Talma Gordon

Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

“The Literary Legacy of Pauline Hopkins” (Katherine Ouellette, WBUR)

“A Pioneering Black Author’s Novel Takes Us to a Wakanda-like Civilization” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Wife of His Youth,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Désirée’s Baby,” Kate Chopin
• “Sister Josepha,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• “Stranger Than Fiction,” James Weldon Johnson

Buy the book
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
• More than 100 short stories
• 51 different writers
• Two-volume boxed set
• 1,641 pages
List price: $85.00
Web store price: $65.00

Three of the illustrations made by British Guiana–born American artist J. Alexandre Skeete (1874–1945) for the serial publication of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901–02) in The Colored American Magazine. [“With One Bound She Sprang Over the Railing of the Bridge” | “A Deep Sigh Startled Him” | “With a Cry Jewel Staggered to Her Feet” | Images from the Digital Colored American Magazine site.]

“Talma Gordon” (1900) is widely considered the first African American murder mystery, while Hagar’s Daughter, which features a Black female sleuth, is the first detective novel by an African American author.

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When the debut issue of The Colored American Magazine appeared in May 1900, the editors announced:

In our next issue (June) we shall begin a department devoted exclusively to the interest of women and the home. This department will be under the editorial charge of Miss Pauline E. Hopkins, who is especially well fitted for this work among the women of her race. While Miss Hopkins has a very happy manner of presenting any subject which she may write, she has that which is of still greater value in a department of this kind, a heartfelt desire to aid in every way possible in uplifting the colored people of America, and through them, the world. There will appear from month to month in this department, articles that will be of special and practical value to all women. . . .

Hopkins, who was 41 at the time but presented herself as 34, worked alongside the four founders of the magazine—Harper S. Fortune, Walter Alexander Johnson, Walter W. Wallace, and Jesse W. Watkins—all men in their twenties who had migrated from Virginia. Her employment background was atypical for an editor at a literary monthly. In her late teens she had been an actress and singer in a family troupe called the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, and she was advertised as “Boston’s favorite colored soprano” when she began performing on her own. She sometimes wrote her own productions, including a musical play called Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad. During the 1890s, she worked as a stenographer while giving speeches in support of social and political causes.

The debut issue of The Colored American Magazine contained Hopkins’s first published short story, “The Mystery Within Us.” During the next four years, she published five additional stories, two dozen biographical sketches in a Famous Men and Women of the Negro Race series, and numerous other pieces, many using at least two pen names. Her debut novel, Contending Forces, was issued in book form in late 1900 by the company that printed the magazine, which in turn heavily promoted the novel and reprinted an excerpt in the November issue. It would be her only book; three additional novels (Hagar’s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self) were serialized in the magazine between 1901 and 1903 but did not appear in book form.

The editors claimed a circulation as high as 17,000 and a pass-along readership of nearly 100,000, although it consistently faced financial challenges. As many as one-third of the subscribers were white. Hopkins would rise in importance; she was named the magazine’s literary editor in 1903 and briefly editor-in-chief in 1904, the year allies of Booker T. Washington bought the magazine in what one recent biographer has called a “hostile takeover.” The new publisher moved the offices to New York, replaced Hopkins and other staff members, and shifted the magazine’s contents to a more accommodationist take on civil rights and race relations. The changes effectively sank the magazine; over the next five years, its circulation plummeted, even among New York subscribers, and it ceased publication in 1909.

The magazine’s staff members during Hopkins’s tenure, while mindful of their white audience, were often unapologetic for the forthrightness and diversity of opinions, tackling hot-button topics that rankled some subscribers. In March 1903, a white reader wrote to complain about the fiction, focusing particularly on the two novels that had been published to date (Hagar’s Daughter and Winona, the first of which appeared under the pen name Sarah A. Allen—the maiden name of Hopkins’s mother):

I have been taking and reading with interest the COLORED AMERICAN MAGAZINE. If I found it more helpful to Christian work among your people I would continue to take it.

May I make a comment on the stories, especially those that have been serial. Without exception they have been of love between the colored and whites. Does that mean that your novelists can imagine no love beautiful and sublime within the range of the colored race, for each other? I have seen beautiful home life and love in families altogether of Negro blood.

The stories of these tragic mixed loves will not commend themselves to your white readers and will not elevate the colored readers. I believe your novelists could do with a consecrated imagination and pen, more for the elevation of home life and love, than perhaps any other one class of writers. . . .

