The Lost Detective

by Nathan Ward

  Hammett soon tried to reestablish himself full time as an ad man, battling at the office with a new rival named Chipman, who, said Hammett, would “slit my throat” if given the chance. Samuels was understandably cautious about giving Hammett the entire office load he had carried before his collapse. Though often boastful after his office debates about advertising, in October, Hammett wrote his wife in Montana a surprisingly fragile letter about his situation with Samuels: “I’d like to know whether anything is going to come of the advertising racket or not. What he’s [Samuels] afraid of is that I’ll die on his hands. I’m not altogether sure I want the blooming thing.”6 Imagining the work and added bickering of coming back and fighting for his old position, he explained, “I don’t know whether that will sit well on my lungs or not.”

  Nevertheless, he kept building his industry reputation by writing essays such as “Advertising IS Literature,” which ran in the October 1926 Western Advertising. “Whether he likes it not,” Hammett wrote from experience, “every man who works with words for effects is a literary worker.” The worker’s only “liberty” was “in deciding how adept he shall be.”

  As he was building his career back up with Samuels, a man named Joseph Shaw took the helm of The Black Mask. He quickly dropped “The” from its title and began assigning for the fall of 1926. Starting out as a newspaperman, Shaw had been known as “Cap” to his friends since the Great War, in which he attained captain’s rank as a bayonet instructor. He had also been a national champion in sabers. A man with little experience editing magazines, he nevertheless had a clear idea for the intriguing enterprise he had been handed.

  One of the most important goals Shaw set for himself was to bring Dashiell Hammett and his popular Op back into the fold. Neither had appeared in Black Mask since March 1926. Shaw wrote Hammett a letter in which he pledged him more money and proposed longer works, to be serialized by Black Mask, stretching beyond the constraints of the magazine story form. Hammett was delighted; it was, he said, just what he had had in mind himself, and he seemed especially pleased that Shaw was paying him the three hundred dollars Hammett felt his predecessor Phil Cody still owed him. Hammett usually called it “applesauce” when people praised him while wanting something, but he reported it proudly to his wife.

  That fall of 1926, a nurse named Esther Haley, who specialized in TB cases, found Hammett living alone briefly at 20 Monroe Place; on a follow-up in November, she saw him at 1309 Hyde Street, where the whole family was reunited in an arrangement that nevertheless passed Nurse Haley’s inspection for hygiene: the patient had a room to himself away from the children. She noted that his weight was up ten pounds and, while he still had night sweats, he said he was doing some writing for magazines. When Haley saw him next, in March 1927, Hammett was alone in a studio at 891 Post Street, still resting, he told her, but also doing advertising work from home. The wife and children, Haley recorded, lived in an apartment on Sacramento, near Hyde. By April’s exam, he explained he was a little worse, although with no blood spitting, and that his rotten teeth bothered him tremendously.7

  During this time, he had nevertheless written something extraordinary for Cap Shaw, a novella called The Big Knockover. He was also now reviewing mysteries for the Saturday Review of Literature, a platform he relished, raising himself and his realist school of detective fiction even as he pointed out the weak stew served by others. His focus had switched back almost entirely to writing. In the January 1927 Black Mask, Shaw announced Hammett’s coming return in the next issue: “Dashiell Hammett has called back the Continental detective from his long retirement and is setting him to work anew.”

  When it began running in excerpts in February 1927, The Big Knockover featured a brazen, over-the-top double holdup of San Francisco banks, one of which may have been modeled on the Old Mint building. You can feel Hammett stretching out at last, achieving the full, striding voice of his longer works. “I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy’s dive,” it begins,

  Paddy—an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain—showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:

  “Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send ’em over for life in the end.”

  The Big Knockover has many elements: spare, slangy prose; the Op’s serving as guide to scruffy locales up and down San Francisco; and poetic lists of criminal names, proof of Hammett’s strong grounding in Pinkerton studies. It also features a criminal operation seemingly far larger than the Op or the police force of his wide-open town can handle.

  The Op is skeptical when he first hears of the audacious bank “caper” from a stuttering newsie, but his source is gunned down moments later by a young Armenian boy who saunters off “hands in pockets, softly whistling Broken-Hearted Sue.” Intrigued by a traffic jam he sees on Market Street the next day, the Op walks over toward the Financial District and the Seaman’s Bank. As he gets closer, he hears “roaring, rattling, explosive noises” and sees a man trying to set his dislocated jaw back in place. Finally, he reaches the block between Bush and Pine Streets, where “Hell was on a holiday.” Where the Seaman’s National and Golden Gate Trust Company buildings face each other, a double looting is going on, involving a robbery gang of perhaps a hundred and fifty crooks. “For the next six hours,” says the Op, “I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.”

