The Lost Detective Read Free

1921, he had been sleeping alone, as advised due to his TB, in a Murphy bed in the hallway of their Eddy Street apartment, to keep safely apart from the baby. The family had been kept out of total poverty by a small, grudging loan made by his father. The fact that Hammett would even overrule his pride to ask such a favor of Richard Hammett shows how desperate things had become. While often kept home by his health, since February he had also been taking secretarial courses at the Munson School on Sutter Street. In addition to learning how to take quick notes, he was mastering touch typing, with which he turned out both the stories and poems he sent to magazines and the meticulous letters of outrage he wrote to the Veterans’ Bureau about changes tohis pension. He kept writing, when he could, at a table in the kitchen and sometimes in the big sunny reading room at the public library.
    Reporting would eventually have presented some of the same physical challenges as detective work as he ran down stories. 3 He needed work he could do at home—or, when at his worst, even flat on his back. Though bedridden much of each day, Hammett somehow continued to combine hustle with the understandably fatal view that TB would someday finish him off. “He would have done whatever he had to do to make a buck,” says David Fechheimer. “He was never a very good invalid.” * He had to come up with a less physically taxing way of making money.
    Without any surviving manuscripts before he was in his late twenties, it is hard to date exactly his decision to become a writer, let alone what kind of writer he wanted to be. He may not have respected the mystery story as it was then practiced, but he did not set out to reinvent it, either. His first attempts at writing actually were short, droll pieces, allegories, poems, character sketches, and what he called “legit” fiction, a form he never gave up the dream of returning to even after the success of his crime stories. His early efforts were more literary than “hard-boiled,” a recent term for skill under fire popularized by the ghastly war.
    That spring of 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, he typed up a draft of his first short story, “The Barber and His Wife,” onhis new black Underwood at the kitchen table. The story features a brawny, well-dressed husband and his unsatisfied wife to whom he gives hardly a thought; a brother with recognizable lung trouble; and a cultured young man who takes the wife to the movies. It reads a bit like a lesser Sherwood Anderson story until a coolly observed scene of violence when the husband visits the young suitor’s office:

    He stopped before Becker’s desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.
    “Is this Mr. Becker?”
    “Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”
    “No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up.” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Stemler!”

    His debut story was rejected before finally finding a home that fall, but in June or July of 1922, Hammett had his first sale of a sardonic parable of fewer than a hundred words called “The Parthian Shot,” bought for The Smart Set by its famous editor H. L. Mencken, the most celebrated graduate of the school Hammett had attended through eighth grade, Baltimore Polytechnic. It was impressive for anyone to receive a letter from the great Mencken, but especially thrilling if you had grown up living in Baltimore, where he was the godlike driving force at the Sun . This first sale did not go far toward paying the Hammetts’ bills, but it allowed the struggling family to do something comparatively lavish—to order in dinner to celebrate. The little dinner must have been a highlight of that summer in which Hammett’s mother died, on August 3, 1922.
    His first crime story, “The Road Home,” was bought by a magazine of a lower rank, The Black Mask , which ran it that December of 1922.