Hopkins pulled few punches in her response, which reads in part:

. . . My stories are definitely planned to show the obstacles persistently placed in our paths by a dominant race to subjugate us spiritually. Marriage is made illegal between the races and yet the mulattoes increase. Thus the shadow of corruption falls on the blacks and on the whites, without whose aid the mulattoes would not exist. And then the hue and cry goes abroad of the immorality of the Negro and the disgrace that the mulattoes are to this nation. Amalgamation is an institution designed by God for some wise purpose, and mixed bloods have always exercised a great influence on the progress of human affairs. I sing of the wrongs of a race that ignorance of their pitiful condition may be changed to intelligence and must awaken compassion in the hearts of the just. . . .

Mixed-race relationships play an unexpected dual role in “Talma Gordon,” Hopkins’s second story to appear in the magazine and perhaps her best-known work today. Widely considered the first murder mystery written by a Black American, the story—particularly the trial scene—was almost certainly inspired by the Lizzie Borden case, which occurred eight years earlier and still haunted the Boston social imagination. John Cullen Gruesser, author of Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, has noted that “Talma Gordon” combines the locked-room mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with the buried treasure secret of “The Gold Bug” to create something altogether new. Catherine Ross Nickerson, in The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, describes how the story “has the wildness of the story-paper and dime-novel from which it borrows, and incorporates plot elements from both gothic and adventure genres.” Yet, by the story’s close, the murders and the crime’s deus ex machina explanation have taken a back seat to other revelations that have forever changed the survivors.

Notes: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” is from Act 5 of Hamlet. “Smiling, frowning evermore, . . .” is from “Madeline” (1830) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “Whom the gods love die young,” a common expression in many cultures and periods, appears in Greek author Menander’s (341–290 BCE) play Dis Exapatōn, which survives only in fragments. Roman playwright Plautus (254–184 BCE), whose work derives closely from Menander’s, uses the line in Latin in his fragmentary play Bacchides. The phrase “all went merry as a marriage bell” is from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) by Lord Byron. “A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea” (1837) is a poem by Scottish poet Allan Cunningham that he also set to music.

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The Canterbury Club of Boston was holding its regular monthly meeting at the palatial Beacon-street residence of Dr. William Thornton, expert medical practitioner and specialist. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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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.

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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.

L. A. Noir

Joan Didion (1934–2021)
From Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s

Interesting Links
“From Hollywood to Malibu: Mapping Joan Didion’s Los Angeles” (David Ulin, USC Dornsife)

“California Cool and Magical Thinking: Joan Didion at 86” (Alex Clark, The Guardian)

Story of the Week selections
• “Quiet Days in Malibu,” Joan Didion
• “Business Deal,” Nathanael West
• “The Hossack Murder,” Susan Glaspell

Buy the book
Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s
Salvador | Democracy | Miami | After Henry | The Last Thing He Wanted | 851 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $32.00

Promotional poster for The Cotton Club, 1984, featuring artwork by Michael Marcus and Jim Pearsall, designed by Ron Brant. ArtNet.com

In the early 1970s Dominick Dunne produced two movies written by his brother John Gregory Dunne and sister-in-law Joan Didion: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), which featured Al Pacino in his first starring role, with Raul Julia in his film debut, and Play It as It Lays (1972), adapted from Didion’s second novel, which earned Tuesday Weld a Golden Globe nomination for best actress. Dunne’s next feature film, made without his brother’s or Didion’s involvement, would end his career as a movie producer.

Ash Wednesday (1973) is one of those films with a reputation that survives in no small part through the stories surrounding its creation. As Dunne recounted in his 1999 memoir The Way We Lived Then, the movie was grotesquely over budget, it was behind schedule, and the star, Elizabeth Taylor, was chronically late to the set, leaving more than a hundred extras and crew members waiting around and her costar Henry Fonda “fuming on the sidelines.” Taylor’s husband was on the set as well, and Dunne remembered how he “watched with utter fascination the deterioration of the famous marriage of Elizabeth and Richard Burton, as my own life was unraveling at the same time.”

