Suggestions to Detective Story Writers

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“How Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op Became a Depression-Era Icon” (Susanna Lee, CrimeReads)

“The Night Gertrude Stein Met Dashiell Hammett” (Nathan Ward, CrimeReads)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Tenth Clew,” Dashiell Hammett
• “The ‘Western’: Definition of the Myth,” John Williams
• “Positive Obsession,” Octavia E. Butler

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

The Voice in the Closet by Herman Landon, The Thirty-first Bullfinch by Helen Reilly, and The Other Bullet by Nancy Barr Mavity, all published in 1930. The many errors in these three novels motivated Dashiell Hammett to publish his list of the “blunders” writers of detective novels should avoid.

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Soon after Dashiell Hammett published his third novel, The Maltese Falcon, to critical acclaim and strong sales, he accepted a position as crime fiction reviewer for the New York Evening Post. Between April and October 1930, in thirteen “Crime Wave” columns, he read and reviewed a total of eighty-five books, virtually all of them forgotten in the decades since. A former Pinkerton Agency detective, Hammett often despaired of the unrealistic scenes and inexpert characters that populated the genre—much as he had when he was a critic for the Saturday Review of Literature earlier in the decade.

The week before he began his “Crime Wave” installments, though, he submitted to the Evening Post a longer review of a single book: The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Far and away the most popular American mystery novelist during the first half of the twentieth century, Rinehart wrote some forty novels that sold more than ten million copies during her lifetime. Hammett didn’t think much of the plot of The Door: “The maintenance and complication of the mystery depend too largely on folks consistently missing each other by unpredictable inches in the dark and unpredictable seconds in the light.” Yet he admitted that the book was compulsively readable:

Nobody who begins it is at all likely, barring acts of God, to leave it unfinished. He may hoot at its soft spots, he may be irritated by its old-fashioned cast—Mrs. Rinehart is distinctly not a writer of this decade—but he will read it through. Well, readability is the standard by which books of this sort should be judged.

Where the novel really failed, in Hammett’s view, was with the lack of professionalism shown by the lead detective (“a nice enough fellow personally, in spite of his habit of strewing the scene of his operations with broken toothpicks”) and with the implausibility of the book’s pivotal clues (“walking-sticks buried naked in earth that is stamped down over them are not dug up fairly covered with anybody’s fingerprints”).

The incompetence of the genre’s detectives and the sloppiness of authors’ research continued to earn Hammett’s scorn. When he was reviewing books for the Saturday Review, Hammett excoriated The Benson Murder Case, one of S. S. Van Dine’s novels featuring detective Philo Vance:

Alvin Benson is found sitting in a wicker chair in his living room, a book still in his hand, his legs crossed, and his body comfortably relaxed in a lifelike position. He is dead. A bullet from an Army model Colt .45 automatic pistol, held some six feet away when the trigger was pulled, has passed completely through his head. That his position should have been so slightly disturbed by the impact of such a bullet at such a range is preposterous, but the phenomenon hasn't anything to do with the plot, so don't, as I did, waste time trying to figure it out. The murderer's identity becomes obvious quite early in the story. The authorities, no matter how stupid the author chose to make them, would have cleared up the mystery promptly if they had been allowed to follow the most rudimentary police routine. But then what would there have been for the gifted Vance to do?

Philo Vance, Hammett continued, “is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There is a theory that anyone who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he manages always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong.” Later, when he wrote for the Evening Post, he tried again to get through a Philo Vance novel but found the district attorney and police sergeant “as incomparably inefficient, as amazingly ignorant of even beat-walking police routine, as ever.”

Perhaps inevitably, after several years of reading (and trashing) so many unremarkable novels, Hammett threw up his hands. His “Crime Wave” column in the June 7, 1930, issue of the Evening Post was supposed to be a review of three newly arrived mystery novels that were “from beginnings to endings, carelessly manufactured improbabilities having more than their share of those blunders which earn detective stories as a whole the sneers of the captious.” He declined to review the books he had been assigned and instead published a list of blunders he had encountered in these and other recent books, with the hope that writers might avoid them in the future. The column proved so popular that he supplemented the list a month later with several additional entries, and we reprint the combined lists as our Story of the Week selection below.

By the end of the year, Hammett was off to Hollywood, and his days as a book reviewer were behind him.

*   *   *
For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Suggestions to Detective Story Writers

A fellow who takes detective stories seriously, I am annoyed by the stupid recurrence of these same blunders in book after book. It would be silly to insist that nobody who has not been a detective should write detective stories, but it is certainly not unreasonable to ask any one who is going to write a book of any sort to make some effort at least to learn something about his subject. Most writers do. Only detective story writers seem to be free from a sense of obligation in this direction, and, curiously, the more established and prolific detective story writers seem to be the worst offenders. Nearly all writers of Western tales at least get an occasional glimpse of their chosen territory from a car-window while en route to Hollywood; writers of sea stories have been seen on the waterfront; surely detective story writers could afford to speak to policemen now and then.

Meanwhile, a couple of months’ labor in this arena has convinced me that the following suggestions might be of value to somebody:

(1) There was an automatic revolver, the Webley-Fosbery, made in England some years ago. The ordinary automatic pistol, however, is not a revolver. A pistol, to be a revolver, must have something on it that revolves.