  Inspiring his own epic heist, Hammett had certainly read a national news story about a bold posse of gunmen making a raid on the Denver Federal Reserve Bank in December 1922. Firing their way in during business hours, they got away with two hundred thousand dollars, the record daylight take at the time, shooting up the streetscape as they sped off under fire from overwhelmed upstairs guards, one of whom died of his wounds. As he fired from the running board of the getaway car, one of the robbers was hit but was pulled inside it as the gang sped off.8

  What follows in The Big Knockover is a detecting adventure as it had never been done. In a room on Fillmore Street, the Op catalogues the notable dead crooks he recognizes on the floor, from the Dis-and-Dat Kid, “who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before”; to Snohomish Whitey, “supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919”; to “L.A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual, with a thousand dollar bill sewed in each shoulder of his coat”; to Bull McGonickle, “still pale from fifteen years in Joliet”; to Toby the Lugs, “Bull’s running mate, who used to brag about picking President Wilson’s pocket in a Washington vaudeville theater”; to Paddy the Mex. The Agency’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, might have appreciated the low-life scholarship of such a list.

  If you consider The Big Knockover together with its follow-up, “$106, 000 Blood Money,” which began running in May, the two parts make up Hammett’s first novel. However, their author didn’t see them that way and would not have his linked novellas published together.

  By the baby’s first birthday that May, Jose and the girls had moved across the bay to a little house in Fairfax, California, where Hammett would visit them by ferry once or twice each week, and where baby Jo eventually learned to walk. By the end of 1927, doctors would tell him his TB was gone, but Hammett stayed on at 891 Post Street, in a studio he would later come to share with Sam Spade.

  For his first published novel, he chose to take his Op on his bloodiest mission yet, away from the bay and up north into the mountains and the labor wars in Montana. With pressure from his Black Mask editors for ever more action, he chose a place he knew whose starkness and violence needed little exaggeration.

  * * *

  * Author’s correspondence with Fechheimer. The interview with Peggy O’Toole did not make its way into the all-Hammett issue of City of San Francisco Magazine (Nov. 4, 1975), which included the full sixty-five-page draft of Hammett’s abandoned original Thin Man novel, set in San Francisco. The City issue added to the drumbeat for a planned film base
d on the Joe Gores novel, Hammett, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, the publisher of City. The issue, without which no Hammett biography of the past forty years would be possible, now sells for $150 online.

  Chapter XI

  THE BIG SHIP

  “This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.”

  —THE CONTINENTAL OP IN RED HARVEST

  You see the cindery hillside with a high funnel sticking out of it, a masonry smokestack almost six hundred feet tall, for a long time on the dusty approach to the town. And as you enter the small, flat grid of streets the stack hovers darkly over your shoulder on its slag-covered mound, while here and there, among the lines of houses and brick storefronts, appear Deco–style holdovers such as the Washoe theater or Club Moderne.

  Anaconda was founded in 1883 by a copper magnate named Marcus Daly, who had bought the nearby Anaconda mine and hoped to make his company town the capital of Montana. In Hammett’s novel Red Harvest, the Continental Op arrives in a grim 1920s mining town called Personville (“Poisonville” to locals) that shares some details with Anaconda. Marcus Daly’s story could be an inspiration for Personville’s old mining “czar” Elihu Willsson, who “owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts” for forty years until 1921, when he paid an army of goons to help him break the miners’ union: “When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker”—but at a price. Like other nightmare towns Hammett wrote about, Personville had gone to the thugs. A city owned and run by Elihu Willsson had degenerated into a criminal free-for-all.

  Personville conflates Anaconda with nearby Butte and the smaller mining village whose name it echoes, Walkerville. But it actually borrows more from Butte:

  The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.1

  The story opens with the Op having a drink in a real Butte location, the Big Ship, a miner’s nickname for Butte’s biggest boardinghouse, the Florence Hotel. The real Butte was certainly set “in a notch between two mountains,” a hillside town running up to the Mountain Meadow cemetery where the body of Frank Little was carried by grieving miners in 1917.

  Like Butte at this time, Personville had a “Broadway line,” which the Op rides to visit Elihu Willsson, whose home corresponds on the map to where the surviving home of another copper king, William A. Clark, sits in Butte.2*

  The Op is called to town by Elihu Willsson’s son, Donald, who, as the editor of one of his father’s newspapers, has been naïvely running a reformist campaign to clean up Personville. Donald Willsson is quickly killed before the two men can meet, and not wanting to waste the trip from San Francisco, the Op gets himself hired by old Elihu himself to restore the town he once ran.

  Elihu’s check for ten thousand dollars to the Continental Detective Agency unleashes the bloodletting to come as the Op sets to work pitting the gang members against one another to empty Personville “of its crooks and grafters.” At one point a battered black touring car whips past him “crammed to the curtains with men,” and the Op grins with pride: “Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid.” The Op has a dark gift for sowing violence, cracking open the weak confederacies of criminals, and tying up loose ends outside the courts. This is put on spectacular display in Personville, where he quickly sizes up police chief Noonan as helpless and genially corrupt. Hammett knew that the real Butte bloomed with such evil characters—soiled lawmen such as the former chief detective Ed Morrisey, who was not unlike the sorry ex-detective Bob MacSwain in Red Harvest. Fired as a violent drunkard and suspected (but never charged) in the death of his wife, Morrissey also hired himself out as a gunman and was discussed for decades as a suspect in the Frank Little killing. (A citizen definitely worthy of Poisonville, Morrissey was found beaten to death in 1922.)3