The screenplay for the film was by Jean-Claude Tramont, who was the fiancé of the agent Sue Mengers (“the most powerful woman in Hollywood at the time”), who was a close friend of Robert Evans, the chief executive of Paramount, which was financing the movie. Two years later Mengers would play a pivotal role in bringing the script for “Rainbow Road” by Didion and John Gregory Dunne to the attention of her client Barbra Streisand; it would eventually be released as A Star Is Born. In a made-for-Hollywood coincidence, when Dominick Dunne finally met Tramont at a meeting in Paris, on his way to Italy to shoot Ash Wednesday, he was stunned to discover that years earlier he had known the screenwriter as a young NBC Studios page named Jack Schwartz from the Bronx—but that’s another story. “What I learned from this episode of my life,” Dunne wrote, “is that it’s not a good thing to know other people’s family secrets.” Their previous acquaintance got the two men off to a bad start, because Dunne assumed Tramont/Schwartz was a chameleon who had exploited his romance with Mengers to place his script. Things got worse when Tramont had to leave the set after Taylor learned that the screenwriter was mocking her taste in clothing behind her back.

The end of Dunne’s Hollywood career occurred at a party following a screening of the movie back in Los Angeles. “I told a terribly cruel joke when I was drunk about Sue Mengers and Jean-Claude Tramont,” he admitted. To his utter mortification, the joke was printed verbatim in The Hollywood Reporter on the eve of the movie’s premiere. Dunne immediately received a phone call from a furious Robert Evans. “I can still recall the conversation almost word for word twenty years later,” he wrote in his memoir. “The underlying theme of the call was ‘You’ll never work in this town again.’” And he didn’t—as a movie producer, anyway.

Sixteen years later, after Dunne had recreated himself as a best-selling novelist and a crime reporter for Vanity Fair, he was in a Los Angeles courtroom covering the preliminary hearing for a Hollywood murder case. “Life has so many twists and turns, and people turn up whom you thought you’d never see again. . . . I watched Robert Evans, standing by his friend and lawyer Robert Shapiro—who himself later became famous at the O. J. Simpson trial—take the Fifth Amendment over and over during the trial of the hired killers who murdered show business entrepreneur Roy Radin, his former partner on the film The Cotton Club.”

Like many insiders in Hollywood’s cutthroat film industry, Dunne must have seen the trial as a comeuppance of sorts; he would never again mention Evans in print without bringing up the murder. “When I appeared in court, there wasn’t an empty seat,” Evans wrote in his autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. “All the vultures were there: the producers and would-be producers of miniseries and TV shows; the book writers looking for an angle; the newspaper reporters and magazine writers of the world press.” He added pointedly, “Only after the verdicts were in did Vanity Fair publish an article stating that Roy Radin’s murder had nothing to do with The Cotton Club.”

Evans was not the only person Dunne knew at the preliminary hearing; also in attendance was his sister-in-law Joan Didion. She had an entirely different take on the proceeding: in her view, Evans shouldn’t have been there at all. She argued that the famous producer had been shoehorned into a narrative created by prosecutors looking for a story to capture the attention of the public, the media, and Hollywood itself. Despite her brother-in-law’s insinuation, Radin and Evans were never partners on the film The Cotton Club—or on anything else. The following year, in her skeptical and (at the time) contrarian report of the Central Park Five trial, in which five innocent teenagers were convicted of rape, she wrote that “crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept.” In the Cotton Club murder trial, as it became known in the press, Evans himself was the “story” that made it “news”; without his name, the case was just another murder trial.

Didion published her dissection of the court case as one of her “Letters from Los Angeles” in The New Yorker. When she included it in her collection 1992 essay collection, After Henry, she changed the title to “L.A. Noir,” and that is the version we present as our Story of the Week selection.

Notes: Tiny Tim, a musician, is most often remembered for his comic falsetto-and-ukulele rendition of “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” and Frank Fontaine, a comedian, for his guest appearances on television variety shows in the 1950s and 1960s. In the McMartin child-abuse case, Virginia McMartin, founder of a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, was arrested in 1984 with six others and charged with child sexual abuse. There were two trials in their case, among the longest and most expensive in U.S. history, involving hundreds of children and allegations of satanic ritualism; the second came to an end in July 1990, and all charges were dropped. William Morris was a Hollywood talent agency. Colombian cocaine smuggler Carlos Lehder, a cofounder of the Medellín cartel, was extradited to the United States in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

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Around Division 47, Los Angeles Municipal Court, the downtown courtroom where, for eleven weeks during the spring and summer of 1989, a preliminary hearing was held to determine if the charges brought in the 1983 murder of a thirty-three-year-old road-show promoter named Roy Alexander Radin should be dismissed or if the defendants should be bound over to superior court for arraignment and trial, it was said that there were, “in the works,” five movies, four books, and “countless” pieces about the case . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission. To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

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’.

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“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.

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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.

