Hammett's politics were always leftish, in some ways he was exactly the kind of writer Mencken admired: he reacted against the vaguely 'feminine' tone of 1890s aestheticism by introducing a profound skepticism into realist narrative, and he stripped literary language of what Pound and others called 'rhetoric.' The only difference between Hammett and the high modernists was that he applied an emerging sensibility to popular adventure stories, attacking bourgeois culture from 'below' rather than from above.
Actually, neither Hammett nor pulp fiction was quite so low on the cultural scale as historians usually suggest. Black Mask had been founded by Mencken and George Nathan in 1920 as a way of supporting The Smart Set, and it was a more respected journal than Mencken himself allowed (even Woodrow Wilson was a subscriber). Red Harvest appeared there in installments, at a time when 'Cap' Shaw was trying to boost the literary reputations of his writers by having them experiment with longer forms. Hammett immediately submitted the manuscript of his novel to the Alfred A. Knopf company, where Mencken and Nathan were valued authors, and in an accompanying letter he pointed out his former connection with The Smart Set. The manuscript was read by Blanche Knopf, one of the most astute editors of the period, who was the leader of a modernist literary salon in New York. Knopf immediately recognized Hammett's talent, but she thought that 'so many killings on a page . . . make the reader doubt the story.'23 Hammett obligingly dropped two dynamitings and a tommy-gun attack, and in response to Knopf's query about his future plans, wrote that he had hopes of 'adapting the stream-of-consciousness method, conveniently modified, to a detective story.' He also remarked, 'I'm one of the fewif there are any morepeople moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. . . . Some day somebody's going to make 'literature' of it (Ford's The Good Soldier wouldn't have needed much altering to have been a detective story), and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes' (quoted in Johnson, 72).
Blanche and Alfred Knopf were the publishers of several important American novelists, including William Faulkner and Willa Cather; together with Mencken, they were also key figures in the transmission of European literary modernism to the United States. Over the next two decades, they gave their imprimatur to hard-boiled writing, developing the careers of Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler and eventually piquing the interest of the movie studios. By this means, Hammett joined the main current of American literature; he never wrote the stream-of-consciousness novel he planned, but within a year of submitting Red Harvest, he told Blanche Knopf that he had borrowed part of the plot from Henry James's Wings of the Dove to complete The Maltese Falcon (1930), the book that firmly established his reputation as a serious author.
From the beginning, Falcon was admired by intellectuals, who observed that the crime was messy, the chase circuitous, and the solution to the murder less important than the depiction of a criminal milieu. To slightly revise a question asked by Edmund Wilson (one of Hammett's supporters and America's leading critic of literary modernism), Who cares who killed Miles Archer? Spade's famous speech to Brigid at the end of the novel mocks the idea of a just solution to murder, just as the Falcon itself mocks the idea of ownership or private property. Born of a 'Holy War' that, as Gutman says, 'was largely a matter of loot,' the Falcon is little more than an embellished form of raw capital, and it belongs to 'whoever can get hold of it.' The novel's final irony is that the rara avis turns out to be just as counterfeit as the characters. A phallic signifier, it provides a motive for the frantic activity of the novel; but when the paint is peeled away, all that remains is a lead shape, an empty object of exchange. Both the hermeneutic code (the enigma of the murder) and the proairetic code (the action or search for the treasure) are rendered absurd. The world, as Spade explains to Brigid in his parable about the Flitcraft case, is founded on a void.
The vaguely existential philosophy that Spade is often said to represent, and the fantasy he satisfies, is at the core of what Leslie Fiedler identifies as the 'American romance': a stoic masculine individualism, living by its wits and avoiding social, economic, and sexual entanglements. This sort of romance is sometimes misogynistic and homophobic, and because of its hostility toward bourgeois marriage, it often results in latently homosexual narratives about male bonding. We find such qualities everywhere in Hammett, but what makes him slightly unusual is that he subverts the classic formulas of the romantic quest, undermining the phallic stoicism of his detectives. Spade is an unusually ruthless hero, more disturbing than any of his movie incarnations; he moves with ease through an underworld composed almost entirely of women and bohemian homosexuals, so that even his masculinity seems ambiguous; and in the end, he behaves more like a survivor in the jungle than like an agent of justice.