(2) The Colt’s .45 automatic pistol has no chambers. The cartridges are put in a magazine.

(3) A silencer may be attached to a revolver, but the effect will be altogether negligible. I have never seen a silencer used on an automatic pistol, but am told it would cause the pistol to jam. A silencer may be used on a single-shot target pistol or on a rifle, but both would still make quite a bit of noise. “Silencer” is a rather optimistic name for this device which has generally fallen into disuse.

(4) When a bullet from a Colt’s .45, or any firearm of approximately the same size and power, hits you, even if not in a fatal spot, it usually knocks you over. It is quite upsetting at any reasonable range.

(5) A shot or stab wound is simply felt as a blow or push at first. It is some little time before any burning or other painful sensation begins.

(6) When you are knocked unconscious you do not feel the blow that does it.

(7) A wound made after the death of the wounded is usually recognizable as such.

(8) Finger-prints of any value to the police are seldom found on anybody’s skin.

(9) The pupils of many drug-addicts’ eyes are apparently normal.

(10) It is impossible to see anything by the flash of an ordinary gun, though it is easy to imagine you have seen things.

(11) Not nearly so much can be seen by moonlight as you imagine. This is especially true of colors.

(12) All Federal snoopers are not members of the Secret Service. That branch is chiefly occupied with pursuing counterfeiters and guarding Presidents and prominent visitors to our shores.

(13) A sheriff is a county officer who usually has no official connection with city, town or State police.

(14) Federal prisoners convicted in Washington, D.C., are usually sent to the Atlanta prison and not to Leavenworth.

(15) The California State prison at San Quentin is used for convicts serving first terms. Two-time losers are usually sent to Folsom.

(16) Ventriloquists do not actually “throw” their voices and such doubtful illusions as they manage depend on their gestures. Nothing at all could be done by a ventriloquist standing behind his audience.

(17) Even detectives who drop their final g’s should not be made to say “anythin’ ”—an oddity that calls for vocal acrobatics.

(18) “Youse” is the plural of “you.”

(19) A trained detective shadowing a subject does not ordinarily leap from doorway to doorway and does not hide behind trees and poles. He knows no harm is done if the subject sees him now and then.

*   *   *

A few weeks ago, having no books on hand that I cared to talk much about, I listed in this column nineteen suggestions to detective story writers. Those suggestions having been received with extreme enthusiasm—to the extent at least of one publisher offering me a hundred dollars for a slightly more complete list—I, not needing that particular hundred dollars at the moment, herewith present a few more suggestions at the mere usual space rate:

(20) The current practice in most places in the United States is to make the coroner’s inquest an empty formality in which nothing much is brought out except that somebody has died.

(21) Fingerprints are fragile affairs. Wrapping a pistol or other small object up in a handkerchief is much more likely to obliterate than to preserve any prints it may have.

(22) When an automatic pistol is fired the empty cartridge-shell flies out the right-hand side. The empty cartridge-case remains in a revolver until ejected by hand.

(23) A lawyer cannot impeach his own witness.

(24) The length of time a corpse has been a corpse can be approximated by an experienced physician, but only approximated, and the longer it has been a corpse, the less accurate the approximation is likely to be.

Originally published in two parts in the New York Evening Post, June 7 and July 5, 1930. Article title added by Library of America.

The Main Death

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Dashiell Hammett Place” (Mike Humbert, The Dashiell Hammett Website)

“John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon Is Still a Marvel of Tough, Sardonic Suspense” (Michael Sragow, Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Tenth Clew,” Dashiell Hammett
• “Hunting Human Game,” Frank Norris
• “South of the Slot,” Jack London
• “L. A. Noir,” Joan Didion

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

Hand-colored postcard showing Lotta’s Fountain at the intersection of Market, Geary, and Kearny streets in San Francisco, looking northeast up Market, c. 1923, from a photograph by Howard Clinton Tibbitts (1863–1937). The large building on the right is the Palace Hotel. Dashiell Hammett worked nearby, first for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (in the Flood Building on 870 Market) and then across the street as the advertising manager for Albert S. Samuels Co., Jewelers (at 895 Market).

The year 1926 seemed to start out well enough for Dashiell Hammett. After a series of disagreements with Black Mask editor Philip C. Cody, he quit writing fiction and took a full-time job as the advertising manager for the jewelry company owned by Albert Samuels. He was still drinking too much and ailing from the tuberculosis that had been plaguing him since his brief stint in the army, but for the first time in years he was bringing home a regular paycheck: $350 a month, enough to support his wife, Josephine (“Jose”), and their four-year-old daughter, Mary. A second daughter, Josephine, was born to the couple in May.

This newly acquired financial stability came to an end in July when Hammett collapsed in his office amidst a pool of blood from a hemorrhaging lung. Diagnosed with hepatitis on top of his tuberculosis, he was unable to continue working. Samuels sent a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau so that Hammett could collect disability, and the Bureau awarded him 100% of the allowable amount of $90 a month. To avoid the risk of infecting his family, he rented his own small apartment on a narrow lane that today is known as Dashiell Hammett Street. In the spring of 1927, Jose moved with the children 20 miles north to San Anselmo in Marin Country, and the couple lived together sporadically over the next two years. In truth, their marriage was all but over.

