The Main Death and This King Business

by Dashiell Hammett

  He was kidding, of course.

  Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today’s e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It’s a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.

  J.M.R.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Later Years: 1926–1930

  Dashiell Hammett served his apprenticeship under editors Sutton and Cody, but by the end of 1925 he had outgrown them. When Cody refused his demand for more money, Hammett quit the magazine, and in March 1926 he took a job as advertising manager at Albert S. Samuels Jewelry Store in San Francisco, “the House of Lucky Wedding Rings.” The pay was $350 per month (about $55,000 per year in 2015 dollars), double his monthly income from writing for the pulps. It was his first full-time job in at least three years and, more likely, since he left the army. At Samuels he impressed his boss with his energy and ingenuity, working from 8 to 6, six days a week—but it was too much. Five months later, on 20 July, he was found collapsed in his office, lying in a pool of blood. His younger daughter Josephine was not quite two months old. Eight weeks later, Samuels wrote a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau certifying that Hammett had resigned his position due to ill health. His earnings, now reduced to disability payments, dropped to $80 per month plus payment for some part-time work he did for Samuels. Moreover, the Veterans Bureau nurses insisted that Hammett live apart from his wife and children, which meant two rent payments. Within three months, he moved to 891 Post St. (the address of Sam Spade’s apartment in The Maltese Falcon) and Jose and the girls stayed first in an apartment in San Francisco, then across San Francisco Bay in Fairfax in Marin County. Hammett, meanwhile, tried to revive his advertising career from his apartment, publishing how-to articles in Western Advertising.

  Meanwhile, a shakeup was materializing at Black Mask. Circulation was decreasing sharply, and Cody, whose attentions were divided among other Pro-Distributors projects, needed a new editor to revitalize the magazine. The successful applicant was a fifty-one-year old aspiring mystery writer who had submitted his first story to Black Mask in summer 1926. Joseph Thompson Shaw was a most unlikely candidate to edit a pulp detective-fiction magazine. He was a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he was a member of the editorial board for the school literary magazine. He was a four-time national sabers champion. He had worked as a journalist at The New York World, as a clerk at G. P. Putnam’s publishing company, and as editor of American Textile Journal, before embarking on a successful career in the textile business. Then he opened his own office to sell securities on the stock exchange. He wrote a history of the textile industry, From Wool to Cloth (American Woolen Co., 1904), and a travel book, Spain of To-Day (NY: Grafton, 1909). During WWI he served as a captain in the army and after the war as an officer in the American Relief Administration in France, and as director of the Bureau for Children’s Relief in Czechoslovakia. And he was socially connected. In February 1925, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that he was a member of the Pinehurst Country Club in Brooklyn, where he was frequently seen taking tea and dancing with his wife after polo and golf matches. Shaw’s first mystery story, “Makings,” was published in the December 1926 issue of Black Mask, the month after he took over from Cody as editor.

  Shaw was the first full-time editor of Black Mask, and he took his job seriously. Though he had no experience in pulp magazine publishing, he was an excellent businessman and a superb promoter. His primary goal was to separate Black Mask from the rest of the pulp-fiction field by virtue of the quality of its fiction, detective fiction. Upon assuming the editor’s chair, he read through back issues of the magazine to identify the authors he wished to cultivate. He chose four, whom he called his “backfield,” employing a football metaphor: Erle Stanley Gardner, J. Paul Suter, Carroll John Daly, and Hammett, his favorite among them; for the line he named “a splendid nucleus” in Tom Curry, Raoul Whitfield, and Frederick Nebel. In the introduction to a 1946 anthology of stories from Black Mask, Shaw recalled his first days as editor:

  We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective story differing from that accredited to the Chaldeans and employed more recently by Gaborieau, Poe, Conan Doyle—in fact universally by detective story writers; that is, the deductive type, the cross-word puzzle sort, lacking—deliberately—all other human emotional values. …

  So we wrote to Dashiell Hammett. His response was immediate and most enthusiastic: That is exactly what I’ve been thinking about and working toward. As I see it, the approach I have in mind has never been attempted. The field is unscratched and wide open. …

  We felt obligated to stipulate our boundaries. We wanted simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief. We wanted action, but we held that action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three-dimensional form.

  Hammett’s enthusiasm was amplified by Shaw’s check for $300, the money Hammett felt Cody had owed him earlier in the year. Shaw also passed along what he represented as lavish praise from Cody and Gardner. By February 1927 Hammett was back in the fold. He responded with his most accomplished short fiction to date, the “The Big Knock-Over,” the linked story “$106,000 Blood Money,” and “The Main Death,” all Op stories and his only submissions to Black Mask for the next year, totaling just under 45,000 words. They are also his most violent.

