by Nathan Ward
Hammett was not a diarist, and he pitched most of his letters as he moved around. His transformation from working detective to writer was in part a function of his sickly health, and his U.S. Army medical file tells the biography of his illness—the vagaries of his weight and lung capacity and official judgments of his disability from the time of his discharge in 1919. With tuberculosis he was slowly incapacitated out of conventional employment, especially the detective work he’d largely enjoyed. Still needing money for his family, but often too sick to leave his apartment, he took a stab at writing.
* * *
* When recently asked to recall on which hand she remembered seeing her father’s famous knifepoint scar, Jo Hammett answered through her daughter Julie Rivett that she was pretty sure it was his left hand. This suggests he got the wound shielding himself against a knife blow with his nondominant hand.
Part I
THE CHEAPER THE CROOK
[The detective] must appear the careless, ordinary individual, particularly to those upon whom he is to operate. Assimilating, as far as possible, with the individuals who are destined to feel the force of his authority, and by appearing to know but little, acquire all the information possible to gather from every conceivable source.
—ALLAN PINKERTON, THIRTY YEARS A DETECTIVE (1884)
A good detective has to be brave, vigorous, damnably clever, tireless—altogether a real person! His is an extraordinarily complicated mechanism.
—DASHIELL HAMMETT, 1929
I had started out with the big agency to see the world and learn human nature.
—CHARLIE SIRINGO, A COWBOY DETECTIVE
Chapter I
THE DEVILISH ART
BALTIMORE, 1915
Even if he had finished alongside his high school classmates at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, it is difficult to imagine Samuel D. Hammett among the self-possessed upperclassmen pictured in the school’s yearbooks, old-looking boys in dark suits with class pages touting their skills in metalwork and German translation. Instead, he left school at age fourteen to help his family, and over the five and a half years since then, he had tried on a variety of professions and laid all of them aside: office messenger for the B&O railroad, paperboy, dockworker, nail machine operator, “very junior” advertising clerk, timekeeper in a cannery, salesman for his father’s hapless seafood business. He was often let go “most amiably,” he recalled.
The family had lived in both Philadelphia and Baltimore since Sam’s birth on May 27, 1894, at the Hammett tobacco farm, Hopewell and Aim, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland; born, as he put it, between the Potomac and Patuxent Rivers. Sam was named for his paternal grandfather, Samuel Biscoe Hammett Jr., who, after the death of his first wife in the 1880s, had married a much younger woman named Lucy with whom he started a second family almost contemporaneous with the arrival of his grandchildren. All of them crowded into the three-story farmhouse. After losing a bitterly fought county election, young Sam’s father, Richard Thomas Hammett, sought a fresh start by moving his own family, a wife and three young children, briefly to Philadelphia. He experienced disappointments in that city, too, and in 1901 he moved the family again, this time to Baltimore and the row house rented by his wife’s mother at 212 North Stricker Street, near Franklin Square. He had gone from the house of his father to that of his wife’s mother, with brief failures in between.
Though Richard’s ambitions tended more toward politics, his social skills and temperament did not; he took a job as a streetcar conductor, and the Hammett children entered Public School Number 72. As a city boy, young Sam Hammett could cite his country roots, and when he returned on summer visits to his grandfather’s farm, he could just as rightly put on citified airs. The family would move twice more around Baltimore, only to return to the mother-in-law’s when Richard’s political and business schemes fell through. This would be Sam’s home until he was in his twenties.
From boyhood, Hammett was an incorrigible reader and prowler of public libraries whose tastes ran from swashbucklers and dime Westerns to edifying works of European philosophy and manuals of technical expertise. It was a habit that nourished him early on and sustained him through his later illnesses flat on his back. While a boy, his late-night reading sessions often left him difficult to rouse in the morning, complained his mother, Annie Bond Hammett, a small, frail, yet forthright woman known as Lady, who supported his curiosity and certainly encouraged his confidence. The narrator of Hammett’s autobiographical fragment, Tulip, remembers this about his mother:
She never gave me but two pieces of advice and they were both good. “Never go out in a boat without oars, son,” she said, “even if it’s the Queen Mary; and don’t waste your time on women who can’t cook because they’re not likely to be much fun in the other rooms either.”
It was probably Annie Hammett who met the census taker at the door of their row house in Philadelphia in 1900, since it was recorded that 2942 Poplar Street was then home to three children: Reba, Richard, and a six-year-old middle child, “Dashell.” Hammett’s evolution from Sam to Dashiell is not a straight line, but his mother certainly called him Dashiell (Da-SHEEL) as a boy, a name he later put on his stories and books and, ultimately, came to be called by almost everyone.* Hammett seems to have had a strong and comfortable relationship with his mother and his older sister, Reba, and would get on more easily with women throughout his life. According to his second cousin Jane Fish Yowaiski, later interviewed by Josiah Thompson, only Sam’s mother could make him go to church.