The disability payments were not enough to support two residences and a family of four, so Hammett took on as much writing as he could handle. He became the crime-fiction critic for the Saturday Review of Literature, publishing twenty-four columns between March 1927 and October 1929. Three short poems were accepted—two by The Stratford Magazine and one by Bookman. He wrote a series of five articles on the advertising business for Western Advertising. And, of supreme importance both to Hammett and to American literature, Joseph T. Shaw became editor and part-owner of Black Mask and encouraged the magazine’s star author to come back to the fold. An announcement in the January 1927 issue informed readers that “Dashiell Hammett has called back the Continental detective from his long retirement and is setting him to work anew.” In reality, though, the Continental Op’s “long retirement” had not even lasted a full year.

Hammett’s return to the magazine in 1927 began with two linked stories, “The Big Knock-Over” and “$106,000 Blood Money.” (The longest works by Hammett to date, they were published together as a book in 1943 and deceptively marketed as a “new novel.”) At the beginning of June, he wrote to Jose:

Got home tonight to find a stack of letters from the Black Mask: one from Shaw telling me how good I am, one from Cody telling me the same thing with further trimmings, and one from [Erle Stanley] Gardner telling me the last dingus he read of mine was not only the best ever printed in the Black Mask, but the best he had ever read anywhere, and so on and so on and so on.

Overwhelmed by this applesauce I’m wiring them to shoot me some dough and I'll do them some more of the shots-in-the-dark.

“The last dingus” was “The Main Death,” which would be the last short story he published in Black Mask for a while. Instead, Hammett would fill the pages of the magazine for the next two years with the serialization of his first two novels: Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. The two years after that, he would send to Shaw three short stories and two more novels (The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key) before ending his association with the magazine for good.

On its surface, “The Main Death” seems to be a straightforward puzzle mystery: an abundance of seemingly contradictory clues perplex the cops and detectives (and the reader), the Continental Op hunts down evidence that resolves the paradoxes, and he then reveals who committed the crime—or more accurately, in this case, crimes. What distinguishes this story, as Hammett’s biographer Richard Layman points out, is that “the Op's personal sense of right and wrong is the only guide he follows.”

To understand fully the Op’s dilemma, it’s important to know that the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (the model for Hammett’s Continental Detective Agency) turned down all divorce cases or requests to shadow cheating spouses—the type of work that pays the bills for the middling private eye. Nonetheless, the Op’s client, Bruno Gungen, whose $20,000 has gone missing when Jeffrey Main is shot and killed, seems less interested in finding the perpetrators or recovering the money than in confirming whether his young wife, almost one-third his age, has been cheating on him—an angle of the investigation the Op vehemently refuses to pursue. In order to determine who killed Main, however, the Op finds it necessary to dive into the marital affairs of his detestable client, and he decides to solve the case in a manner that avoids satisfying Gungen’s ulterior motive—even if it means that everyone involved might get away with their crimes.

Notes: A cacoethes carpendi, in the context used by the Op, is an uncontrollable mania for enjoyment or consumption. Highgrading is the theft of ore or dealing in stolen ore.

A pivotal scene takes place in the Mars Hotel on 4th and Howard streets, two blocks from the stretch of Market Street where Hammett worked as a detective and an ad manager. The Mars would later become a place where Jack Kerouac crashed when in San Francisco; his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz resides at the “skid row hotel” at the opening of Big Sur. The building was immortalized in a painting by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse for the cover of The Grateful Dead’s 1974 studio album, From the Mars Hotel. All the structures on the block were demolished in the late 1970s to make way for the Moscone Convention Center.

*   *   *

The captain told me Hacken and Begg were handling the job. I caught them leaving the detectives’ assembly room. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Creeping Siamese

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“America’s ‘smartest and most literate detective story author’” (Richard Layman, Christie’s)

“The Complete Continental Op: An Interview with Dashiell Hammett's Granddaughter, Julie M. Rivett” (Art Taylor, SleuthSayers)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Zigzags of Treachery,” Dashiell Hammett
• “Hunting Human Game,” Frank Norris
• “Experience of a Chinese Journalist,” Wong Chin Foo

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

Title illustration by Stuart Hamilton for “The Case of the Creeping Siamese,” a reprint of the 1924 story “Creeping Siamese” distributed by King Features Syndicate to newspapers for their Sunday supplements in 1942. This copy is from the El Paso Times, May 31, 1942, and is courtesy of Davy Crockett’s Almanack. In the wake of the box-office success of the 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, King Features licensed several early Hammett stories for republication.

In “The Third Murder,” a memorable chapter from The Maltese Falcon, a gruff man “nearly seven feet tall,” clutching a football-shaped parcel, staggers into Sam Spade’s office.

The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade. He said, "You know—" and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said. He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself stiffly straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls.

The man, Captain Jacobi, was dead on the spot, having delivered to Spade the mysterious falcon, which turns out to be a fake—assuming the “real” statue ever existed.

