Nightmare Town: Stories Read Free Page A

but it did not satisfy his desire to prove himself as a major novelist.
    The abiding irony of Hammett’s career is that he had already produced at least three major novels: Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key – all classic works respected around the world.
    But here, in this collection, we deal with his shorter tales, many of them novella length. They span a wide range, and some are better than others, but each is pure Hammett, and the least of them is marvellously entertaining.
    What makes Dashiell Hammett’s work unique in the genre of mystery writing? The answer is: authenticity.
    Hammett was able to bring the gritty argot of the streets into print, to realistically portray thugs, hobos, molls, stoolies, gunmen, political bosses, and crooked clients, allowing them to talk and behave on paper as they had talked and behaved during Hammett’s manhunting years. His stint as a working operative with Pinkerton provided a rock-solid base for his fiction. He had pursued murderers, investigated bank swindlers, gathered evidence for criminal trials, shadowed jewel thieves, tangled with safecrackers and holdup men, tracked counterfeiters, been involved in street shoot-outs, exposed forgers and blackmailers, uncovered a missing gold shipment, located a stolen Ferris wheel, and performed as guard, hotel detective, and strikebreaker.
    When Hammett sent his characters out to work the mean streets of San Francisco, readers responded to his hard-edged depiction of crime as it actually existed. No other detective-fiction writer of the period could match his kind of reality.
    Nightmare Town takes us back to those early years when Hammett’s talent burned flame-bright, the years when he was writing with force and vigour in a spare, stripped style that matched the intensity of his material. Working mainly in the pages of Black Mask (where ten of these present stories were first printed), Hammett launched a new style of detective fiction in America: bitter, tough, and unsentimental, reflecting the violence of the time. The staid English tradition of the tweedy gentleman detective was shattered, and murder bounced from the tea garden to the back alley. The polite British sleuth gave way to a hard-boiled man of action who didn’t mind bending some rules to get the job done, who could hand out punishment and take it, and who often played both sides of the law.
    The cynic and the idealist were combined in Hammett’s protagonists: their carefully preserved toughness allowed them to survive. Nobody could bluff them or buy them off. They learned to keep themselves under tight control, moving warily through a dark landscape (Melville’s “appalling ocean”) in which sudden death, duplicity, and corruption were part of the scenery. Nevertheless, they idealistically hoped for a better world and worked toward it. Hammett gave these characters organic life.
    Critic Graham Mclnnes finds that “Hammett’s prose… has the polish and meat of an essay by Bacon or a poem by Donne, both of whom also lived in an age of violence and transition.”
    The theme of a corrupt society runs like a dark thread through much of Hammett’s work. The title story of this collection, which details a “nightmare” town in which every citizen – from policeman to businessman – is crooked, foreshadows his gangster-ridden saga of Poisonville in Red Harvest. (The actual setting for his novel was Butte, Montana, and reflects the corruption Hammett had found there with Frank Little’s death in 1917.)
    Hammett saw the world around him as chaotic, without form or design. By the mid-1930’s he had convinced himself that radical politics could provide a sense of order, and that perhaps an ideal “people’s world” was possible. Communism seemed to promise such a world, but he eventually discovered that it was an illusion. In his last years, Hammett realised that there was no apparent solution to world chaos.
    Much has been written on the typical