Hunting Human Game

Frank Norris (1870–1902)
From True Crime: An American Anthology

Previous Story of the Week true crime selections
• “The Hossack Murder,” Susan Glaspell
• “A Memorable Murder,” Celia Thaxter

In 1894, at the age of twenty-four, Benjamin Franklin (“Frank”) Norris finished his fourth year at Berkeley but didn’t receive his degree, having repeatedly flunked the mathematics portion of his examinations. His failure to graduate did not slow him down. During the following eight years he took writing courses at Harvard; reported for the San Francisco Chronicle on the Boer War in South Africa, where he fell ill before being expelled from the territory; wrote at least 160 short stories, sketches, and essays for various newspapers and magazines; covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba, where he again became sick (and where he befriended Stephen Crane); became an editor for Doubleday in New York (where he “discovered” and championed the novel Sister Carrie by up-and-coming writer Theodore Dreiser); and managed to finish writing seven novels, including the national bestseller The Octopus. In 1902, he was back in the San Francisco area and planning a trip around the world on a tramp steamer when he suffered an attack of appendicitis. Initially ignoring the pain, he finally went to a doctor—but it was far too late. Suffering from gangrene, he died of peritonitis at the age of thirty-two.

Like fellow San Francisco writer Jack London, Norris was heavily influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin and the literary naturalism of French writer Émile Zola. (In spite of overlapping careers and friendships, Norris and London appeared to have never met.) Jeanne Campbell Reesman, in her essay for A Companion to the American Short Story, tallies up some of the many similarities in Norris’s and London’s works: “such key naturalistic concerns as the nature of the self; heredity and environment in shaping lives versus free will; Darwinistic ideas concerning an individual’s ability to adapt to environment; awareness of the human capacity for animalistic and brutal behavior; patterns of dominance and submission; survival of the individual versus survival of the community of species.” All of which explains Norris’s fascination with crime and criminals in such pieces as “Hunting Human Game.”

This week’s story was recommended by longtime Story of the Week fan Ben Ostrander of Austin, Texas, who found this “grisly little report on an Australian serial killer” to be a fine early sample of true crime writing. (Squeamish readers need not worry: the grisliness is left entirely off the page and to the reader’s imagination.)

*   *   *

On the 21st of November in the year 1896 there appeared in one of the newspapers of Sydney, Australia, an advertisement to the effect that one Frank Butler—mining prospector, was in search of a partner with whom to engage in a certain mining venture. . . . If you don't see this week's 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.

The Hossack Murder

Susan Glaspell (1876–1948)
From True Crime: An American Anthology

Interesting Links

Patricia Bryan, “Stories in Fiction and in Fact: Susan Glaspell's ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ and the 1901 Murder Trial of Margaret Hossack,” Stanford Law Review (Midnight Assassin)

A History of the Provincetown Playhouse

Previous Story of the Week selection
“A Memorable Murder,” Celia Thaxter

Susan Glaspell is remembered primarily for her role in cofounding (with her husband, George “Jig” Cook) the Provincetown Players, a theater troupe that showed its first plays in 1915 at the avant-garde Massachusetts summer resort. The Players incorporated the following year in New York City, converting the first floor of a Greenwich Village townhouse into a theater before moving in 1918 to its famous Playhouse location at 133 Macdougal Street. The company showcased works by such writers as Djuna Barnes, Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Reed, and Wallace Stevens, but it is most remembered for launching the career of Eugene O’Neill, staging fifteen of his early plays in just seven years.

In addition to managing the company, Glaspell was a dramatist in her own right—and the Players would perform eleven of her plays before the original group folded in 1922. She would go on to win the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama (for Alison's House), but perhaps her best-known play today is Trifles, which was first staged in Provincetown on August 8, 1916—with Glaspell and her husband playing the lead characters. The following year she turned the play into a story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” which has been her most widely read work since its “rediscovery” in the 1970s.

Elaine Showalter, who borrowed the title A Jury of Her Peers for her recent literary history of American women’s literature, writes that Glaspell “turned the drama of marital loneliness . . . into a parable of crime and justice.” Both the play and the story are based on the trial of Margaret Hossack for the murder of her husband. Glaspell herself covered the trial in 1900–01 during her previous career as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. Patricia Bryan, coauthor of a recent book on the murder, reviewed the original transcripts and materials (including Glaspell’s original series of newspaper articles) and wrote in a 1997 Stanford Law Review essay: “The competing narratives told in the courtroom where Mrs. Hossack was tried for her life seemed limited and incomplete; neither the prosecution nor the defense offered a satisfying description of the Hossack family or a complete explanation of the crime.” Bryan also points out a cruel irony, “The abuse that Margaret Hossack had suffered [from her husband] was of great significance . . . because it provided a motive for the crime.” In fact, the stronger the evidence for domestic abuse (and, likewise, the more inhumane the abuse committed by her husband), the stronger the case against her.