It wasn’t the first time Dashiell Hammett had used such a scene in his fiction; the 1926 story “Creeping Siamese” opens with a tall man entering the offices of the Continental Detective Agency and dropping dead on the floor. Fans and biographers—and Hammett himself—have pointed to other stories that contain elements that he perfected in The Maltese Falcon, such as the final scene of “The Gutting of Couffignal,” which is a rough preview of the famous climactic confrontation between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

Published in the March 1926 issue of The Black Mask, “Creeping Siamese” is the last Hammett story to appear under the editorship of Philip C. Cody. In the fall of 1925, Hammett learned that his wife, Jose, was pregnant with their second child, and he needed a raise—an increase in the rate-per-word paid for his stories, which were largely responsible for the magazine’s growth in readership. When Cody refused, it was the last straw for Hammett, who was already frustrated with the insistence on stories with more action and annoyed by an outstanding payment of $300 he believed was due to him. So Hammett quit and took a full-time job as the advertising manager for a jeweler. His resignation apparently threw Cody and the rest of the staff into a panic; Erle Stanley Gardner, a relatively new contributor who was doing well financially as a practicing attorney, later told Hammett biographer Richard Layman that he offered to pay the difference with a deduction on his own rate—an offer rejected by the magazine’s publisher, Eltinge Warner, who didn’t think much of Hammett’s stories. (Gardner “must be nuts,” Warner reportedly said.) It took a full year and a change of editors to lure Hammett back to the pages of the magazine.

“Creeping Siamese” is a fairly simple puzzle mystery, and some critics, most notably Layman, have faulted it for both the lengthy exposition of how the murder happened (and how it didn’t happen) and the implausibility of the deduction the police make from the available evidence. There is not much in the way of action after the opening scene, which, given Cody’s penchant for hard-hitting, page-turning plots, might well have been meant as a parting message of sorts. Other readers, however, have noted that Hammett’s concern, as in many of his puzzle mysteries, is not with the scattering of clues leading to a clever solution of the case but with the presuppositions and biases that send investigators in the obviously wrong direction in the first place.

Based on the scantiest of evidence—a red silk sarong—the detectives, including the Continental Op, begin working under the assumption that they should be looking for “brown men,” that is, Asian immigrants. “This short story operates as a counter to the Yellow Peril narratives that appear regularly in all forms of popular media after the success of Sax Rohmer’s character Fu Manchu,” writes Brooks E. Hefner, most recently the author of Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow. “The Op’s skepticism of such an easy solution—and its politics—demonstrates the hard-boiled challenge to the nativist impulses of the 1920s.” Similarly, Sean McCann in his book Gumshoe America notes that Hammett makes his point “almost polemically,” particularly with the disquieting scene that ends the story. “Hammett uncovers the scapegoating fantasies of foreign-adventure fiction and its Klannish analogues,” McCann contends. “Race, the story implies, is an empty but potent fiction.” What makes that fiction potent is how groundless stereotypes and racist fears guide not only white law enforcement officials but also the public—or as the Op crossly puts it, “God knows what a jury would make of it!”

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Standing beside the cashier’s desk in the front office of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch, I was watching Porter check up my expense account when the man came in. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Gutting of Couffignal

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“They Also Served: The Men and Women Behind the Mask” (Kevin Burton Smith, The New Thrilling Detective Web Site)

“Dashiell Hammett’s Strange Career” (Anne Diebel, The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Arson Plus,” Dashiell Hammett
• “Hunting Human Game,” Frank Norris
• “A Memorable Murder,” Celia Thaxter

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

Cover illustration for the December 1925 issue of The Black Mask, which contains Hammett’s story “The Gutting of Couffignal.” (Click on image to see entire cover.) Image from Galactic Central.

Receiving a rejection letter is disappointment enough for any author, but imagine the mortification of having the dismissal of two of your stories broadcast to the reading public in the pages of the very magazine that returned them.

We recently were obliged to reject two of Mr. Hammett’s detective stories. We didn’t like to do it, for Mr. Hammett and his Continental Detective Agency had become more or less fixtures in Black Mask. But in our opinion, the stories were not up to the standard of Mr. Hammett’s own work—so they had to go back.

The editors printed this declaration in the August 1924 issue of The Black Mask above the letter Dashiell Hammett had sent in response to the rejections, and they added how they hoped to show readers “the difference between a good author and a poor one”—with Hammett as an example of a “good author” for making the following admission:

The trouble is that this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I have fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.

There are men who can write like that, but I’m not one of them. . . .

Claiming that he’d decided not to publish either story and that he would no longer be writing “on a schedule,” Hammett promised that he would, from then on, send in only the kind of story that “fits my sleuth” rather than writing for the “market,” and he thanked the editors “for jolting me into wakefulness.”

On almost every point, biographer Richard Layman points out, Hammett’s letter was disingenuous. One of the two stories was soon resubmitted to The Black Mask, probably with modest revisions, and appeared only a couple of months later. The other was quickly accepted by True Detective Stories, an unsubtle reminder to Black Mask editors that their star contributor could simply take his efforts elsewhere. Between the fall of 1924 and the end of 1925, far from slackening the pace of his output, Hammett published a dozen stories, including eight in The Black Mask, and they were nearly all at least twice the length of his previous stories for the pulps.

