Nightmare Town

Dashiell Hammett

Nightmare Town

INTRODUCTION BY COLIN DEXTER

From the English-speaking world there are a good many instances of great writers carrying only a few slimmish volumes of their works as they file past St Peter; and just behind Thomas Gray and A.E. Housman we may well spot Samuel Dashiell Hammett in the queue at the ‘no-more-than-six-items’ counter in the celestial supermarket.

Hammett’s six? The five full-length novels written in the brief period 1929-34, including the universally acknowledged masterpieces The Maltese

Falcon and The Glass Key; plus a collection (fairly considerable) of short stories, covering a much longer period. Nightmare Town presents the reader with twenty of these stories, most of which have been unavailable in print for some time.

In view then of his comparatively limited output, we may reasonably ask if the high praise bestowed on Hammett by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald – his two most distinguished heirs in the ‘hard-boiled’ lineage – was perhaps a little over the top. And to put readers’ minds at rest (there are enough questions to be sorted out in the stories) the answer is ‘decidedly not’. Each of these three writers was practising his craft in a society that was corrupt – with even some of the private eyes potentially corruptible themselves – and in a world that seemed randomly ordained. The advice to fellow writers who were in some doubt about the continuation of a plot was usually ‘Have a man come through the door with a gun!’ and the ubiquity of guns then was a match for that of mobile phones today. Furthermore, as Chandler maintained, murder was committed not just to provide a detective-story writer with a plot. Almost all the sleuths featured in the troubled and often chaotic years between the 1920’s and the 1950’s would have been wholly sceptical about solving a case with the aim of putting the universe back to rights, of restoring some semblance of a moral framework to a temporarily blighted planet. No. They were doing the job they were paid to do, as was Hammett himself in his years working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, with the resolution (if any) of their cases more the result of chance, of hunches, of experience than of some Sherlockian expertise in Eastern European cigar-wrappings.

It is the last mentioned qualification – that of experience, which gives the Hammett stories their distinctive flavour of authenticity. Yet it would be rather misleading to categorise them, in a wholly general sense, as essays in ‘realistic’ fiction, since Hammett is as liable as most detective-story writers to settle for the reassuringly ‘romantic’ approach that his gritty and usually fearless sleuths are little short of semi-heroic stature.

Who are these men?

First, we meet the unnamed Continental Op, an operative with the ‘Continental Agency’, who in spite of his physical appearance, short and fat, is clearly based on the tall and elegant Hammett himself, with the casework based on Hammett’s personal experiences as a Pinkerton detective. In this selection, we have seven stories featuring the Op, each narrated in a matter-of-fact style in the first person, and each illustrating some aspect of his tenacity and ruthlessness, but affording virtually no biographical information.

Second (and taking Hammett’s first name) is Sam Spade, who features here in A Man Called Spade, Too Many Have Lived, and They Can Only Hang You Once – the only three stories from the whole corpus in which the memorable hero of The Maltese Falcon walks and stalks the streets of San Francisco once again. The narration is in the third person, and as with the Op we are given next to no biographical details that we had not already known. Spade has no wish to solve any erudite riddles; he is a hard and shifty fellow quite capable of looking after himself, thank you; his preoccupation is to do his job and to get the better of the criminals some client has paid him to tangle with.

The third – and for me potentially the most interesting – is a man who appears here, just the once, in The Assistant Murderer, introduced as follows in the first sentence:

Gold on the door, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.

He is a match for the other two – laconic, sceptical, successful; yet I think that Hammett was striking out in something of a new direction with Alec Rush, and I wish that he had been more fully developed elsewhere.

The other stories offer considerable range and variety – not only in locality, but more interestingly in diction and point of view. Take, for instance, the repetitive, virtually unpunctuated narrative of the young boxer (already punch-drunk, we suspect) at the opening of His Brother’s Keeper:

I knew what a lot of people said about Loney but he was always swell to me. Ever since I remember he was swell to me and I guess I would have liked him just as much even if he had been just somebody else instead of my brother; but I was glad he was not somebody else.

Again, take the psychological study, in Ruffian’s Wife, of a timid woman who suddenly comes to the shocking realisation that her husband… But readers must read for themselves.

After reading (and greatly enjoying) these stories, what surprised me most was how Hammett has kept the traditional ‘puzzle’ element alive. The majority of the stories end with some cleverly structured surprise, somewhat reminiscent of O’Henry at his best (see especially, perhaps, The Second-Story Angel). But such surprises are not in the style of a pomaded Poirot shepherding his suspects into the library before finally expounding the truth. Much more likely here is that our investigator happens to be seated amid the randomly assembled villains, with a frisson of fear crawling down his back and a loaded revolver pointed at his front.

The secrets of Hammett’s huge success as a crime novelist are hardly secrets at all. They comprise his extraordinary talents for story-telling; for characterisation; and for a literary style that is strikingly innovative.

As a story-teller, he has few equals in the genre. In Who Killed Bob Teal?, for example, a suspicious party has flagged down a taxi and the taxi’s number has been recorded. The narrative continues:

Then Dean and I set about tracing the taxi in which Bob Teal had seen the woman ride away. Half an hour in the taxi company’s office gave us the information that she had been driven to a number on Greenwich Street. We went to the Greenwich Street address.

Many of us who have been advised by editors to ‘Get on with the story!’ would have profited greatly from studying such succinct economy of words.

The characterisation of Hammett’s dramatis personae is realised, often vividly, on almost every page here – primarily through the medium of dialogue, secondarily by means of some sharply observed, physical description (especially of the eyes). Such techniques are omnipresent, and require no specific illustration. They are dependent wholly upon the author’s writing skills.

Much has been said about Hammett’s literary style, and critics have invariably commented on its comparative bareness, with dialogue gritty and terse, and with language pared down to its essentials. But such an assessment may tend to suggest ‘barrenness’ of style rather than ‘bareness’ – as if Hammett had been advised that any brief stretch of even palely-purplish prose was suspect, and that almost every adjective and adverb was potentially otiose. Yet we need read only a page or two here to recognise that Hammett knew considerably more about the business of writing than any well-intentioned editor.

Consider, for example, the second paragraph of the major story, Nightmare Town:

A small woman – a girl of twenty in tan flannel – stepped into the street. The wavering Ford missed her by inches, missing her at all only because her backward jump was bird-quick. She caught her lower lip between white teeth, dark eyes flashed annoyance at the passing machine, and she essayed the street again.

Immediately we spot the Hammett ‘economy’ trademark. But something more, too. We may be a little surprised to find such a wealth of happily chosen epithets here (what a splendid coinage is that ‘bird-quick’!) as Hammett paints his small but memorably vivid picture.

This story (from which the book takes its title) shows Hammett at the top of his form, and sets the tone for a collection in which we encounter no sentimentality, with not a clichй in sight, and with none of the crudity of language which (at least for me) disfigures a good deal of present-day American crime fiction.

Here, then, is a book to be read with delight; a book in which we pass through a gallery of bizarre characters (most of them crooks) sketched with an almost wistful cynicism by a writer whom even the great Chandler acknowledged as the master.