For this week’s Story of the Week selection, then, we turn to the original series of articles that the 24-year-old Glaspell wrote between December 1900 and April 1901. In them, the reader can see her style change dramatically, from the purely “police blotter” entries of the initial investigation to the more far more socially engaged and troubled report published on April 9, before summation and jury deliberations. By the trial’s end, it becomes clear why the case haunted Glaspell for the next two decades.

Special note: Readers who prefer not knowing the outcome of the trial before reading the selection should postpone reading the introduction that accompanies the story in the PDF. Also, on page 187, “the celebrated ‘crowbar’ case” refers to a famous accident in 1848 involving Phineas Gage, who lived twelve years after a crowbar passed completely through his cranium.

*   *   *

Indianola, Dec. 3.— (Special.)— A foul murder was committed Saturday night near Medford, fifteen miles southwest of Indianola. A farmer named Hossack was struck over the head and killed by unknown parties, at his home a few miles out from Medford. . . . 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.

Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
From True Crime: An American Anthology

Interesting Links
Blog post: Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe (Lincoln Buff 2)

The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: A Narrative Overview (Papers of Abraham Lincoln)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Artemus Ward on His Visit to Abe Lincoln”
• “Tolstoi Holds Lincoln World’s Greatest Hero”

This daguerreotype is the earliest-known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at age 37 (1846 or 1847) when he was a frontier lawyer in Springfield and Congressman-elect from Illinois. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Last year’s publication of the unapologetically preposterous Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer stirred up a predictable amount of eye-rolling (“the most inane idea imaginable,” snorted Richard Norton Smith, the founding director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum) and garnered a few unexpected fans (including novelist Lev Grossman, filmmaker Tim Burton, and—if the author can be believed—even historian Doris Kearns Goodwin).

Yet, as amusing (or perplexing) as the latest rage in mashup books might seem, a far more plausible idea for such a novel might have been Abraham Lincoln: Private Eye.

After all, in Springfield, the future President practiced law and handled thousands of cases for nearly twenty-five years in the Illinois courts, actions ranging from debt and divorce to petty crime and murder. And he is known to have been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe (who was less than a month older than Lincoln). One friend from his Springfield years wrote that Lincoln “read and loved ‘The Raven’—repeated it over and over” (a copy of the book containing the poem is known to exist among his personal papers), and biographer Michael Burlingame reports that Lincoln especially liked the stories “The Gold Bug” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

One of Lincoln’s court cases stands out, however—especially because he turned it into a story that shares a few similarities with some of Poe’s fiction. In June 1841 Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed a letter that began, “We have had the highest state of excitement here for a week past that our community has ever witnessed . . . and the curious affair that aroused it, is verry [sic] far from being, even yet, cleared of mystery.” Five years later, he rewrote his account of the affair as a front-page narrative for the tri-weekly local newspaper, the Quincy Whig. At the trial, Lincoln stood as the defense attorney for William Trailor, a man accused of the murder of Archibald Fisher. Lincoln’s only true-crime story is regarded by many readers as an early example of the genre and, more than a century later, it enjoyed wider prominence when it was reprinted in the March 1952 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Note: William Trailor’s youngest brother and the alleged victim were both named Archibald; thus, in the story Lincoln refers to the victim simply as Fisher.

*   *   *

In the year 1841, there resided, at different points in the State of Illinois, three brothers by the name of Trailor. . . . 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.

I’ll Be Waiting

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
From Raymond Chandler: Stories & Early Novels

 Interesting Links
“The case for Raymond Chandler,” Allen Barra (Salon)

Raymond Chandler bus tours of Los Angeles (Esotouric)

Buy the Book
Raymond Chandler: Stories & Early Novels
The Big Sleep • Farewell, My Lovely • The High Window • 13 pulp stories
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $31.50

In the 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler described the type of crime fiction that he and his idol, Dashiell Hammett, had been writing during the past two decades:

. . . there are still quite a few people around who say that Hammett did not write detective stories at all, merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini.