The exchange of letters exposes the tensions between Hammett and Philip C. Cody, the magazine’s new editor who had assumed the position only four months earlier and who insisted that Black Mask authors needed to pack more action and adventure into their stories. Associate editor Harry C. North carried out much of the dirty work, including sending the rejection letter to Hammett. North underscored the spirit of the new regime to another contributor, Erle Stanley Gardner: “If you could once appreciate the fact that the publisher of The Black Mask is printing the magazine to make money and nothing else, perhaps you would be more nearly able to guess our needs.”

Given this context, Hammett’s confession in his letter (“when I try to grind out a yarn because I think there is a market for it, I flop”) reads more like a warning to Cody and North to back off than a promise to write stories likely to please them. Nevertheless, as Hammett’s stories got longer, the action and violence increased and the body count got higher. Layman tallies an average during Cody’s tenure of six deaths in each story featuring Hammett’s famous detective, the Continental Op. And far from no longer writing for the “market,” Hammett seems to have deliberately catered several stories for pulp audiences to the point of parody. In “Corkscrew,” a genre mash-up emulating (and mocking) the many Western stories in The Black Mask, the Op leaves San Francisco to become the new deputy sheriff in an Arizona border town, where he endures bucking broncos and shootouts on main street.

In “The Gutting of Couffignal,” one of the last stories Hammett wrote for Cody, the violence reaches a crescendo. Set in a community populated by wealthy retirees, the tale reads like a chaotic war story when the island of Couffignal is suddenly and inexplicably attacked by a small army, complete with machine guns, hand grenades, and bombs. It has divided readers and critics since its publication: Layman faults it for “too many loose ends” and a “carelessly planned plot,” while William F. Nolan, noting that the story has become one of the most reprinted of the Continental Op tales, calls it “an extravaganza, a wildly violent example of Dashiell Hammett at full throttle,” and Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler chose it to represent Hammett’s oeuvre in The Best Mystery Stories of the Century.

Virtually all critics, however, note the importance of certain aspects of the story to Hammett’s work as a whole. The first is an oft-quoted speech by the Op, explaining why he remains a detective instead of moving to a better-paying job: “Now I pass up that twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. . . . I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weigh that against any sum of money.” The speech takes place during the final scene, which itself is a trial run of the famous climactic confrontation between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. When Hammett added an introduction to the 1934 Modern Library edition of the novel, he wrote that he had failed to make the most of a “promising dénouement” in “The Gutting of Couffignal” and hoped to have “better luck . . . in a longer story.”

Hammett published only three more stories under Cody’s editorship, and they appeared in the first three issues of 1926. He parted ways with The Black Mask in March 1926 for several reasons, including a dissatisfaction with the editorial direction, Cody’s refusal to increase his pay per story as the magazine’s circulation skyrocketed, and a squabble over $300 he felt the magazine owed him. Still ailing from the tuberculosis that had been plaguing him for years, and with his wife pregnant with their second child, he was having a hard time making ends meet, so he took as job as an advertising manager for a jeweler. Later that year, however, Joseph T. Shaw assumed the editorship of The Black Mask and immediately set to work winning back the magazine’s star fiction writer, including an agreement to pay Hammett the disputed $300. Hammett began publishing stories again in the February 1927 issue, and The Black Mask would go on to publish serially four of his novels, including The Maltese Falcon, before the end of the decade.

Notes: Early in “The Gutting of Couffignal,” the Op is reading The Lord of the Sea, a fantastical novel by British writer M. P. Shiel published in England in 1901. Hammett (and, thus, the Op) probably read the revised and much abridged (“savagely cut,” according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia) version published by Knopf in 1924 with an introduction by Carl van Vechten.

*   *   *

Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Zigzags of Treachery

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco”: a walking tour with photographs (Bob Cromwell)

“Barbary Coast: Historical Essay,” with photographs (Daniel Steven Crafts, FoundSF)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Tenth Clew,” Dashiell Hammett
• “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler
• “The Curse of Everard Maundy,” Seabury Quinn

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

Hand-colored photographic postcard published in the early 1910s by Richard Behrendt, a local wholesaler. Image from Notes on the Arts and Visual Culture.

The above postcard shows “Terrific Street,” the nickname a century ago for Pacific Street in the Barbary Coast district of San Francisco, looking east from the corner of Kearny Street. (Kearny was commonly misspelled Kearney in the early twentieth century; Pacific Street later became Pacific Avenue.) Visible on the left side is a row of nightclubs: The Queen, Diana Hall, Spider Kelly’s, and the somewhat notorious Hippodrome; on the right is The Midway Theater, a cabaret. Despite numerous attempts by the city to clean up the district, the street was a popular destination for young middle-class adults and sketchier elements when Hammett became a Pinkerton detective in 1915; many of the businesses were closed or became “soft drink parlors” and speakeasies during Prohibition. In “Zigzags of Treachery,” Hammett includes a paragraph describing the neighborhood in the early 1920s as its multiethnic residents emerge on a typical evening: “Twilight came, and the street and shop lights were turned on. It got dark. The night traffic of Kearney Street went up and down past me. . . .”

