Kill Your Darlings Read Free Page B

book had gotten (deservedly) mixed reviews; for another, the hero wasn’t a private eye and so, technically, the book probably shouldn’t have even been in the running. But knowing I didn’t deserve to win—knowing I didn’t have a prayer to win—didn’t keep me from writing an acceptance speech over and over again in my brain on the four-hour drive from Port City to Chicago.
    “I understand your idol Roscoe Kane’s here,” Tom said.
    “Yeah, you just missed him.”
    “Damnit! Will you introduce me tomorrow?”
    “Of course.”
    “I bet meeting him must be an experience.”
    “It certainly is.”
    “He’s one of my favorites, too, you know.”
    Tom was one of the world’s foremost authorities on private eye fiction, and one of the genre’s biggest enthusiasts; getting on his list of favorites didn’t make you one of the elite. Even I was on. In fact, the first fan letter I ever had was from Tom. God bless him.
    “What do you think about this Hammett thing?” he said.
    “What Hammett thing?”
    “The new Hammett book.”
    “What, you mean the latest biography, the one by Cynthia Crystal?”
    “No, no... I mean the new novel.”
    I picked up the bottle of Pabst he’d been pouring from and looked it over.
    “Tom,” I said. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but Hammett’s been dead since ’61, and that’s put a crimp in his publishing efforts. Considering he stopped writing around ’34, I hardly think there’s a new Hammett novel, unless it was written with a Ouija board.”
    “It’s an unpublished book that he wrote in the twenties. A lost manuscript that got found a few months ago.”
    “Yeah, right, in a box in the back of Murder Ink bookstore next to
MacBeth Meets the Bowery Boys
by Francis Bacon and Huntz Hall.”
    “Mal, this is for real. The manuscript’s been authenticated. The Hammett estate is standing behind the thing.”
    “Are they involved in the publication? Will they hold the copyright?”
    “I believe so.”
    “Then they stand to gain. Sounds hinky to me.”
    Tom made a face; this time he looked at my Pabst bottle to check what
I
was drinking. “Hey, the executors of the estate aren’t going to hoax the public where Hammett’s concerned. If they were out for a buck, they wouldn’t’ve kept so many of his short stories from being reprinted in book form; they’re fussy about what Hammett stuff gets put back in print. But how could they stand in the way of a newly discovered book-length work?”
    I was starting to think Tom was telling the truth and not taking advantage of a hick from Iowa who’d been drinking all evening.
    “Hammett’s my favorite writer,” I said. “I’d love to read a new Hammett book. So would a few other people. Don’t play games with me, boy. What’s the deal?”
    The novel, a mystery featuring Hammett’s famous Continental Op character, was entitled
The Secret Emperor
, and until recently had been believed left unfinished by Hammett, in its earliest stages, as some notes in the Hammett collection at the University of Texas would indicate. But, apparently, during 1927—a year when Dashiell Hammett had been thought to have temporarily given up writing to go back to the ad copy-writing game—Hammett had revised and completed the manuscript.
    “Hammett’s editor at
Black Mask
, old Cap Shaw, had encouraged him to do this book,” Tom said, “but when Hammett showed it to him, the Captain was disappointed.”
    “Why? Was it bad?”
    “How should I know? I haven’t read it yet; damn few people have. But Shaw is said to’ve been disappointed because Hammett didn’t construct it as a serial, so that Shaw could run it in installments in
Black Mask
.”
    “Which is how Hammett’s first book,
Red Harvest
, and most of his other books were put together,” I said.
    “Right. This one was all of a piece. Hammett apparently lost confidence in the book, and never showed it to a major publisher; instead, he sold first rights to a