By the time Chandler wrote “I’ll Be Waiting” in 1939, however, he had pretty much dispensed with the olive. All the other ingredients of a great noir martini are there: the hotel detective, the deceptively vulnerable girl, shady underworld figures, menacing shadows, an ominous threat of violence. The only thing lacking is a murder mystery for the “paunchy” hero Tony Reseck to solve.

“I’ll Be Waiting” is the shortest of Chandler’s stories; it is also the first—and only—one published in a “slick” magazine. Nearly all his previous works of short fiction had been published in the pulps Black Mask and Dime Detective, but Chandler wrote one for the Saturday Evening Post at the behest of his agent and was motivated primarily by the money such magazines paid.

Afterward, he seems to have worried that he sold out. That year he expressed disappointment in a letter to another pulp writer, George Harmon Coxe: “I didn’t think much of the story when I wrote it—I felt it was artificial, untrue and emotionally dishonest like all slick fiction.” Even twenty years later, in a letter to detective writer William Gault, he acknowledged that while “I’ll Be Waiting” had been “anthologized to death” and the “story was all right,” he preferred the free-spirited form of the pulps to the constraints in tone and substance imposed by glossy magazines:

I’m an improviser, and perhaps at times an innovator. Some slick writing is very good, on the surface, but it seems to lack something for me. . . . But perhaps I have a different idea about writing and shouldn’t be saying this.

In their anthology of hardboiled fiction, editors Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian regard the story as “a superbly atmospheric night-piece” and respond, “Chandler was a perceptive critic of others’ work, although less so of his own.” Indeed, still frequently included in anthologies, the story today is considered by many readers and critics as among his best and most polished (with a superb twist ending), and it has even been adapted for film twice, most recently in 1993 as an episode of Showtime’s Fallen Angels directed by Tom Hanks.

Notes: On page 570, Goodman refers to musician Benny Goodman. One page 572, there are several contemporary cultural references: The Last Laugh is a 1924 movie starring Emil Jannings; “Spring, Beautiful Spring” (also known as “Chimes of Spring”) was a song written by Paul Lincke in 1903; The Blue Bird was Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1909 allegorical play, which became a movie in 1918.

*   *   *

At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

The Moonlit Road

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
Martin Griffin on “The Moonlit Road” (The Ambrose Bierce Project)

Ambrose Bierce Timeline (The Ambrose Bierce Project)

Buy the book
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Edgar Allan Poe • Bret Harte • Edith Wharton • Ellen Glasgow • Robert E. Howard • H. P. Lovecraft • Clark Ashton Smith • Robert Bloch • 36 others • 746 pages

Also available
Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
Includes over 75 stories • 880 pages

In a recent issue of the journal Dead Reckonings, literary critic S. T. Joshi mentioned “The Moonlit Road,” proclaiming the story “poignant and terrifying” and “far too little known.” At first, Bierce’s tale reads like a simple whodunit: its three conflicting narratives seem to fit together and “what happened” might seem straightforward, but a closer reading causes hesitation: Where is “Caspar Grattan” living and what happens to him in the end? Who is “767”? Can we trust the “medium Bayrolles”? As Martin Griffin writes in a perceptive essay, the story’s “doubts and implications are not resolved but rather . . . bequeathed to the reader, to see if he or she can make any sense of them.”

Certain aspects of the story echo Bierce’s own life—particularly the themes of suspicion and infidelity. His wife died in 1905, only months before their divorce had been finalized, and he wrote the story the following year (it was published in the January 1907 issue of Cosmopolitan). The couple had permanently separated two decades earlier when he found letters to her from a Danish man with whom she had become friendly. According to their daughter Helen, the long-distance friendship was never romantic but rather “a decorous and discreet fascination.” But Bierce walked out and never saw her again: “I don’t take part in competitions—not even in love.” Soon after their separation, a far more tragic love triangle occurred. Their seventeen-year-old son Day shot and killed his best friend, and then himself, after the latter had eloped with Day’s girlfriend.

A final note: Although it may be “far too little known,” “The Moonlit Road” became stepfather to one of the twentieth century’s greatest movies. Martin Griffin reminds us that Bierce’s tale was the inspiration for “Yabu no naka” (“In the Grove”), a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which provided the plot and characters for Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 Rashomon. (Only the movie’s title and the setting are taken from another story by Akutagawa.)

I
STATEMENT OF JOEL HETMAN, JR.

I am the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected, fairly well educated and of sound health—with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not—I sometimes think that I should be less unhappy if they had been denied me, for then the contrast between my outer and my inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort I might sometimes forget the somber secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels. . . .If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!