The Lost Detective

by Nathan Ward

  According to his granddaughter Julie Rivett, Hammett’s daughter Jo remembered that he “got irritated with her mother when she talked about the strikes in Anaconda. Grandma, I’m told, described in positive terms how the strikebreakers were given special privileges—extra food, chocolates, and such. To her, it seemed a wonder.”7 Hammett, who had known strikebreaking more intimately, had not experienced it as wondrous or privileged work but as an ugly and dangerous assignment. Still, despite the gulf in their perspectives, it is hard to dispute he would have gleaned meaningful background from Jose when creating the world of Personville.

  “The Cleansing of Poisonville” began appearing serially in Black Mask in November 1927. The magazine’s editors hailed the debut of “the first, complete, episode in a series dealing with a city whose administrators have gone mad with power and lust of wealth. It is also, to our minds, the ideal detective story—the new type of detective fiction which Black Mask is seeking to develop … Poisonville is written by a master of his craft.”

  For all that, Hammett still had to send off his “Poisonville” novel unsolicited to East Coast publishing houses.

  * * *

  The package mailed to the Fifth Avenue “Editorial Department” offices of Alfred A. Knopf on February 11, 1928, began simply, “Gentlemen” and introduced “an action-detective novel for your consideration. If you don’t care to publish it, will you kindly return it by express, collect.” The writer went on to introduce himself: “I was a Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency operative for a number of years; and, more recently, have published fiction, book reviews, verse, sketches, and so on, in twenty or twenty-five magazines.”

  Hammett listed nearly five lines of magazine credits, while saying nothing further about his former career as a genuine sleuth, a distinction that would become so important.

  Although he was growing more accustomed to literary success, the answer Hammett received from Blanche Knopf must have been almost as exciting as his first small sale to The Smart Set almost six years earlier. Mrs. Knopf, in addition to publishing Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten with her husband, was a savvy young publisher of mysteries who knew something about the detective genre. Born the same year as Hammett, she had founded the Knopf house with Alfred, on a five-thousand-dollar loan from Alfred’s father, in 1915, the year Hammett became a detective. Blanche Knopf’s hand was in everything at the publishing house; in addition to editing many of its established writers, she had even designed the Knopf colophon of a leaping borzoi dog.

  Mrs. Knopf felt that, apart from its “hopeless” title, Poisonville was quite publishable and they were “keen” about the manuscript except for the middle of the book, where, she said, “the violence seems piled on too heavily; so many killings on a page I believe make the reader doubt the story.” Beyond publishing this book, she wondered hopefully if Hammett had further “ideas for detective stories” or even any others “under way.”

  In fact, he had at least one other under way and more ideas than he even could execute. In his answer, Hammett submitted a list of eight title possibilities for his “Poisonville” book, some of which were even worse: The Poisonville Murders, The Seventeenth Murder, Murder Plus, The Willsson Matter, The City of Death, The Cleansing of Poisonville, The Black City, and, finally, Red Harvest, upon which they agreed.

  Hammett had piled up bodies in “Poisonville” to please the readers of Black Mask. But when he went back to prepare it as a novel for Mrs. Knopf, he found that she (and her editor Harry Block) wanted him to remove a number of extra corpses and at least two dynamitings, and to begin to learn to do some of his killing offstage for a book audience. Dramatically, it didn’t much matter how corrupt the real Butte had been, or how graphic its violence, if the truth seemed unbelievable on the page.

  As he reworked his first book he was finishing his second, The Dain Curse, and he told Mrs. Knopf that he even had plans for a stream-of-consciousness detective novel, in which the reader learned all the clues just as the investigator did. He considered himself “one of the few—if there are any more—moderately literate people who take the detective story seriously.” Mrs. Knopf was another.