  With “The Big Knock-Over” Hammett’s writing took on a new energy. The language was sharper than before; the plotting was more interesting; the dialogue was surer; and the dramatic scenes were more vivid. There was more action than in Hammett’s earlier stories, and the action was linked to real-life crime, as Shaw reminded readers in his introductory blurb, which mentioned the Illinois gang wars and a recent mail-truck robbery in Elizabeth, New Jersey that netted more than $800,000 and eventually left six people dead: “Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness–yet can anyone be sure that it isn’t likely to occur?” The Op’s comment in “The Gutting of Couffignal” about M. P. Shiel’s The Lord of the Sea well describes Hammett’s stories for Shaw: “There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats … It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.” Readers agreed.

  The star of Shaw’s backfield produced, and the new editorial formula worked. In May 1927 Shaw announced that the circulation of Black Mask had increased 60%: “BECAUSE IT’S GOT THE STUFF! The stories in it are the best of their kind that can possibly be gotten, written by men who not only know how to write, but know what they are writing about.”

  Unlike his predecessors, Shaw nurtured his authors’ careers and he took a special interest in Hammett’s. In January 1927 Hammett became the mystery-fiction reviewer for The Saturday Review of Literature. Co-founded in 1924 and edited by Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby, who also chaired the editorial board of the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club, The Saturday Review was regarded as the most influential literary magazine in the United States. Hammett did not then have the cachet to land that job, but Shaw did. A fledgling literary agent as well as an ed
itor, he had the social and business connections to recommend his star writer. Book reviewing was significant to Hammett’s literary development. In his tough criticism of current mystery publications, he was forced to articulate his editorial standards, and that effort showed in the increased care he took with his own stories and his growing confidence that he could make detective fiction, which he regarded as subliterary in the hands of its most popular practitioners, respectable.

  At Shaw’s urging, Hammett began planning his foray into novel writing and book publication. The first installment of his four-part serialized novel, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” appeared in Black Mask monthly from November 1927, one year after Shaw became editor. In February 1928, when the last monthly installment was published, Hammett sent what he called his “action-detective novel” to the editors at Alfred A. Knopf, who published Conrad Aiken, Willa Cather, H. L Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and an array of classical literature. Since at least 1918, Knopf had maintained an imprint called The Borzoi Mysteries under the direction of Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, but little attention had been paid to that line until Hammett arrived and Shaw began feeding Black Mask authors to the firm. Mrs. Knopf offered Hammett a three-book contract if he would change the title of his first novel, and in February 1929 she published Red Harvest—dedicated to Joseph Thompson Shaw—which received glowing reviews, followed in July by Hammett’s second Continental Op novel, The Dain Curse, also first serialized in Black Mask. Encouraged by Hammett’s success, Knopf published Shaw’s novel Derelict, in 1930, along with two books by Raoul Whitfield, Green Ice, a crime novel, and Silver Wings, a collection of juvenile “Flying Ace” stories.

  After publication of Red Harvest, Hammett began to attract international attention as an important new novelist whose modernist literary sensibility set him apart from the genre writers associated with the pulps. He was compared favorably to Ernest Hemingway by Herbert Asbury in the Bookman, and the New Statesman in London called him an author of “obvious intelligence.” Meanwhile, he attracted the attention of Hollywood studio heads in need of talented writers who could handle dialogue to prepare scripts for the new talking movies, introduced commercially the year Red Harvest was published. Hammett accommodated them, confiding to Blanche Knopf that he would concentrate on writing more fiction that could be adapted to the screen.

  By 1931, Hammett had written two more novels, both serialized in Black Mask before book publication by Knopf—The Maltese Falcon, introducing Sam Spade, and The Glass Key, about the political fixer Ned Beaumont. The last Op story, “Death and Company,” was published in November 1930. That story marked the end of Hammett’s interest in his fat, laconic detective and the end of his tenure at Black Mask. He had learned how to write fiction in his Op stories, and now his fiction had made him rich. He moved to New York, where he was the toast of the town.

  R.L.

  THE MAIN DEATH

  Black Mask, June 1927

  After an enforced absence from literary work, Mr. Hammett is once more in the lineup of Black Mask regular contributors, and, judging from the many enthusiastic comments on The Big Knock-Over, his popularity is greater than ever. In The Main Death—which, by the way, is a short story—he is at his clevrest and bet. By its surprise development, its subtleties, its wonderfully clear picturization, its easy, swift movement to the climax, this tale will delight every lover of the short story. It is a gem—a model of what the short story can be.

  A curious tangle of a robbery, a mysterious killing and jealousy.

  The captain told me Hacken and Begg were handling the job. I caught them leaving the detectives’ assembly room. Begg was a freckled heavyweight, as friendly as a Saint Bernard puppy, but less intelligent. Lanky detective-sergeant Hacken, not so playful, carried the team’s brains behind his worried hatchet face.

  “In a hurry?” I inquired.

  “Always in a hurry when we’re quitting for the day,” Begg said, his freckles climbing up his face to make room for his grin.

  “What do you want?” Hacken asked.

  “I want the low-down on the Main doings—if any.”

  “You going to work on it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “for Main’s boss—Gungen.”

  “Then you can tell us something. Why’d he have the twenty thou in cash?”

  “Tell you in the morning,” I promised. “I haven’t seen Gungen yet. Got a date with him tonight.”