At the end of 1926, Samuel Dashiell Hammett began a three-year tenure as the crime fiction critic for the Saturday Review of Literature. A former Pinkerton detective, Hammett had made a name for himself as the Black Mask contributor whose streetwise stories offered readers a realism sorely lacking in most of the magazine’s fare. In his first column for the Saturday Review, he began a weary assessment of five new books by relating what a “fellow sleuth” at Pinkerton had told him after confessing “without shame” to a passion for mystery novels: “I eat ’em up. When I’m through my day’s gum-shoeing I like to relax; I like to get my mind on something that's altogether different from the daily grind; so I read detective stories.”

The state of the genre was still a matter for despair three years later, when Hammett joined the staff of the New York Evening Post to publish a new “Crime Wave” column. During his time at the paper, he reviewed over eighty novels and story collections, but for one article, after deciding that the latest books were overwhelmed with errors and sloppiness that would “earn detective stories as a whole the sneers of the captious,” he threw up his hands and addressed his fellow authors as a group. “I am annoyed by the stupid recurrence of these same blunders in book after book,” he began, noting that the authors of most Westerns and sea novels do at least some research. “Surely detective story writers could afford to speak to policemen now and then.” So, instead of reviewing the books at hand, he offered a list of suggestions on how to avoid certain of his professional pet peeves. (“A pistol, to be a revolver, must have something on it that revolves.”) After favorable responses from readers, he supplemented the list with a few more bits of advice in a later column.

Many of the books Hammett was asked to review were “puzzle mysteries” in the tradition of such British writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Our introduction to a previous Story of the Week selection by Hammett, “The Tenth Clew,” discusses how he led the rebellion against the old-fashioned detective story and introduced into the genre the realities of everyday “gum-shoeing.” In our current selection, “Zigzags of Treachery,” the Continental operative reiterates that most of a detective’s successful cases are “the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck.” Although “Zigzags” has some of the trappings of a traditional puzzle story, it is primarily about one of the most tedious aspects of real-life detective work: shadowing.

Several of Hammett’s Pinkerton colleagues later confirmed to biographers that “Sam” (as he was then known) was a highly respected detective, a patient mentor, and a “shadow ace,” to borrow the author’s term for one of his own characters. “A trained detective shadowing a subject does not ordinarily leap from doorway to doorway and does not hide behind trees and poles,” he advised writers in his Post column. “He knows no harm is done if the subject sees him now and then.” An ace detective can even get away with interacting with the subject; in his sketch “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective” (1923), Hammett recalled one such incident: “A man whom I was shadowing went out into the country for a walk one Sunday afternoon and lost his bearings completely. I had to direct him back to the city.”

“Zigzags of Treachery” includes Hammett’s “four rules of shadowing,” and when the story appeared in The Black Mask, the editors published in the same issue an explanatory letter from the author:

The four rules for shadowing that I give in “Zigzags” are the first and last words on the subject. There are no other tricks to learn. Follow them, and once you get the hang of it, shadowing is the easiest of detective work, except, perhaps to an extremely nervous man. You simply saunter along somewhere within sight of your subject, and, barring bad breaks, the only thing that can make you lose him is over-anxiety on your own part. . . .

Back—and it’s only a couple years back—in the days before I decided that there was more fun in writing about manhunting than in that hunting, I wasn’t especially fond of shadowing, though I had plenty of it to do.

Although he regarded shadowing as drudgework, it could still be dangerous. During one case, Hammett, not realizing the man he was following had a companion, was lured into a side street, where the second man bashed him in the back of the head with a brick. He was out of commission for two days.

Throughout “Zigzags,” Hammett maintains a dexterous balance, conveying the sluggish boredom that is an inherent part of shadowing while simultaneously keeping readers on the edge of their seats—because, at every street corner, in any dark alley, there is the possibility of danger. The story’s detail provides an “intimate inside look,” writes Hammett scholar Peter Wolfe, that “nearly makes it a primer on detection.”

Notes: “Soft drink parlors,” such as those owned by Ledwich, were former saloons and pubs that during Prohibition usually sold sodas and “near beer”—malt beverages containing less than 0.5% alcohol—and often doubled as speakeasies. The Robert Louis Stevenson monument is in Portsmouth Square (formerly Portsmouth Plaza), on the west side of Kearny Street. Portsmouth “Street” is either Hammett’s error or, more likely, the Black Mask editors’.

*   *   *

“All I know about Dr. Estep’s death,” I said, “is the stuff in the papers.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Tenth Clew

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Forgotten Hammett: A Long-Lost Interview” (Thrilling Detective)

“Tough Guy: The Mystery of Dashiell Hammett” (Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Dashiell Hammett
• “Arson Plus”
• “Slippery Fingers”
• “Crooked Souls”

. . . and one by Raymond Chandler
• “I’ll Be Waiting”

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

The January 1, 1924, issue of The Black Mask featured Dashiell Hammett on the cover for the first time. Although the story was titled “The Tenth Clew” inside the magazine, the word is spelled as “Clue” on the cover. Image courtesy of The FictionMags Index.

---

The film director Howard Hawks and three writers—William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman—were at work on the screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s debut novel, The Big Sleep. It was 1945, six years after the novel had been published, and none of them could figure out one of the mysteries in a story filled with corpses. So they sent a telegram to the author and asked him who killed the chauffeur. Chandler cabled back, “NO IDEA.”

