The man who made the American style of detective fiction international and who, according to his peer and contemporary Raymond Chandler, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse,” was born a poor farm boy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Samuel Dashiell Hammett, better known to friends as “Sam” and later known to the world as Dashiell Hammett, lived for a time like one of his wild-eyed and dangerous characters. He dropped out of school at age 13, lived hand-to-mouth doing various odd jobs around Baltimore and Philadelphia (which were tough towns, even then), consorted with gamblers, thieves, and prostitutes, and, by the standards of the class he was most comfortable with, did the unthinkable when he joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
Now a glossy, white-collar company that deals in things like “protective services” and “crisis management,” the Pinkertons were once the most powerful investigative agency in the United States. With branches scattered throughout major American cities and even a few foreign locations, the Pinkertons once rivaled the active duty U.S. Army in size, with 2,000 active officers and as many as 30,000 reserve detectives. While Allan Pinkerton’s men protected presidents, caught serial killers, and oversaw an impressive criminal database that was more or less copied by the later FBI, they also broke up strikes and fought pitched battles on behalf of the companies and masters of industry that hired them. For the unions and their workers during the early twentieth century, “Pinkerton” was something only properly said with spit and from the side of one’s mouth.
From 1915 until 1922, Sam Hammett worked as an operative with the Pinkertons. Besides a brief interlude in which he served as an enlisted solider during World War I, Hammett walked the dark, mean streets of places like Baltimore and San Francisco (which was a decidedly seedier town those days than it is now) and was a participant in the ferocious labor wars that gripped America during the Wilson years. This was Hammett’s informal education, the foundation of what would ultimately become his life as one of the founding fathers of America’s “hardboiled” style of detective fiction. So, when Hammett, a thin, frail man who was too sick to be a detective anymore, began writing in his San Francisco apartment during the off hours away from his main job as an ad man for Samuels Jewelry, he leaned on his past life in order to create men like the Continental Op (who was based on James Wright, a short, pugnacious Pinkerton from Baltimore) and the villainous Casper Gutman, the rotund heavy in The Maltese Falcon who bears more than a passing resemblance to one of Hammett’s former clients, the silent film star and accused rapist Fatty Arbuckle.
But, as Nathan Ward, the author of the newly released The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, shows, Hammett also used fiction in order to enhance his own biography. For instance, Ward’s new account calls into question some of Hammett’s tallest tales, such as the time when he helped to retrieve stolen gold that had gone missing aboard the S.S. Sonoma, or when he crashed his Army ambulance during World War I. (The latter story was often used by Hammett as a way to explain why he never drove a car.) Of all of Hammett’s tales, none was bigger, nor as transformative, as the time he was approached by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company with the offer of $5,000 dollars for the murder of I.W.W. labor leader Frank Little. (He declined.) The conspiracy and later lynching of Little by somebody else was supposedly the moment when Hammett began to question his loyalty to the Pinkertons. It was also the first time politics crept into Hammett’s worldview. For James Ellroy, the offer to kill Little not only awakened Hammett to the fact that he was a “fascist tool,” but it also became the driving force behind his very proletarian fiction. For Hammett himself, a Communist sympathizer who would stand before a New York district court as a defendant in a Smith Act trial involving his allegiance to a Communist-front organization, the Frank Little moment served as the final straw that led him into the awaiting arms of Marxism.
The problem with this lovely story is that it might not have happened at all. In fact, most Hammett biographers, including Ward, believe that the tale is just another one of Hammett’s hardboiled narratives. After all, if this moment so appalled Hammett that it reorganized his political sympathies, then why did he return to the Pinkertons a few years later? The more likely story is that Hammett had always leaned to the left. A close reading of some of his early Continental Op stories provides evidence for this theory. For instance, in “Crooked Souls,” Hammett puts the type of radical class anger that he would later espouse into a ransom note penned by kidnappers:
To top it off, “Crooked Souls” turns Harvey Gatewood, the grieving father and lumber magnate, into a corrupt war profiteer and debased criminal. The Continental Op, a streetwise detective with a healthy working class skepticism, suspects Gatewood from the beginning. Gatewood was the first of Hammett’s many vile 1%-er characters, but he was far from the last.
Indeed, cynicism and class conflicts are at the center of much of Hammett’s work. These elements, along with a desire to make detective fiction realistic, distinguishes his work from the British school of detective fiction that is best embodied by the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Whereas the British school promoted crimes as intellectual puzzles to be solved in order to restore the natural order of things, Hammett and his followers saw crimes not as aberrations in the human condition, but as activities carried out by people possessed by passions so intrinsically human that the early Christians gave them a catchy title: the Seven Deadly Sins. More importantly, Hammett didn’t believe that the world or society could ever be put back together again. As a Communist, it’s likely that he didn’t want such a restoration anyway. Even the nihilistic world of thugs and amoral private eyes that he himself created became too counterrevolutionary. Hammett quit fiction in 1934 in favor of left-wing causes. He never returned.
Ultimately, we’re only left with the conclusion that Hammett was a complicated man. A drifter who became a shamus who later renounced everything his old employer stood for, Hammett was a sort of cracked mirror who reveled in his past experiences (just read “Suggestions to Detective Story Writers” and imagine the old thin man gloating), while at the same time he damned them with his later activities. And for a man who wrote about detectives, real-life crime followed Hammett like a shadow, from his boyhood days as a railroad hoodlum all the way to his 1932 conviction in a civil suit brought by actress Elise De Vianne, who accused the drunken novelist-turned-screenwriter of battery and rape.
Most of all, Hammett was a genius writer who created an entirely new way of talking about urban America, while at the same time he concocted a fictitious past that always billed him in the role of hero. All founding fathers are difficult to discern, but few are as curious as America’s original purveyor of noir.
Benjamin Welton is a writer in Boston.