  While we talked we had gone into the assembly room, with its school-room arrangement of desks and benches. Half a dozen police detectives were scattered among them, doing reports. We three sat around Hacken’s desk and the lanky detective-sergeant talked:

  “Main got home from Los Angeles at eight, Sunday night, with twenty thousand in his wallet. He’d gone down there to sell something for Gungen. You find out why he had that much in cash. He told his wife he had driven up from L. A. with a friend—no name. She went to bed around ten-thirty, leaving him reading. He had the money—two hundred hundred-dollar bills—in a brown wallet.

  “So far, so good. He’s in the living-room reading. She’s in the bedroom sleeping. Just the two of them in the apartment. A racket wakes her. She jumps out of bed, runs into the living-room. There’s Main wrestling with a couple of men. One’s tall and husky. The other’s little—kind of girlish built. Both have got black handkerchiefs over their mugs and caps pulled down.

  “When Mrs. Main shows, the little one breaks away from Main and sticks her up. Puts a gun in Mrs. Main’s face and tells her to behave. Main and the other guy are still scuffling. Main has got his gun in his hand, but the thug has him by the wrist, trying to twist it. He makes it pretty soon—Main drops the rod. The thug flashes his own, holding Main off while he bends down to pick up the one that fell.

  “When the man stoops, Main piles on him. He manages to knock the fellow’s gun out of his hand, but by that time the fellow had got the one on the floor—the one Main had dropped. They’re heaped up there for a couple of seconds. Mrs. Main can’t see what’s happening. Then bang! Main’s falling away, his vest burning where the shot had set fire to it, a bullet in his heart, his gun smoking in the masked guy’s fist. Mrs. Main passes out.

  “When she comes to there’s nobody in the apartment but herself and her dead husband. His wallet’s gone, and so is his gun. She was unconscious for about half an hour. We know that, because other people heard the shot and could give us the time—even if they didn’t know where it come from.

  “The Mains’ apartment is on the sixth floor. It’s an eight-story building. Next door to it, on the corner of Eighteenth Avenue, is a two-story building—grocery downstairs, grocer’s flat upstairs. Behind these buildings runs a narrow back street—an alley. All right.

  “Kinney—the patrolman on that beat—was walking down Eighteenth Avenue. He heard the shot. It was clear to him, because the Mains’ apartment is on that side of the building—the side overlooking the grocer’s—but Kinney couldn’t place it right away. He wasted time scouting around up the street. By the time he got down as far as the alley in his hunting, the birds had flown. Kinney found signs of ’em though—they had dropped a gun in the alley—the gun they’d taken from Main and shot him with. But Kinney didn’t see ’em—didn’t see anybody who might have been them.

  “Now, from a hall window of the apartment house’s third floor to the roof of the grocer’s building is easy going. Anybody but a cripple could make it—in or out—and the window’s never locked. From the grocer’s roof to the back street is almost as easy. There’s a cast iron pipe, a deep window, a door with heavy hinges sticking out—a regular ladder up and down that back wall. Begg and I did it without working up a sweat. The pair could have gone in that way. We know they left that way. On the grocer’s roof we found Main’s wallet—empty, of course—and a handkerchief. The wallet had metal corners. The handkerchief had caught on one of ’em, and went with it when the crooks tossed it away
.”

  “Main’s handkerchief?”

  “A woman’s—with an E in one corner.”

  “Mrs. Main’s?”

  “Her name is Agnes,” Hacken said. “We showed her the wallet, the gun, and the handkerchief. She identified the first two as her husband’s, but the handkerchief was a new one on her. However, she could give us the name of the perfume on it—Dèsir du Cœur. And—with it for a guide—she said the smaller of the masked pair could have been a woman. She had already described him as kind of girlish built.”

  “Any fingerprints, or the like?” I asked.

  “No. Phels went over the apartment, the window, the roof, the wallet and the gun. Not a smear.”

  “Mrs. Main identify ’em?”

  “She says she’d know the little one. Maybe she would.”

  “Got anything on the who?”

  “Not yet,” the lanky detective-sergeant said as we moved toward the door.

  In the street I left the police sleuths and set out for Bruno Gungen’s home in Westwood Park.

  The dealer in rare and antique jewelry was a little bit of a man and a fancy one. His dinner jacket was corset-tight around his waist, padded high and sharp at the shoulders. Hair, mustache and spade-shaped goatee were dyed black and greased until they were as shiny as his pointed pink finger-nails. I wouldn’t bet a cent that the color in his fifty-year-old cheeks wasn’t rouge.

  He came out of the depths of a leather library chair to give me a soft, warm hand that was no larger than a child’s, bowing and smiling at me with his head tilted to one side.

  Then he introduced me to his wife, who bowed without getting up from her seat at the table. Apparently she was a little more than a third of his age. She couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, and she looked more like sixteen. She was as small as he, with a dimpled olive-skinned face, round brown eyes, a plump painted mouth and the general air of an expensive doll in a toy-store window.