Nightmare Town

gun when he has to, but prefers using his wits. He is as close to an actual working detective as Hammett could make him.

Hammett featured the Op in his earlier long works, Blood Money (also known as The Big Knockover), Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse, all of which were revised from Black Mask novellas.

His next major fictional creation was San Francisco private eye Samuel Spade, to whom Hammett gave his first name. (As a Pinkerton, he had always been called Sam. When he turned to writing, he became simply Dashiell Hammett.) Spade made his debut in The Maltese Falcon, a five-part Black Mask serial that Hammett carefully reworked for book publication by Alfred A. Knopf. Most critics rate this “saga of a private detective” as the finest crime novel written in this century. Describing his character for a Modern Library edition of Falcon, Hammett stated:

Spade had no original. 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. For your private detective does not… want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.

Indeed, this was precisely the way Hammett wrote Spade in The Maltese Falcon – able to match wits with the crafty fat man, Casper Gutman, in tracking down the fabled bird of the title; able to handle the intrusive police; and able to fend off the advances of seductive Brigid O’Shaughnessy in solving the murder of his partner, Miles Archer.

Hammett never intended to make Spade a continuing character; in completing The Maltese Falcon he was “done with him.” Yet he had not foreseen the book’s wide and lasting popularity, nor that it would become a supremely successful radio series, nor that no less than three motion pictures would be produced based on the published novel.

The public demanded more Spade stories, and Hammett’s literary agent pleaded with the author to come up with new adventures. Hammett was reluctant, but he was also short of money. He made vast sums in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, but he squandered every dollar as quickly as he earned it. Money was for spending and Hammett always felt that more of it would magically appear as needed. Finally, he sat down to rap out three new Spade stories, placing two of them with The American Magazine and the final one with Collier’s.

All three are in the present collection: A Man Called Spade, Too Many I lave Lived, and They Can Only Hang You Once. The tales are crisp, efficient, and swift-moving.

The other stories assembled here demonstrate Hammett’s bold experimentation with language and viewpoint. Compare the fussy, ornate narration in A Man Named Thin (featuring a poet- detective) with the crude, uneducated narration of the young boxer in His Brother’s Keeper. Both are told first-person, but they are leagues apart. Hammett tackles a female point of view in the superbly written Ruffian’s Wife, and brings off a neat twist ending in The Second-Story Angel (note the understated humour in this one).

Both Afraid of a Gun and The Man Who Killed Dan Odams are set far from his usual San Francisco locale and demonstrate the wide range of Hammett’s fiction. Gun takes place in the high mountain country, and Dan Odams is a semi-modern Western set in Montana. They represent Hammett in top form.

While the majority of pulp writers in the twenties and thirties were grinding out stories for money, Hammett worked as a dedicated artist. He gave each story the best of himself, labouring over each sentence, each turn of phrase. And he was constantly seeking new ideas and new characters. His protagonist in The Assistant Murderer is a prime example. With Alec Rush, the author created a detective described as incredibly ugly, a radical departure from the usual magazine hero. Hammett was striking out in a fresh direction with this story, which involves a complex case solved not by Rush but by the killer’s confession.

The Assistant Murderer was written just before Hammett temporarily left Black Mask for his unsuccessful attempt at a career in advertising. One feels that had he remained with the magazine, Hammett might well have written more stories featuring this offbeat detective.

During the pulp era, editors constantly called for “Action! More action!” Hammett decided to see just how much action he could pack into a single novella. Originally printed in Argosy All-Story Weekly, the title story of this collection, Nightmare Town, is a tour de force in sustained violence. The hero wields an ebony walking stick with devastating effectiveness, cracking skulls and breaking bones in the finest pulp tradition.

An important contribution in Nightmare Town is The First Thin Man, which here achieves its first book printing. This early version of 1930 stands in sharp contrast to the novel Hammett eventually finished for Alfred A. Knopf three years later, with vast differences in basic approach, mood, plot, and tone. A call from Hollywood and the promise of substantial film money had caused Hammett to abandon the original manuscript at sixty-five typed pages. When he returned to it three years later, John Guild, the Op-like working detective – dedicated, stoic, close-mouthed – was replaced by Nick Charles, a hard-drinking, party-loving cynic, an ex-crime solver with no desire to solve more crimes; he just wanted another martini. It was Nick’s wife, Nora (modelled directly on Lillian Hellman), who badgered him into becoming a detective again to solve the case of the missing thin man.

Dashiell Hammett had undergone a major life change between 1930 and 1933, and Nick Charles marked the end of Hammett’s career as a novelist. He had written himself into a blind corner and no longer believed that the criminal ills of society could be dealt with on a one-to-one basis. In Hammett’s view, a lone detective (such as Sam Spade or John Guild) could do nothing to stem the mounting tide of societal corruption. The detective’s code of personal honour could have no effect on a dishonourable world. Hammett’s core bitterness and cynicism, reflected in a less obvious form in his earlier work, had now taken centre stage. He was no longer able to believe in heroes. Even plainspoken, down-to-earth, working heroes.

In 1951, after he was sentenced for contempt because he refused to name names before a federal judge in New York, Hammett spent five months in jail in defence of his political beliefs. But he never believed in political violence and had been shocked when Senator Joseph McCarthy asked him if he had ever engaged in an act of sabotage against the United States. Having served his country in two world wars as an enlisted soldier, he loved America, even as he despised its capitalist politics.

Hammett’s final years, following his release from prison, were sad ones. His name was removed from a film based on one of his characters; his radio shows were cancelled; and a scheduled collection of his fiction was dropped by the publisher. He spent most of his last decade isolated in a small gatekeeper’s cottage in Katonah, New York. On two occasions shots were fired through his front windows, but Hammett bore his exile with stoic acceptance.

Sick and frail, blacklisted as a political pariah, unable to write, and hounded by the IRS for taxes on money he no longer earned, Samuel Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer in 1961, at the age of sixty-six.

He considered himself a literary failure, but, as this book helps prove, he was anything but that. No other writer since Edgar Allan Poe has exerted a greater influence on mystery fiction. His art was timeless and his work has not dated. In the genre of detective fiction, he was a master.

That mastery is evident in Nightmare Town, the largest collection of his shorter works and by far the most comprehensive.

WILLIAM F. NOLAN

West Hills, California 1999

NIGHTMARE TOWN

A Ford – whitened by desert travel until it was almost indistinguishable from the dust-clouds that swirled around it – came down Izzard’s Main Street. Like the dust, it came swiftly, erratically, zigzagging the breadth of the roadway.

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 rear of the passing machine, and she essayed the street again.