  Hammett still had “a flock” of book ideas even as he began to turn his attention toward Hollywood. In April 1928 he received an inquiry from Fox Films about the rights to some of his original material, which included half a dozen stories and his first novel (still in manuscript). He cabled Mrs. Knopf for advice about his “motion picture dickering” and to keep her apprised of his climbing career.8

  By April, he wrote her that “If … I make a more transient connection with Fox I’ll probably let the stream-of-consciousness experiment wait awhile, sticking to the more objective and filmable forms.” Wait a while it did. In June, he traveled to Los Angeles to make his pitch, staying downtown at the Alexandria, an elegant eight-story hotel with the popular Palm Court ballroom, and felt like an emerging big shot. There was even hope that Fox would commission original screenplays from him. Even though no money followed from his first meeting in Hollywood, it does not seem to have shaken his belief that movie studios would ultimately want what he had to sell. Despite the lack of a deal, he followed through on his resolution, from then on, to write books that were more “objective and filmable.”

  When Red Harvest was published in February 1929, Herbert Asbury in The Bookman called it “the liveliest detective story that has been published in a decade,” and doubted “if even Ernest Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue.” The book was hailed by a number of reviewers for its portrait of corruption and for its starkly savvy prose. Others had a more contemplative picture of how a detective should behave, and did not wish to slog about in the underworld, even with as charismatic a guide as Hammett’s Op. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, the first edition of Red Harvest had sold out and was optioned by a film company—not Fox, but Paramount Studios.

  Six months after publication of his first novel, Knopf brought out The Dain Curse, in July 1929, a mystery that expands on the sinister California theme of cults built around sex and drugs that Hammett had sketched out in “The Scorched Face,” only this time the Op was not searching for a rebellious “wandering daughter” but trying to save one who had been convinced she was evil, the inheritor of a false family curse. (As such a wide-ranging reader, Hammett may even have been inspired by an old Wilkie Collins story about inherited mental illness, “Mad Monkton.”)

  The book, which had also been serialized in Black Mask, was Hammett’s last starring his Op. It featured a lean, “sorrel-haired” writer as a villain, drew a little on the knowledge of jewels Hammett had gained during his brief advertising career, and contained some other inside jokes about the office. It was dedicated to Albert Samuels.† Few reviewers thought it as good as Red Harvest, including Hammett, who later found the story “silly,” but The Dain Curse did sell out its first three printings and was full of memorable lines from his wisecracking detective. It also gained Hammett his first review mention in the New York Times, as part of a Christmas roundup of books.

  Hammett was now writing as well and as quickly as he ever would. By the time Knopf published The Dain Curse, he had already submitted his third novel, what he introduced as “by far the best thing I’ve done so far.” After experimenting with other physical types for sleuths in some non-Op stories (including a fat, hyperbolically ugly PI named Alexander Rush), he had developed a new detective worthy of the long haul of starring in his own novel. He was taller, looked and acted a little like a “blond Satan,” and answered to no one but the client—not to an Old Man of the office, not even to his business partner, for whom he showed his contempt by bedding his wife. Sam Spade was about to come snarling to life.

  * * *

  * Clark, who beat Marcus Daly in the dirty campaign over a state capital, owned the Butte streetcar system that brought visitors to his thirty-four-room Victorian mansion. For an entertaining account of the battles between the magnates, see C. B. Glasscock, T
he War of The Copper Kings (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935).

  ** In later years, as he continued to be compared to Ernest Hemingway—who also wrote sparely about tough guys but was never labeled a genre writer—Hammett would insist to friends that “Ernest” did not create convincing female characters—none as lifelike as Dinah Brand, anyway.

  † With three of his books, The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, and The Glass Key, the honoree got the dedication once Hammett had moved on.

  Chapter XII

  AMONG THE GHOSTS

  The contemporary novelist’s job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should be.

