The Lost Detective

by Nathan Ward

  Was the Arbuckle case Sam Hammett’s last? Sometimes it was, but more often he claimed the Sonoma gold theft as his swan song. After considerable study in the 1970s, the mystery author Joe Gores called the Sonoma job “Hammett’s final investigation as a Pinkerton operative.” It certainly offered him a more poetic exit: solving a crime too quickly for his own good. It was a perfect self-deprecating end to his detecting life. Asked in 1934 why he had finally left his career with Pinkerton’s, Hammett answered, “I suppose because they wouldn’t let me go to Australia after some stolen gold. It sounded romantic.”

  On November 23, 1921, the steamship SS Sonoma returned to San Francisco by way of Sydney, Auckland, Pago Pago, and Honolulu. Along with its bags of far-flung mail, the ship carried $375,000 worth of English gold specie. The gold had come aboard under bank supervision one half hour before the ship left Sydney, and had been undisturbed for the rest of the voyage, according to the crew, locked away in the ship’s strong room. When officials arrived to unload it in San Francisco, however, they noticed that one of the three strong room locks had been switched and no longer opened with the captain’s key, while inside, some $125,000 worth of gold was missing. The ship was impounded at the pier, and detectives were called in.

  Although by this time he was strong enough to venture out for only a few hours at a time, Hammett could have answered the call for operatives to go down to the bulkhead wharf building at Pier 35 while the ship’s crew and passengers were being investigated, especially as the search went on for several days.

  The way Lillian Hellman remembered Hammett telling it:

  [He] and another operative met the boat as it docked, examined all sailors and officers, searched the boat, but couldn’t find the gold. They knew the gold had to be on the boat, and so the agency decided that when the boat sailed home Hammett should sail with it.7

  Hammett excitedly packed his bags, and then “the head of the agency suggested they give a last, hopeless search. Hammett climbed a smokestack he had examined several times before, looked down and shouted, ‘They moved it. It’s here.’” Scolding himself for not finding the loot once they were at least out to sea, “He fished out the gold, took it back to the Pinkerton office, and resigned that afternoon.” The self-rebuke makes his heroism less flashy, but it is still not likely that this tubercular part-time detective would clamber up a smokestack, let alone do it more than once.

  In fact, the gold was not even found by a Pinkerton. While knocking on some pipes, crewmember Carl Knudsen discovered $29,000 of it stuffed inside a fire hose that had been lowered into the Sonoma’s chimney, while police detectives found $75,000 more hanging from buoy markers beneath the pier. Newspapers tried to sell an account that the gold’s hiding place visited First Assistant Engineer Knudsen in a dream, but Knudsen denied it, and Hammett’s later version makes a much better story.

  You don’t have to believe Hammett solved the theft to grant that he could have done just enough legwork around the docks to later write about it memorably, giving the Sonoma a cameo in The Maltese Falcon (as La Paloma). Also, the gold was discovered on November 28, and Hammett was again judged 100 percent disabled in early December. Although he always needed money, the only reason to think he did any detective work after this is the word of his Pinkerton colleague Phil Haultain.

  * * *

  “I remember this one time, we were working on the hold-up of the California Street Cable Company,” recalled Phil Haultain decades later. “And Sam said, ‘You’d better take a gun. No, you’d better take two.’”8

  This statement turns out to have the hard-boiled air of truth, as even their own supervisor, Phil Geauque, would fire his weapon in the field that day. Because of the testimony of his young partner and the fact that his boss was seen mixing it up, it seems reasonable that Hammett could have been on the job, too. And yet, on paper he should have been largely bedridden by this time.‡

  Two young men had boarded the cable car just before noon on January 3, 1922, hailing it opposite the car barn at Hyde and California Streets and riding on as it climbed the steepening grade in the winter sunlight. One of them claimed the rear platform of the car, near the gripman, while the other took the front, beside the conductor. Among the pack of thirty or forty passengers inside sat two officials from the California Cable Car Company, who had boarded along with the men and were accompanying a leather pouch filled with three-days’ sales receipts on their way to the bank.

  When the car reached Jones Street, two more strangers came on, taking their place on the front and rear platforms. The group of four then drew guns on the gripman and conductor and took command of the car from both ends as it continued along California Street. They next closed on the pair of cable car executives with the money bag in the center of the car, adding fifty dollars to the take from the pocket of assistant cashier Boger; at the far corner of Jones Street, the four holdup men jumped off, carrying the leather bag and its $3,550. They climbed into an open automobile whose driver, Samuel Salter, an auto mechanic from an Ellis Street garage, had been hired to tour San Francisco after their original taxi broke down. Salter was told cryptically to wait a few minutes. After his passengers leapt off the cable car carrying a leather pouch, one got in beside him and trained a revolver on Salter and shouted, “Take your hand off that brake and let’s see you go.” Salter drove crazily downhill—very much like a man with a gun to his head—to Pine Street, where one of the gang jumped from the car, his split somehow already divided out. The gang left their driver at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. He drove straight to the Hall of Justice to tell his story, but shotgun squads could find no sign of the gang.

