Creeping Siamese and Other Stories Read Free Page B

Suter, Carroll John Daly, and Hammett, his favorite among them; for the line he named “a splendid nucleus” in Tom Curry, Raoul Whitfield, and Frederick Nebel. In the introduction to a 1946 anthology of stories from Black Mask , Shaw recalled his first days as editor:
    We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective story differing from that accredited to the Chaldeans and employed more recently by Gaborieau, Poe, Conan Doyle—in fact universally by detective story writers; that is, the deductive type, the cross-word puzzle sort, lacking—deliberately—all other human emotional values. …
    So we wrote to Dashiell Hammett. His response was immediate and most enthusiastic: That is exactly what I’ve been thinking about and working toward. As I see it, the approach I have in mind has never been attempted. The field is unscratched and wide open. …
    We felt obligated to stipulate our boundaries. We wanted simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief. We wanted action, but we held that action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three-dimensional form.
    Hammett’s enthusiasm was amplified by Shaw’s check for $300, the money Hammett felt Cody had owed him earlier in the year. Shaw also passed along what he represented as lavish praise from Cody and Gardner. By February 1927 Hammett was back in the fold. He responded with his most accomplished short fiction to date, the “The Big Knock-Over,” the linked story “$106,000 Blood Money,” and “The Main Death,” all Op stories and his only submissions to Black Mask for the next year, totaling just under 45,000 words. They are also his most violent.
    With “The Big Knock-Over” Hammett’s writing took on a new energy. The language was sharper than before; the plotting was more interesting; the dialogue was surer; and the dramatic scenes were more vivid. There was more action than in Hammett’s earlier stories, and the action was linked to real-life crime, as Shaw reminded readers in his introductory blurb, which mentioned the Illinois gang wars and a recent mail-truck robbery in Elizabeth, New Jersey that netted more than $800,000 and eventually left six people dead: “Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness–yet can anyone be sure that it isn’t likely to occur?” The Op’s comment in “The Gutting of Couffignal” about M. P. Shiel’s The Lord of the Sea well describes Hammett’s stories for Shaw: “There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats … It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.” Readers agreed.
    The star of Shaw’s backfield produced, and the new editorial formula worked. In May 1927 Shaw announced that the circulation of Black Mask had increased 60%: “BECAUSE IT’S GOT THE STUFF! The stories in it are the best of their kind that can possibly be gotten, written by men who not only know how to write, but know what they are writing about.”
    Unlike his predecessors, Shaw nurtured his authors’ careers and he took a special interest in Hammett’s. In January 1927 Hammett became the mystery-fiction reviewer for The Saturday Review of Literature . Co-founded in 1924 and edited by Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby, who also chaired the editorial board of the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club, The Saturday Review was regarded as the most influential literary magazine in the United States. Hammett did not then have the cachet to land that job, but Shaw did. A fledgling literary agent as well as an editor, he had the social and business connections to recommend his star writer. Book reviewing was significant to Hammett’s literary development. In his tough criticism of current mystery publications, he was