No writing about Annie neglects to point out how she held herself a little above her husband’s family, and not without reason. She proudly told her children about her own mother’s people, who were originally French Huguenots called the De Schiells (pronounced Da-SHEEL, like Hammett’s middle name within the family), a surname Americanized as “Dashiell.” The family was at least as settled as the Hammetts, whose earliest ancestor in Maryland died in 1719. James Dashiell had arrived in the state in 1663, according to a family history, cropping the ears of his cattle in the fleur-de-lis pattern favored by his French grandmother. Sam’s mother told him tales of the Old World De Schiells filled with chateaux and knights, passing along their rather unambitious family motto, “Ny Tost Ny Tard” (“Neither Soon nor Late”).
Because Richard Hammett’s family always needed money Annie Hammett worked private nursing jobs when possible, despite a chronic cough and weakness that otherwise kept her close to home. Hammett seems to have shared his mother’s opinion that Richard Hammett was not worthy of her, or at least that he could have treated her much better: in addition to his failures as a breadwinner (as a manufacturer agent, then a clerk, salesman, and a conductor) Richard was something of a ladies’ man who liked to dress sharp for his other women. Hammett’s cousin Jane Yowaiski recalled Richard’s visits to her family in the 1930s, looking like “the Governor of Maryland” and often driven by attractive younger women whom he’d introduce as his “friend.”1
By the time he was twenty, Sam was a gangly and quiet young man with reddish hair who liked to fish and hunt and drink and who vastly preferred the company of women and books to what he’d seen of the working world. Like the father he quarreled with, Sam was a bit of a loafer and aspiring ladies’ man. (Early that same year, 1915, he caught his first dose of gonorrhea, possibly from a woman he had met while working near the train yards. It would not be his last case of the clap.) Still living with his parents, he increasingly turned up late to work, if not also hungover from his growing nightlife.
“I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like,” he remembered. “Usually I was fired.”2 According to Hammett, his boss at the B&O Railroad office attempted to cut him loose after a week of late arrivals, then relented when he refused to lie and promise to do better, delaying the inevitable.
At twenty his most recent positions had been with the Baltimore brokerage house Poe & Da
vies, where his lateness and sloppiness with sums got him fired, and as a dockworker, where “I made the grade but then it became too strenuous.”3 He passed some idle weeks before something else caught his eye in the newspaper, an “enigmatic want-ad” seeking capable young men with a range of experience like his own who were fond of travel. Although the exact newspaper message has never been identified, according to one former employee from this era, the company’s blind recruitment ads were pretty much of a piece:
WANTED—A bright, experienced salesman to handle good line; salary and commission. Excellent opportunity for right man to connect with first-class house.4
Hammett mailed in his reply, then was called downtown to interview in a suite at the Continental Trust Company building on Baltimore Street, an office tower whose sixteen floors were guarded by small stone falcons. The position, it turned out, was not in either sales or insurance but something with the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. “The fortunes of job-hunting not guided by definite vocational training had taken him into the employ of a private detective agency,” Hammett wrote of another detective in “The Hunter.”
Pinkerton’s was looking for detectives, or “general operatives,” as the agency preferred, and by advertising instead for other professions the company maintained its secrecy. Many of the skills of salespeople, for instance, served well in operative work, especially the ability to quickly size up a stranger without raising suspicion, but the murky ads were also used to recruit for Pinkerton’s strikebreaking efforts. Hammett would work at both.
According to one former Pinkerton, a good general operative was a man “who can be relied upon to do the right thing, even in the absence of instructions from the executive department, and who will at all times act in a cool, discreet and level-headed manner.”5 A hoarder of quirky knowledge from his wide reading, Hammett must also have impressed his interviewer as cool, discreet and level-headed, because he was hired as a Pinkerton clerk, and within months was an agency operative. Now twenty-one, he had lucked into hard, unpredictable work that peculiarly suited him with the country’s oldest and largest detective agency. “The eye of the detective must never sleep,” Allan Pinkerton wrote, and Hammett soon discovered that operatives were expected to work every day of the week, if needed. The company’s symbol, an unblinking eye above the motto “We Never Sleep,” had given rise to a popular term its founder disliked: private eye.