  At the center of the storm he has caused, the Op finds a lucky ally in Dinah Brand, a “deluxe hustler” and gossipy moll who greets him with a “soft, lazy” voice. She has “the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear,” her part is crooked, her rouge uneven, her dress is “a particularly unbecoming wine color,” and one stocking has a run, but, the Op deadpans, “This was the Dinah Brand who took her pick of Poisonville’s men, I had been told.” He warms to her, too, as she matches him drink for drink while dangling criminal gossip for sale: “I’m a girl who likes to pick up a little jack when she can.” She sketches for him the town’s outlaw cast of bootleggers, grifters, and crooked cops, but wants payment: “You can think it’s not going to cost you anything, but I’ll get mine before we’re through,” she says. Recognizing the Op’s mission, she offers, “If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you.”4

  Dinah Brand is probably the most lifelike female character Hammett ever created, and as with a number of his fictional people, she was probably modeled in part on some vivid acquaintance; she resembles a type of woman he favored in his dalliances, “rumpled, frowsy, edging into blowsy,” as Jo Hammett describes her in A Daughter Remembers, “and perfectly comfortable with herself and with men—the kind of woman, I noticed over the years, that my father was attracted to.”5 It is hard to know if, while writing his Poisonville novel, Hammett was already spending time with Nell Martin, the spirited woman who would later accompany him to New York. “I used to think I knew men,” Dinah complains at one point, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.”**

  Not only does the Op get a disturbing taste for death in Personville, but he befriends this woman who seems to have already fleeced many of the town’s men, except for the passive lunger she keeps around to abuse, Dan Rolff. When the Op uncharacteristically confesses to Dinah that he fears he is “going blood-simple like the natives,” she comforts him with laudanum, and he has two gumshoeing hallucinations, as dogged as they are poetic. In one, he trails after a woman whose face is hidden by a veil, following her voice through “half the streets in the United States”; in the second dream, he chases around a strange city “a small brown man who wore an immense sombrero”:

  Keeping one hand on the open knife in my pocket, I ran toward the little brown man, running on the heads and shoulders of the people in the plaza. The heads and shoulders were of unequal heights and unevenly spaced. I slipped and floundered over them.6

  The Op wakes to a worse nightmare: he is gripping a fatal ice pick. Thinking he was solving one crime, he also must clear himself of Dinah’s murder. He has gone “native” to the point that even one of his steadiest fellow operatives, the terse Canadian Dick Foley, becomes unsure of his innocence; enough so that the Op sends him back to San Francisco. The book ends with the Op fretting over the language of his agency reports to the Old Man but still catching “merry hell” for his tactics.

  One mystery at the center of this book is how Hammett wrote something so convincingly realistic. The traditional account suggests that his first novel grew out of the nightmarish things he saw during his brief time spent in Butte as a Pinkerton, when dozens of agents roamed undercover on behalf of the mining companies. It seems quite a leap of faith to accept Hammett’s story about being in Butte in 1917, when he was a relatively new operative in Baltimore, and being offered a bribe to kill Frank Little. But it is not impossible he was there in 1920, the year of a second round of strikes, riots, shootings, and federal troops, when he worked out of the Spokane office. This hews more closely to how the Pinkerton Agency functioned, assigning from the Denver office and drawing operatives primarily from other northwest branches. More easily dispatched from Spokane than from Baltimore, Hammett may have done some service working undercover, if he was healthy enough, between his move west to Spokane in May 192
0 and his collapse that November, after which he went off to the Cushman hospital to meet the young nurse who became his wife.

  Like so much with Hammett in the early twenties, even if on paper he should have been immobilized, it does not mean he obeyed. If he came to Butte that spring, he would have arrived just weeks after the Anaconda Road Massacre of April 21, 1920, an event in which sixteen striking miners were shot from behind during a protest outside the Neversweat Mine, and another, Tom Manning, died later from his wounds. Troops returned to Butte, but calm had not been entirely restored when Hammett would have walked its streets.

  There is another, more literary reason to believe he was there in 1920: he describes the town too well not to have seen it. Another possibility, that he visited his wife and daughters there in 1926, when his TB became contagious and when Jose brought the girls home to Anaconda, is not likely and is not how the family remembered it: he was far too sick in 1926 for such a long train trip. Being such a gifted observer, Hammett only needed to visit Butte for a week or so to be able to describe things he saw and, especially, heard in billiard halls, hotel lobbies, and the precinct house; or at the fights; or in the room of an appealingly disheveled young woman. He also had another source for background, though she rarely gets credit.

  His authenticity, the “skin of realism” of his writing, springs from Hammett’s own detecting experiences. However, his wife, Jose, had grown up in the dingy model town for Poisonville, and would have known her way around it in all its ugliness. She knew the violent history from her vantage point as the adopted daughter of “Captain” William Kelly, an executive at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Even if she didn’t present what she remembered in the style Hammett preferred, her memories would have made excellent atmosphere for a novelist to tease out and rearrange however he liked.