The new school of American detective fiction was, in part, a reaction to the puzzle mysteries of such writers as Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Agatha Christie. Whodunit was less important than the how, the why, the what, the where of the crime and its investigators; the tidy endings and what Chandler called the “exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues” were thrown over for gritty atmospheres and real-life ambiguousness. In his classic essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler described the old conventions as “too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world.” And the leader of the rebellion, he wrote, was Dashiell Hammett, who “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.” His novels and stories “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”

Hammett boasted a unique résumé for a writer of detective fiction: he had been an actual detective for the Pinkerton agency for seven years. Unlike his famous predecessors, he knew firsthand what it was like to “solve” crimes and hunt down perpetrators, and he portrayed the job (and its occasional drudgery) in stories about an unnamed detective who came to be known as the Continental Op. In the earliest tales, including “Arson Plus,” “Crooked Souls,” and “Slippery Fingers” (all published by The Black Mask magazine in 1923), you’ll still find the trappings of a traditional puzzle mystery, but the elements of the mystery play second fiddle to the daily lives of the Op and his peers. As Hammett told an interviewer a few years later:

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

The first Continental Op story of 1924 is a departure from earlier episodes: it deliberately mocks the whimsy of carefully placed evidence and cleverly solved crimes. “The Tenth Clew” isn’t noteworthy for the lack of clues—or “clews,” as Christie or Doyle would spell it—but rather for their ridiculous abundance. The adventures of the Op and Sergeant O’Gar (who had made his debut in “Crooked Souls”) exhibit instead how hard work, tedious inquiries, dodgy pursuits, and even pure luck normally play greater roles in catching a perpetrator than do clues and deduction.

While the detectives are credible representations of Hammett’s former colleagues, the depiction of the fortune-hunting femme fatale of the story barely rises above the level of a crude stereotype: “She was pronouncedly feline throughout. Her every movement was the slow, smooth, sure one of a cat.” Privately, Hammett not only acknowledged the absurdity of his description of the only woman in the story but seemed to hint that its excessive touches were poking fun at similar characters in other Black Mask stories. On January 1, 1924—the date of the issue in which the story appeared—he sent a letter to the magazine’s editor and pleaded “guilty to a bit of cowardice.”

The original of Creda Dexter didn’t resemble a kitten at all. . . . Believe it or not, she looked exactly like a young white-faced bull-pup—and she was pretty in the bargain! Except for her eyes, I never succeeded in determining just what was responsible for the resemblance, but it was a very real one.

When, however, it came to actually putting her down on paper, my nerve failed me. ‘Nobody will believe you if you write a thing like that,’ I told myself. ‘They’ll think you’re trying to spoof them.’ So, for the sake of plausibility, I lied about her!

The ending of the “The Tenth Clew” has long perplexed readers, many of whom have regarded it as Hammett’s own chauffeur moment. There is an error of logic in the final paragraph, after the characters have congregated for the resolution of the story’s mystery. In fact, when Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine reprinted the story in 1945, editor Fred Dannay (one half of the duo who were Ellery Queen) rewrote the finale to correct the gaffe, probably without the author’s permission. The Library of America collection of Hammett’s crime stories reprints the original text, of course, and we reproduce the “novelette” in its entirety as our Story of the Week selection. We’ll leave it to readers to discover Hammett’s flub on their own, or you can read about it at Mystery*File if you’re unable to pinpoint the mistake.

Note: A badger-game (page 82) is a confidence trick in which the victim is lured into a compromising sexual situation and then subjected to blackmail or extortion.

*   *   *

“Mr. Leopold Gantvoort is not at home,” the servant who opened the door said, “but his son, Mr. Charles, is—if you wish to see him.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Crooked Souls

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Coining 'The Continental Op'” (Don Herron, Up and Down These Mean Streets)

Fifteen unpublished Hammett stories discovered (Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Arson Plus,” Dashiell Hammett
• “Slippery Fingers,” Dashiell Hammett
• “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

1908 postcard of the James Flood
Building. Suite 314 housed the San
Francisco branch of the Pinkerton
Detective Agency, which employed
Dashiell Hammett. Image courtesy
of Time Shutter.

Earlier this year, Story of the Week presented “Slippery Fingers,” one of Dashiell Hammett’s first tales to feature his unnamed detective, the Continental Op. The story appeared in the October 15, 1923, issue of The Black Mask under the pseudonym Peter Collinson. The very same issue of the magazine, however, contained a second story by Hammett, “Crooked Souls”—the first work of fiction to be published under his real name. (The story was reprinted as “The Gatewood Caper” in The Big Knockover, a 1966 collection of Hammett’s stories.)

Although appearing side by side in the same magazine and featuring the same anonymous protagonist, the two stories are quite different in tone and style. Curtis Evans of The Passing Tramp blog describes “Crooked Souls” as “a crime story about people with problems” and contends that it is “Hammett's first great Op classic of the crime genre. As the evocative title indicates, here Hammett already evinces more interest in character.” While “Slippery Fingers” is a relatively straightforward murder mystery that adheres to the conventions of the genre, “Crooked Souls” details the “dogged, routine detective work” that biographer Richard Layman cites as the distinguishing characteristic of Hammett’s later stories. Some of that investigative work could be tedious: “Shadowing is the easiest of detective work,” Hammett wrote to the editors of The Black Mask in 1924. “Back—and it’s only a couple of years back—in the days before I decided that there was more fun in writing about manhunting than in that hunting, I wasn’t especially fond of shadowing, though I had plenty of it to do.”