  —DASHIELL HAMMETT, 1934

  If you go around town looking for it, you’ll find boasts that Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon in all corners of San Francisco. At the Flood Building on Market Street, where he worked for Pinkerton’s before he ever wrote anything, a proprietary caption accompanies the black bird on display in the lobby; around the corner, at John’s Grill on Ellis Street, the menu reprints Fritz Lieber’s “Stalking Sam Spade,” and the marker out front (HOME OF THE MALTESE FALCON) suggests he scribbled some of his masterwork here among the beer glasses and T-bones. (The waiters somehow all know this for a fact.) John’s Grill, with its marvelous long neon sign and three floors decked out with Falcon memorabilia, has served as a headquarters for Hammett scholars over the years and earned its spot on the to-do lists of tourists who come to order the Sam Spade Special, a dinner of “chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes” that Spade quickly eats there in the novel. The falcon statuette in a glass case on John’s second floor is the best known of all the replicas in the city. When it was stolen in 2007, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bounty failed to bring it back, but a replacement bird was created by art students.*

  Across Ellis Street from John’s, at the Hotel Union Square, where he never stayed or wrote but did put up his pregnant fiancée before their wedding in 1921, the Thin Man movies play quietly on a continuous loop in the lobby. Fans of the writer can sleep in the Dashiell Hammett Suite, which features a SPADE & ARCHER sign in the window, fedora and mackintosh on a coatrack, a suitcase filled with Hammett paperbacks, and framed pictures of both Hammett’s wife, Jose, and his companion Lillian Hellman. (Many Hammett enthusiasts who have stayed in the suite have put the discordant Hellman portrait facedown during their stay: after all, she has nothing to do with San Francisco.) The most charming feature of the suite is the lovely chiming of the cable cars passing under the windows, on their way to and from the grinding turntable at the bottom of Powell Street. And while the literature that comes with the room claims he wrote his great San Francisco works in the 1930s (when he had gone to New York and Hollywood), still, it is a fine place to have a drink and think about Hammett.

  All that’s known for sure is he wrote The Maltese Falcon mostly in the studio he rented not that far away, at 891 Post Street, which sits just within the Tenderloin district. He had moved there while still working as advertising manager for Albert Samuels, and it is where Sam Spade first came to life, a “hard and shifty fellow” if ever there was one. After two strong books, Hammett produced a nearly perfect one in this space of barely three hundred square feet. Unlike with his Op or the Old Man, Hammett claimed no direct inspiration for Spade from his own experience: “Spade had no original,” he remembered in 1934. “He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached.”1 But he and Spade shared more than that, starting with their common apartment.

  He put so much of himself into Spade—gave him the rooms he was living in and the streets he knew well; added a handsome, angular face very much like his own, as well as a risky romance with a woman inspired by one he had met at the office, Peggy O’Toole; gave him a cop antagonist with the name of a boy from his old Baltimore neighborhood, Polhaus; he attached the name of a favorite cousin, Effie, to Spade’s “invaluable angel” of a secretary, and then christened Spade with his own first name, which he used less and less, Sam.** The rest, of course, was a rough-edged “dream man” with yellow-gray eyes, the perfect foil for the invading throng of deadly treasure hunters chasing an antique black bird. Hammett’s new mystery presented a private detective uniquely suited to his wicked world, as Hammett said, “able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

  Like the Continental Op, who prefers to stir things up and see what happens, Spade’s “way of learning” is to “heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.” But unlike the Op, Spade is not a company man. Others have written about Spade having a personal code (“When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it”), but he is also the perfect adaptive animal for the San Francisco of the late 1920s, the end result of Allan Pinkerton’s dictum about the importance of detectives assimilating with criminals. “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” Spade reminds Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

  Sam Spade launched a thousand tough-guy sleuths, yet he remains more lifelike because he is not really knowable beyond his ruthless focus and weakness for women. Spade is given to sudden rages that might be strategic, draws a punch from a cop as a way of sounding him out (“in losing his head and slugging me he overplayed his hand”); even when he sleeps with his beautiful client, you aren’t sure it isn’t just to steal her key to search her room:

  At his side, Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s soft breathing had the regularity of utter sleep. Spade was quiet leaving bed and bedroom and shutting bedroom-door. He dressed in the bathroom. Then he examined the sleeping girl’s clothes, took a flat brass key from the pocket of her coat, and went out.2

  He examines every crevice of Brigid’s hotel suite, then returns to cheerfully make her breakfast. He crosses so many lines and mostly crosses back, keeping cop and crook off balance, a quality that allows him to play each of the falcon hunters off the others. But as a wise lady once said to the Hammett authority Don Herron as he was leading one of his Hammett tours, you don’t know how the book might turn out if Spade held a real, bejeweled falcon in his hands.

