Woman In The Dark

WOMAN IN THE DARK—A Novel Of Dangerous Romance

Dashiell Hammett

First Published in 1933

Introduction

Woman in the Dark was published in Liberty magazine in three installments on April 8, April 15, and April 22, 1933, and thus appeared after Dashiell Hammett had written all his novels but one. It is very much Hammett: the offbeat names (Brazil), the flat dialogue, the casually callous cops, the upper class bad guys, the decent low lifes (though suspicion of the wealthy was not peculiar to Hammett in 1933). And yet it also shows us Hammett’s view of life in transition.

In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade recounts a story from his investigative past to Brigid O’Shaughnessy while they await Joel Cairo. Here is an abridged version. The words are Hammett’s, the abridgement, mine.

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned…

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand…Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right…

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put-up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger —well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

“He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

It seems like a time killer, idle talk while waiting. But of course it is not. It is Spade’s motive spring. And it is this vision of an implacably random universe which informs nearly all of Hammett’s work.

The men in this work are like Brazil. Sometimes they are detectives, sometimes not, but they are men who understand life as Spade understood it and expect whatever comes. They are men with few friends and no permanent social context. They have no family. Their allegiance is not to the law, but to something else, call it order, a sense of the way things ought to be. In many ways these men seem to be of the people. Indeed, it is occasionally fashionable to view Hammett’s work from a Marxist perspective—though such a perspective usually requires one to chew more than he’s bitten off. But these men are seemingly immune to the things that compel people. They do not seem afraid of death. They seem able to resist the temptations of money and sex. They seem above pain, and unsurprised by cruelty. They have no illusions. Brazil particularly seems to have muffled himself inside a great calmness, as if nothing much mattered.

Yet like most of Hammett’s men there is passion in him, and it seethes under control only a little past the I- don’t-care. The passion often expresses itself in action rather than in speech. The action is normally violent. Woman in the Dark is more of a love story than Hammett usually wrote.

It appeared two years after he began his lifelong relationship with Lillian Hellman, one year before publication of his final novel, The Thin Man. And the fortuitous ending and implied happily-ever-after for Brazil and Luise is more sentimental than Hammett usually got.

“Hammett’s style,” Raymond Chandler once wrote, “at its worst was as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American Language (and not even exclusively that anymore), can say things he did not know how to say, or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.” Perhaps Hammett did not know how to write about love or, until now, feel the need of it. To my eye the happy ending seems a bit forced, as if Hammett, in order to bring Brazil and Luise together after all, might have bent his hard-eyed gaze away for a moment. I’m rather glad he did, in truth. I too am sentimental.

But if it worked all right here, it led him into a swamp that nearly drowned him in The Thin Man. It was as if Hammett could not accommodate Spade’s Flitcraftian view of life with his impulse to write, at last, of love.

Whatever was at work in Hammett’s soul, it is so that after The Thin Man in 1934 Hammett never wrote another novel, and when he died in 1961 he left only the fragment of one in progress, Tulip. In it he appeared to be trying to write something different, something that might integrate the conflicting impulses. Perhaps he tired. Perhaps he couldn’t integrate the conflict.

Woman in the Dark is subtitled, after all, “A Novel of Dangerous Romance.” It is a conjunction Hammett never quite tried before. It is a conjunction that works pretty well here. It never worked so well again, but for Hammett, the writer, nothing else did either.

Robert B. Parker

One—The Flight

Her right ankle turned under her and she fell. The wind blowing downhill from the south, whipping the trees beside the road, made a whisper of her exclamation and snatched her scarf away into the darkness. She sat up slowly, palms on the gravel pushing her up, and twisted her body sidewise to release the leg bent beneath her.

Her right slipper lay in the road close to her feet. When she put it on she found its heel was missing. She peered around, then began to hunt for the heel, hunting on hands and knees uphill into the wind, wincing a little when her right knee touched the road. Presently she gave it up and tried to break the heel off her left slipper, but could not. She replaced the slipper and rose with her back to the wind, leaning back against the wind’s violence and the road’s steep sloping. Her gown clung to her back, flew fluttering out before her. Hair lashed her cheeks. Walking high on the ball of her right foot to make up for the missing heel, she hobbled on down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill there was a wooden bridge, and, a hundred yards beyond, a sign that could not be read in the darkness marked a fork in the road. She halted there, not looking at the sign but around her, shivering now, though the wind had less force than it had had on the hill. Foliage to her left moved to show and hide yellow