In addition, this story introduces three police detectives—Thode, Lusk, and O’Gar—who would reappear in later works. (O’Gar in particular would be a regularly recurring character—becoming almost a sidekick to the Op in future stories.) The detectives of Hammett’s early fiction reflected his firsthand experience at the Pinkerton Agency—and Pinkerton detectives worked closely with the police. It would be several more years before Hammett developed his famous, self-employed private eyes whose relationships with corrupt or incompetent governmental authorities were often uneasy and contentious.

*   *   *

Harvey Gatewood had issued orders that I was to be admitted as soon as I arrived, so it only took me a little less than fifteen minutes to thread my way past the doorkeepers, office boys, and secretaries who filled up most of the space between the Gatewood Lumber Corporation’s front door and the president’s private office. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Slippery Fingers

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
Dashiell Hammett's letters [spoilers!]: see especially October 15, 1923, letter to the editor of The Black Mask for his comments on “Slippery Fingers” (This Recording)

The history of Black Mask magazine (Black Mask)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Arson Plus,” Dashiell Hammett
• “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler

Buy this book:
Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

A previous Story of the Week selection “Arson Plus” is Dashiell Hammett’s first story featuring the Continental Op, “the private detective who oftenest is successful: neither the derby-hatted and broad-toed blockhead of one school of fiction, nor the all-knowing, infallible genius of another.” After the story’s initial publication in April 1923, the very next issue of The Black Mask magazine presented two additional tales featuring Hammett’s anonymous, tough-talking detective: “Slippery Fingers,” published under his pseudonym Peter Collinson, and “Crooked Souls,” the first story to appear under Hammett’s own name.*

“Slippery Fingers” is the more traditional and formulaic of the two selections: a light, relatively straightforward murder mystery with stock secondary characters and a “trick” revelation, ending with a garrulous confession by the just-nabbed perpetrator. But it nonetheless shows Hammett expanding the genre’s boundaries with his use of language: “What makes the Op stories stand out,” writes LeRoy Panek in his study of the early fiction, “is Hammett’s introduction of slang into the Op’s dialogue and narration. Thus, . . . from the very beginning, Hammett sprinkled nonstandard diction into Op’s grammatically correct sentences.” The patois of Hammett’s rogues is even more notably mangled, serving “as a distinguishing feature of characters at the bottom of the criminal food chain.” Reading through the stories Hammett published during the 1920s, readers can see “the dean” of hard-boiled detective fiction developing his technique into the prose style that would culminate in such classics as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.

The gritty realism of these early stories must have resonated with the editors of The Black Mask, who had written to Hammett a few months previously, asking him if his characters were based on people he had known during his seven-year tenure at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. His response was published in the July 15 issue: “None of the characters is real in a literal sense, though I doubt it would be possible to build a character without putting into it at least something of someone the writer has known.”

* Story of the Week presented “Crooked Souls” later in the year.

*   *   *

“You are already familiar, of course, with the particulars of my father’s—ah—death?” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Arson Plus

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
From Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Dashiell Hammett” (American Masters, PBS)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Moonlit Road," Ambrose Bierce
• “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler
• “The Hossack Murder," Susan Glaspell

Buy this book:

Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
24 stories | 934 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

During his first year as a published author, Dashiell Hammett placed twelve stories in magazines before his pioneering “hard-boiled” piece, “Arson Plus,” appeared under the pseudonym Peter Collinson in the October 1, 1923, issue of The Black Mask. Three years earlier George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken had launched the pulp magazine, but it was only after they sold it in 1922 (at a significant profit) that Black Mask, under new editorship, began to feature the gritty, naturalistic crime stories that would become so extraordinarily popular with its readers.

Hammett’s new style of stories was influenced in part by the success of another, less talented Black Mask writer, Carroll John Daly, and together they would change the detective tale forever. In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler assessed how his literary predecessor finally brought crime fiction out of the parlors of the upper class:

If [English detective fiction writers] wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they knew no more about them out of their own experience than the well-heeled Hollywood character knows about the French Modernists that hang in his Bel-Air château or the semi-antique Chippendale-cum-cobbler’s bench that he uses for a coffee table. Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.

Drawing on his own experience as a Pinkerton detective, Hammett created the nameless, paunchy, street-tough Continental Detective Agency operative who appears first in “Arson Plus” and later in three dozen stories, eight of which were incorporated into his novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. When he submitted the initial pieces for publication, Hammett explained that he “didn’t deliberately keep him nameless,” but the Continental op got through the first couple of stories “without needing one.” He continued: “He’s more or less of a type: the private detective who oftenest is successful: neither the derby-hatted and broad-toed blockhead of one school of fiction, nor the all-knowing, infallible genius of another. I’ve worked with several of him.”

Note: Hiram Johnson (page 18) was governor of California from 1911 to 1917 before serving as a U.S. senator from 1917 to 1945.

*   *   *

Jim Tarr picked up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end, and reached for a match.

“Fifteen cents straight,” he said. “You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time.” . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.