  Inside Hammett’s small Post Street studio, you can easily imagine Spade rolling his cigarettes and jauntily serving Bacardi to his unwelcome guests. According to the Friends of Libraries plaque placed on the wall of the apartment building in 2005, DASHIELL HAMMETT LIVED IN THIS BUILDING FROM 1926 UNTIL 1929, WHEN HE WROTE HIS FIRST THREE NOVELS. Several of those months were spent elsewhere, but as the inscription continues, this space is also significant as the home of Sam Spade: MODELED ON HAMMETT’S, ON THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE FOURTH FLOOR.

  An original member of the Maltese Falcon Society, Don Herron has helped thousands along the Hammett trail since founding his Dashiell Hammett Tour in 1977. Hammett transformed himself while living in San Francisco, and Herron, born in Detroit, also became the man he is only after moving here, during the city’s scruffier prime, long before tech money raised the rents and Google buses prowled the streets.

  Herron has been climbing the San Francisco hillsides since the Jimmy Carter era on behalf of the enthusiasts who show up on designated Sundays, cash in hand, to follow this tall bearded man in his comfortable trench coat: throngs of actors, English professors, Bogie fans, hard-boiled know-it-alls, and kindly buffs. He has led groups of amateur sleuths (from the Mystery Writers of America) as well as professional detectives, and he had the honor of bringing the writer’s daughter Jo Hammett full circle back to her first childhood home on Eddy Street and to the Post Street studio with the cramped elevator where her father wrote The Maltese Falcon.

  After a short, close elevator ride, the apartment door opens into a curved passageway with a recessed wooden phone box of the kind once used for buzzing in guests. On the other side of the wall from the phone is a small but bright
kitchen, while in the main room, a Murphy bed is folded away behind a door (“In his bedroom that was a living room now the wall bed was up …”). Against the wall a period desk sits beneath a framed map of San Francisco, with a solid black Royal typewriter on a leather blotter, and behind the typewriter stands another falcon.

  Turning right from the desk there is a long window view down Post Street, for whenever the writer needed to look away from the “swell lot of thieves” of his imagination. A Gramophone sits on its stand in the corner, opposite a glass-fronted bookcase. Hanging over the scene is an acorn-shaped alabaster light fixture, a little more sculptural than the plain “white bowl, hung on three gilded chains” that lights Spade’s room in the novel. Missing also is the sound of the old Alcatraz foghorn’s “dull moaning” through Spade’s open windows.

  Starting with Sergeant Polhaus, almost every major character comes to Sam’s apartment to harass him at some point in the novel, wanting him for murder or love or treasure. One can imagine the bulbous villain Casper Gutman seated heavily on the room’s couch discussing the history of his black bird, or Brigid O’Shaughnessy undressing in Sam’s bathroom to prove she’s not a thief.

  After Hammett left it in 1929,† tenant after tenant occupied his small studio at 891 Post, presumably unaware of its possible literary significance. Then, more than six decades later, Bill Arney moved in among the Hammett ghosts and began his architectural detective work.

  Arney first saw the outside of Post Street while taking Don Herron’s tour in July 1982. Eleven years later, he recognized the building as he passed it in a cab, with a For Rent sign outside: apartment 401 was available. Arney had heard this was Hammett’s apartment number from Herron, who got it from the novelist Joe Gores, who cited the Crocker-Langley San Francisco City Directory. But Hammett had never said his old apartment definitely belonged to Sam Spade. The man Don Herron calls the “pivotal tenant” ultimately made the case that Hammett’s and Spade’s apartments were one and the same.