Nightmare Town

COLIN DEXTER

January 2001

Oxford

INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM F. NOLAN

Although he lived into his sixties, Samuel Dashiell Hammett’s prose-writing career encompassed just twelve short years, from 1922 into early 1934. But they were richly productive years, during which he wrote more than a hundred stories. Twenty of them have been assembled here in Nightmare Town, displaying the full range of Dashiell Hammett’s remarkable talent.

In his famous 1944 essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler openly acknowledged Hammett’s genius. He properly credited him as “the ace performer,” the one writer responsible for the creation and development of the hard-boiled school of literature, the genre’s revolutionary realist. “He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” Chandler declared. “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

And crime novelist Ross Macdonald also granted Hammett the number one position in crime literature: “We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”

Born in 1894 to a tobacco-farming Maryland family, young Samuel grew up in Baltimore and left school at fourteen to work for the railroad. An outspoken nonconformist, he moved restlessly from job to job: yardman, stevedore, nail-machine operator in a box factory, freight handler, cannery worker, stock brokerage clerk. He chafed under authority and was often fired, or else quit out of boredom. He was looking for “something extra” from life.

In 1915 Hammett answered a blind ad which stated that applicants must have “wide work experience and be free to travel and respond to all situations.” The job itself was not specified.

Intrigued, Hammett found himself at the Baltimore offices of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. For the next seven years, except during periods of army service or illness, Sam Hammett functioned as an agency operative. Unlike most agency detectives, who worked within a single locale, the Pinkerton detectives, based in a variety of cities, ranged the states from east to west, operating across a wide terrain. Thus, Hammett found himself involved in a varied series of cross-country cases, many of them quite dangerous. Along the way, he was clubbed, shot at, and knifed; but, as he summed it up, “I was never bored.”

In 1917 his life changed forever. Working for Pinkerton as a strike-breaker against the International Workers of the World in Butte, Montana, Hammett was offered five thousand dollars to kill union agitator Frank Little. After Hammett bitterly refused, Little was lynched in a crime ascribed to vigilantes. As Lillian Hellman later observed: “This must have been, for Hammett, an abiding horror. I can date [his] belief that he was living in a corrupt society from Little’s murder.” Hammett’s political conscience was formed in Butte. From this point forward, it would permeate his life and work.

In 1918 he left the agency for the first time to enlist in the army, where he was later diagnosed with tuberculosis. (“Guess it runs in the family. My mother had T.B.”) Discharged a year later, he was strong enough to rejoin Pinkerton. Unfortunately, the pernicious disease plagued him for many years and took a fearsome toll on his health.

In 1921, with “bad lungs,” Hammett was sent to a hospital in Tacoma, Washington, where he was attended by Josephine Dolan, an attractive young ward nurse. This unworldly orphan girl found her new patient “handsome and mature.” She admired his military neatness and laughed at all his jokes. Soon they were intimate. Jose (pronounced “Joe’s”) was very serious about their relationship, but to Hammett it was little more than a casual diversion. At this point in his life he was incapable of love and, in fact, mistrusted the word.

He declared in an unpublished sketch: “Our love seemed dependent on not being phrased. It seemed that if [I] said ‘I love you,’ the next instant it would have been a lie.” Hammett maintained this attitude throughout his life. He could write “with love” in a letter, but he was incapable of verbally declaring it.

Finally, with his illness in remission, Hammett moved to San Francisco, where he received a letter from Jose telling him that she was pregnant. Would Sam marry her? He would.

They became husband and wife in the summer of 1921, with Hammett once again employed by Pinkerton. But by the time daughter Mary Jane was born that October, Hammett was experiencing health problems caused by the cold San Francisco fog, which was affecting his weakened lungs.

In February 1922, at age twenty-seven, he left the agency for the last time. A course at Munson’s Business College, a secretarial school, seemed to offer the chance to learn about professional writing. As a Pinkerton agent, Hammett had often been cited for his concise, neatly fashioned case reports. Now it was time to see if he could utilise this latent ability.

By the close of that year he’d made small sales to The Smart Set and to a new detective pulp called The Black Mask. In December 1922 this magazine printed Hammett’s The Road Home, about a detective named Hagedorn who has been hired to chase down a criminal. After leading Hagedorn halfway around the globe, the fugitive offers the detective a share of “one of the richest gem beds in Asia” if he’ll throw in with him. At the story’s climax, heading into the jungle in pursuit of his prey, Hagedorn is thinking about the treasure. The reader is led to believe that the detective is tempted by the offer of riches, and that he will be corrupted when he sees the jewels. Thus, Hammett’s career-long theme of man’s basic corruptibility is prefigured here, in his first crime tale.

In 1923 Hammett created the Continental Op for The Black Mask and was selling his fiction at a steady rate. In later years, a reporter asked him for his secret. Hammett shrugged. “I was a detective, so I wrote about detectives.” He added: “All of my characters were based on people I’ve known personally, or known about.”

A second daughter, Josephine Rebecca, was born in May 1926, and Hammett realised that he could not continue to support his family on Black Mask sales. He quit prose writing to take a job as advertising manager for a local jeweller at $350 a month. He quickly learned to appreciate the distinctive features of watches and jewelled rings, and was soon writing the store’s weekly newspaper ads. Al Samuels was greatly pleased by his new employee’s ability to generate sales with expertly worded advertising copy. Hammett was “a natural.”

But his tuberculosis surfaced again, and Hammett was forced to leave his job after just five months. He was now receiving 100 percent disability from the Veterans Bureau. During this flare-up he was nearly bedridden, so weak he had to lean on a line of chairs in order to walk between bed and bathroom. Because his tuberculosis was highly contagious, his wife and daughters had to live apart from him.

As Hammett’s health improved, Joseph T. Shaw, the new editor of Black Mask, was able to lure him back to the magazine by promising higher rates (up to six cents a word) and offering him “a free creative hand” in developing novel-length material. “Hammett was the leader in what finally brought the magazine its distinctive form,” Shaw declared. “He told his stories with a new kind of compulsion and authenticity. And he was one of the most careful and painstaking workmen I have ever known.”

A two-part novella, The Big Knockover, was followed by the Black Mask stories that led to his first four published books: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. They established Hammett as the nation’s premier writer of detective fiction.

By 1930 he had separated from his family and moved to New York, where he reviewed books for the Evening Post. Later that year, at the age of thirty-six, he journeyed back to the West Coast after The Maltese Falcon was sold to Hollywood, to develop screen material for Paramount. Hammett cut a dapper figure in the film capital. A sharp, immaculate dresser, he was dubbed “a Hollywood Dream Prince” by one local columnist. Tall, with a trim moustache and a regal bearing, he was also known as a charmer, exuding an air of mature masculinity that made him extremely attractive to women.

It was in Hollywood, late that year, that he met aspiring writer Lillian Hellman and began an intense, volatile, often mutually destructive relationship that lasted, on and off, for the rest of his life. To Hellman, then in her mid- twenties, Hammett was nothing short of spectacular. Hugely successful, he was handsome, mature, well-read, and witty – a combination she found irresistible.

Hammett eventually worked with Hellman on nearly all of her original plays (the exception being The Searching Wind). He painstakingly supervised structure, scenes, dialogue, and