
The four novels on which his 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), which spawned a series of comedy films that remain cherishable but are untouched by the darkness that characterizes Hammett’s best work.
He left his wife Jose and spent the last years of his life in an on-off relationship with the playwright Lillian Hellman. Hellman’s memoir of him is one of the primary biographical sources, but she concentrates on his years of fame and is not an entirely reliable witness (Mary McCarthy said “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’). 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. 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 in memoirs and interviews. But Ward also casts doubt on some of Hammett’s contentions about other areas of his life, including his claim that once, during the war, the ambulance he was driving tipped over and flung the wounded passengers on to the road.
I was reminded that Raymond Chandler has also been accused of making his First World War experiences sound more dramatic than they actually were. Perhaps it is the curse of the best popular writers that they become hopelessly addicted to telling the best possible story. But the process by which Hammett’s imagination improved on reality is in a way more interesting than the actionpacked life he professed to have led.
Ward is a very engaging writer, and his book succeeds best in its breezy distillations of what we already know about Hammett’s life. His enthusiastic discussions of the novels and stories remind one how unjust it is that Hammett is sometimes regarded so much less highly than Chandler. All crime writers should loudly sing his praises: Even if they haven’t read him, they’d be nothing without him.