An operative’s life took him everywhere and nowhere, and by following the basic laws for shadowing, he could go unnoticed for hours or even days at a time. “Keep behind your subject as much as possible,” Hammett later summed up tailing for his civilian public, “never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens; and never meet his eye.”6
For a young man whose formal instruction had ended only months into high school, the Pinkerton Agency offered a unique education, which he continued to supplement at public libraries. There is no indication he wanted to write as early as 1915, but the agency helped form the writer he became as surely as working at a newspaper might have. A veteran operative recalled joining Pinkerton’s “to see the world and learn human nature.”7
Allan Pinkerton was long gone by the time Hammett joined the company, although his imprint was everywhere. The Scottish immigrant had gradually transformed himself, through a job he invented, into the leader of a kind of national police force that could chase criminals unhindered by state or county lines. In his many books (ghostwritten and otherwise) he sketched a clear picture of his dogged ideal investigator:
The profession of the detective is, at once, an honorable and highly useful one. For practical benefits few professions excel it. He is an officer of justice, and must himself be pure and above reproach … The great essential is to prevent his identity from becoming known, even among his associates of respectable character, and when he fails to do this; when the nature of his calling is discovered and made known his usefulness to the profession is at an end, and failure certain and inevitable is the result.8
Pinkerton took his own circuitous path to sleuthing. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1819, and while working as a barrel maker, he became involved in the Scottish Chartist labor movement (from which he later borrowed the term operative), before trouble with the police over his activism led him to emigrate with his wife in 1842. After several false starts together, the couple settled in the village of Dundee, Illinois, northwest of Chicago, where they built a small house and Pinkerton opened a reasonably profitable business supplying barrels to the farmers of the region. Pinkerton differed from a number of his neighbors in that he was a teetotaler and an abolitionist; in addition to sheltering his growing young family, Pinkerton’s modest house was home to runaways traveling North to freedom.
The first American detective agency grew out of the suspicions of a young man searching for wood. To cut his material costs, Pinkerton would hunt for timber to make his barrel staves, poling his barge along the nearby Fox River and harvesting from unclaimed stands of trees along the route. He was several miles upriver, near the town of Algonquin, Illinois, in June 1846, when he discovered something that would push his cooper’s life off course. A small island in the middle of the river belonged to no one, and Pinkerton set to work one morning felling and cutting up what he needed when he spotted a blackened patch of ground, proof of an earlier campfire, and other signs of repeated visits by strangers. The fire seemed suspect. “There was no picnicking in those days, people had more serious matters to attend to and it required no great keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.”9
Pinkerton visited the island several times to find other hints of secret meetings. Then, while watching it one night, he saw a group of men land and gather conspiratorially around a fire. He returned once more, bringing the sheriff and a posse, who arrested a group of counterfeiters caught with their tools and “a bag of bogus dimes.” After this triumph, on what came to be called Bogus Island, Pinkerton was solicited by local businessmen for his help cracking another counterfeiting gang. He declined, citing his cooperage business, before his sense of justice got the better of him and he accepted his first paid job of sleuthing.
Pinkerton’s activism had got him chased to America in the first place, and running for county sheriff on the Abolitionist ticket in 1847 brought to a head his conflict with the pastor of the local Dundee Baptist Church, who put him on trial for atheism and “selling ardent spirits.” The slander led Pinkerton to accept a job as assistant sheriff of Cook County and move to Chicago, then a filthy but growing city of nearly thirty thousand people. There, sometime around 1850, he opened the country’s first detective firm, the North-Western Police Agency, which evolved into Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.** He would popularize the use of rap sheets, rogues’ galleries, mug shots, and fingerprints, and he hired the first female detectives decades before the City of New York had any.
Crimes were not solved by aloof geniuses, Pinkerton long contended, but by an operative being an observant student of human nature who guarded his identity as if his life depended on it, a knight who could pass as a rogue, “Assimilating, as far as possible, with the individuals who are destined to feel the force of his authority.”10
The Pinkerton Agency grew in the years when many frontier towns had no municipal police force, while those that did have small ones still saw criminals escape over county lines. “The history of all places which have had a rapid growth is full of startling incidents of crime,” Pinkerton explained, creating “opportunities for criminal deeds so numerous, as to sometimes create an epidemic of wrong-doing.”11 Such epidemics became Pinkerton’s opportunity. In 1855 he had the good fortune to sign a contract to protect the Illinois Central Railroad, whose director, George McClellan, and company attorney, Abraham Lincoln, were men on the rise.
In 1861, Pinkerton uncovered a “Baltimore Plot” against the newly elected president; he spirited Lincoln by train safely through the hea
rt of the conspiracy to his inaugural, and served for a time as his wartime intelligence chief. In a famous war photograph of Lincoln visiting a Union campsite, Pinkerton is right there, hiding in plain sight, identified by his alias “Major Allen,” a stocky, glowering figure in a dark beard and bowler beside the elongated man in the top hat.
To the end of his life, Allan Pinkerton held to the methods roughed out in his first cases. In The Model Town and the Detectives, he recalled being visited by a man representing a group of Illinois merchants whose community was experiencing a wave of thefts. “I told him that I would undertake to clear the town of its active scoundrels, on condition that I should be allowed to work in my own way without interference by any one, and that my instructions be obeyed implicitly.” Pinkerton scouted the town himself, under an assumed name and dressed as a farmer, before unleashing his undercover operatives into the saloons and boardinghouses.
Clearing the town of active scoundrels is what some Hammett heroes do, even if they don’t always keep to Mr. Pinkerton’s other rules of detecting. Pinkerton broke plenty of his own rules as well, when the case was important enough, the most egregious example being his war with the James gang in the 1870s. “I know that the James’ and the Youngers are desperate men,” Pinkerton wrote to his New York office, “and that when we meet it must be the death of one or both of us.”12