  Days later, detectives went to the house of a man named Frank Grider in San Francisco. They wanted to interview him about his son Frank Jr., who was suspected in the cable car robbery and had turned up in Salt Lake City. Two extra Pinkertons, G. A. Robinson and Hammett’s supervisor, Phil Geauque, were standing outside the elder Grider’s home when another son, the suspect’s sixteen-year-old brother, Edwin Grider, appeared. Edwin saw that his father’s house was lively with detectives and bolted. Robinson and Geauque called halt, fired a volley after him, and then grabbed the boy as he was climbing into a taxi.9

  His partner’s memory and their supervisor’s public involvement in the case suggest that Hammett worked the cable car robbery a little and heard about the rest in the office and from the newspaper accounts. Or perhaps, since he was supposedly bedridden during this time, he told Phil Haultain to “take two” guns with him that day because Hammett himself couldn’t accompany him. If Haultain is to be believed, and Hammett was somehow able to work even a piece of the case, then this would certainly have been his last investigation. As he began courses at Munson’s School of Stenography and Typing to prepare to be some kind of reporter, Hammett resigned from Pinkerton’s in February 1922, weeks after the robbery. Since arriving in San Francisco, he had been periodically examined by a visiting nurse at his Eddy Street apartment to verify his claims of disability. But on February 15 he somehow got himself to the Flood Building for an exam in the Pinkerton office. It’s unclear why it took place there, but the appointment does prove that even when sick he could will himself to work. Whether or not he formally resigned that day, it is the last date that Hammett is known to have been in the Pinkerton offices.

  By this time, Hammett’s weight was again as low as when he was sent home from the army.10 His retirement from detecting was actually a quieter departure than the resignation on principle over the Sonoma case reported by Lillian Hellman. He may have told better stories to Hellman over the years, but the unglamorous truth behind his quitting was well known to Josephine Hammett. As she later told David Fechheimer when he found her in Los Angeles, her husband “stopped ’cause he took sick. He couldn’t do that stuff anymore. You know, go out in the fog.”11

  * * *

  * As a Secret Service agent, Geauque once pursued a passerby he saw carrying a small piece of counterfeiting equipment into
a residence. His eagerness to follow resulted in the case Poldo v. United States (1932), which held that he had made an unauthorized, if successful, search of a suspect’s premises. A founder of the International Footprinters’ Society, he lectured in later years on counterfeiting detection techniques. The mistaken claim that he later guarded President Franklin Roosevelt stems, I think, from a misunderstanding of what the Secret Service primarily does—fight counterfeiting. In the forties, he frequently spoke to civic groups, introducing a cautionary Secret Service film called Know Your Money.

  ** Haultain also showed Fechheimer an antique novelty on his desk: a darkened, decorated human head opened at the top like a half coconut shell. He claimed to have shown Hammett the object in the early twenties and wondered aloud if it might later have stoked Hammett’s imagination while he was writing The Maltese Falcon.

  † It was declared a mistrial, and Arbuckle was tried two more times before he was unanimously acquitted in April 1922, far too late to save even the scraps of his career. He never starred in another film.

  ‡ When I asked David Fechheimer what else he remembered from his 1975 interview with Phil Haultain, whether Hammett could have meant “Let’s each of us take two” guns or “I can’t go with you, so you’d better take two,” he noted that the quote works either way.

  Part II

  THE EX-DETECTIVE

  I decided to become a writer. It was a good idea. Having had no experience whatever in writing, except writing letters and reports, I wasn’t handicapped by exaggerated notions of the difficulties ahead.

  —DASHIELL HAMMETT, 1929

  Chapter VII

  A LITTLE MAN GOING FORWARD

  I’m not what you’d call a brilliant thinker—such results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck—but I do have my flashes of intelligence.

  —“ZIGZAGS OF TREACHERY” (1924)

  On a day in late June 1922, William A. Pinkerton, surviving son of the founder and himself the most famous detective in the world, was visiting San Francisco to attend an international convention of police chiefs, a favorite annual event in a city he called his spiritual home. The detective was now past seventy-five, a large, dapper man whose wide, soft hat echoed his younger days chasing Western train robbers. During his week in California he hoped to hear about the latest techniques in crime fighting, to dine with old lawman friends, and to hold forth about the uses of intelligence as the head of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.1

  Pinkerton had checked into the St. Francis Hotel, facing Union Square, where he had stayed happily and eventfully on other visits from Chicago. He had once received a note in the hotel’s dining room inviting him to what he guessed would be an attempt on his life; Pinkerton kept the appointment, and at his signal of slyly touching his hat, detectives grabbed the assassin before he could fire.