This nihilism and pervasive feeling of moral and sexual ambiguity becomes even more evident in Hammett's next novel, The Glass Key (1931), which Diane Johnson has described as a complex treatment of 'male friendship, male loyalty, and male betrayal' (87). The plot is set in motion by a Freudian murder: a state senator kills his sonwith a walking stick, no less. Later, the senator's daughter, Janet Henry, tells the gambler-detective Ned Beaumont about one of her dreams, in which a glass key opens a door to chaos and then shatters. The dream foreshadows Ned Beaumont's discovery of a 'key' to the murder and at the same time comments on the novel's many symbolic castrations. At one point, Beaumont coolly seduces a newspaper publisher's wife, driving the publisher to suicide; and in the last chapter, he takes Janet Henry away from his closest friend, political boss Paul Madvig. In the extended, sadomasochistic torture scenes of chapter 4, in which the thug Jeff keeps calling Beaumont 'sweetheart,' the phallic anxiety threatens to become literal: ''I got something to try.' He scooped Ned Beaumont's legs and tumbled them on the bed. He leaned over Ned Beaumont, his hands busy on Beaumont's body' (86).
The Glass Key could be described as Hammett's novel of the Dark City, his version of The Waste Land. He was reading Eliot at the time he wrote the novel, and Lillian Hellman claimed that when she first met him in 1930, they spent hours talking about the poet. He even names one of the streets in his corrupt, fictional city 'upper Thames Street' (The Waste Land, line 260), and he makes Ned Beaumont a somewhat dandified figure who feels an Eliot-like cultural nostalgia: Beaumont's rooms are decorated 'in the old manner, high of ceiling and wide of window,' and when Janet Henry first sees them she remarks, 'I didn't think there could be any of these left in a city as horribly up to date as ours has become' (141).
The indirect link with high modernism is further reinforced by a neutral, camera-eye narrative technique. Here as in all his other fiction, Hammett dispenses with both 'interior' psychological views and nineteenth-century omniscience; as a result, he gives the reader no comfortable position from which to make judgments. The crooked politicians, the sadistic gangsters, the naive females, the cruelly detached gambler-protagonistall these are familiar pop-cultural stereotypes, but they are presented without any character who, like Chandler's Marlowe, acts as a spokesperson for liberal humanism. Although The Glass Key has all the adventure and suspenseful action of a melodrama, and much of the social detail of a muckraking naturalist novel, it deprives us of the usual melodramatic sermons, sentiments, or philosophical conclusions. What, finally, are we to think of Beaumont and Madvig? How are we to condemn the city without feeling like the 'respectable element' whom Beaumont mocks? There is no answer to these questions, because, like nearly all of Hammett's novels, The Glass Key ultimately deals with what Stephen Marcus calls the 'ethical unintelligibility of the world.' Thus when Ned Beaumont reveals the identity of the villain, we do not feel that the story has been brought to a neat closure. At best, something criminal has been exposed in society's basic institutions; the villain's crime is merely a symptom of a deeper, systemic problem that seems beyond the power of individuals to solve.
Hammett's last novel, the comic The Thin Man (1934), is a partial exception to these rules. It was inspired by his relationship with Lillian Hellman and is the closest he came to a conventional, puzzle-style detective story or a romance about marriage. The setting is glamorous, the protagonist is a sophisticated amateur detective (more precisely, a retired private eye married to a Park Avenue heiress), and the mystery is solved when all the suspects are rounded up in the penultimate chapter. Even so, Nick and Nora Charles occasionally seem like members of Hemingway's lost generation:
We went into the living room for a drink. Some more people came in. Harrison Quinn left the sofa where he had been sitting with Margot Innes and said: 'Now ping-pong.' Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet. I shut off the radio and poured a cocktail. The man whose name I had not caught was saying: ' Comes the revolution and we'll all be lined up against the wallfirst thing.' He seemed to think it was a good idea.25
The comedy here is darkly absurd, and Nick Charles is clearly using liquor as an anesthetic. Much as he and