  While trying to take a walk in the springtime air, Pinkerton was approached by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, who asked if the old detective had time for a question. Pinkerton agreed, and the two men returned to his room, where he removed his hat from his center-parted gray head and bore down on his interviewer with his dark eyes.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  The Chronicle’s man could have asked any number of questions to ensure a more colorful interview. Speaking at a previous year’s conference, for instance, Pinkerton had made news by disparaging the work of U.S. Army Intelligence against the “radical” threat. The reporter might have also asked about the agency’s relentless manhunt that dismantled Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall gang and chased Butch himself to South America; or about Pinkerton’s youthful wounding by a train robber, Hilary Farrington, whose struggle with Pinkerton aboard a paddlewheeler ended with Farrington going over the side to his death. He might have asked about Pinkerton’s more recent call for a return to the whipping post or about the Agency’s work the previous year on Fatty Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial, which stemmed from events at this same hotel.

  Instead, the reporter threw something soft and slow: “What do you think of detective stories?”

  “They’re the bunk—rot,” roared the old man, prompting a follow-up: “Have you ever read a detective story that read like the person who wrote it knew what he was talking about?”

  The renowned old sleuth, whose Scottish father had founded the country’s first detective agency, sniffed at the suggestion. “Never. And I don’t expect to.” He especially panned the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. “These stories about detectives tracing crime by scratches on the back of watches and all that sort of rot give the people the wrong idea about the way we work. Detective work is only using good, common sense—nothing else,” Pinkerton said. “Any man with good common sense can be a detective. I’ve picked some of my men from street cars and all sorts of occupations, and they have usually made good.”2

  That summer of 1922, when William Pinkerton sermonized the reporter, Sam Hammett had been making small steps toward assembling a career as an ex-detective. Since the birth of his daughter in October 1921, he had been sleeping alone, as advised due to his TB, in a Murphy bed in the hallway of their Eddy Street apartment, to keep safely apart from the baby. The family had been kept out of total poverty by a small, grudging loan made by his father. The fact that Hammett would even overrule his pride to ask such a favor of Richard Hammett shows how desperate things had become. While often kept home by his health, since February he had also been taking secretarial courses at the Munson School on Sutter Street. In addition to learning how to take quick notes, he was mastering touch typing, with which he turned out both the stories and poems he sent to magazines and the meticulous letters of outrage he wrote to the Veterans’ Bureau about changes to his pension. He kept writing, when he could, at a table in the kitchen and sometimes in the big sunny reading room at the public library.

  Reporting would eventually have presented some of the same physical challenges as detective work as he ran down stories.3 He needed work he could do at home—or, when at his worst, even flat on his back. Though bedridden much of each day, Hammett somehow continued to combine hustle with the understandably fatal view that TB would someday finish him off. “He would have done whatever he had to do to make a buck,” says David Fechheimer. “He was never a very good invalid.”* He had to come up with a less physically taxing way of making money.

  Without any surviving manuscripts before he was in his late twenties, it is hard to date exactly his decision to become a writer, let alone what kind of writer he wanted to be. He may not have respected the mystery story as it was then practiced, but he did not set out to reinvent it, either. His first attempts at writing actually were short, droll pieces, allegories, poems, character sketches, and what he called “legit” fiction, a form he never gave up the dream of returning to even after the success of his crime stories. His early efforts were more literary than “hard-boiled,” a recent term for skill under fire popularized by the ghastly war.

  That spring of 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, he typed up a draft of his first short story, “The Barber and His Wife,” on his new black Underwood at the kitchen table. The story features a brawny, well-dressed husband and his unsatisfied wife to whom he gives hardly a thought; a brother with recognizable lung trouble; and a cultured young man who takes the wife to the movies. It reads a bit like a lesser Sherwood Anderson story until a coolly observed scene of violence when the husband visits the young suitor’s office:

  He stopped before Becker’s desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.

  “Is this Mr. Becker?”

  “Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”

  “No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up.” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Stemler!”

  His debut story was rejected before finally finding a home that fall, but in June or July of 19
22, Hammett had his first sale of a sardonic parable of fewer than a hundred words called “The Parthian Shot,” bought for The Smart Set by its famous editor H. L. Mencken, the most celebrated graduate of the school Hammett had attended through eighth grade, Baltimore Polytechnic. It was impressive for anyone to receive a letter from the great Mencken, but especially thrilling if you had grown up living in Baltimore, where he was the godlike driving force at the Sun. This first sale did not go far toward paying the Hammetts’ bills, but it allowed the struggling family to do something comparatively lavish—to order in dinner to celebrate. The little dinner must have been a highlight of that summer in which Hammett’s mother died, on August 3, 1922.

  His first crime story, “The Road Home,” was bought by a magazine of a lower rank, The Black Mask, which ran it that December of 1922. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had founded this magazine just two years earlier as one of several vehicles for funding their true love, the more rarefied Smart Set. (These fund-raising vehicles included an erotic sampler, Saucy Stories, and something called the Parisienne.) When The Black Mask debuted in 1920, crime and detection were only a part of the splashy mix that also featured adventure, romance, cowboys, mystery, and occult. Mencken, despite his love of street slang as a brilliant chronicler of the American language, did not publicize his connection to The Black Mask and kept his name off the masthead altogether, and he and Nathan sold the magazine after its first eight issues.