The Lost Detective Read Free Page A

Mencken and George Jean Nathan had founded this magazine just two years earlier as one of several vehicles for funding their true love, the more rarefied Smart Set. (These fund-raising vehicles included an erotic sampler, Saucy Stories , and something called the Parisienne. ) When The Black Mask debuted in 1920, crime and detection were only a part of the splashy mix that also featured adventure, romance, cowboys, mystery, and occult. Mencken, despite his love of street slang as a brilliant chronicler of the American language, did not publicize his connection to The Black Mask and kept his name off the masthead altogether, and he and Nathan sold the magazine after its first eight issues.
    Likewise, Hammett kept his own name off his debut in The Black Mask , using the pseudonym Peter Collinson, and allegedly saving his real name for poetry. ** But if he saw publishing in The Black Mask as slumming it, he certainly got over this view with time, writing mostly for lower-paying crime magazines by the mid-twenties.
    “The Road Home” had no tricks or acts of genius in its detection, but an American view of crime acquired by the writer as a Pinkerton: A lean “manhunter” named Hagedorn has spent two years tracking his subject to a jungly corner ofBurma. Hagedorn intends to bring back his prisoner to New York, but Barnes, who’s claimed a local gem bed worth a criminal fortune, offers Hagedorn a piece of his kingdom if he’ll return home with false proof of the crook’s death. Instead of the detective following clues to snare his man, Hammett begins mid-showdown on a river, Barnes shouting out his bribe offer and Hagedorn quietly considering the criminal’s invitation to take his share of the gems. Barnes escapes ashore, forcing the issue; Hagedorn hesitates, then follows him into the trees, saying, “Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewels of his.” It’s left unclear whether Hagedorn will do the right thing or even survive his trek into the jungle, a challenge to the pieties of the detective story. “The puzzle isn’t so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it,” Hammett would say.
    “The Road Home” is flavored with words that its author, who had never been overseas, clearly dug out of the public library ( muggar , Mran-ma , jahaz ), but the premise derives from his firsthand knowledge of Pinkerton work: The situation resembles a less exotic story Hammett liked to tell of himself, of shadowing a suspicious jewel salesman named Finsterwald from Philadelphia to Savannah, only to have the thief finally approach him in a public park as looking vaguely “familiar” and offer him a share of his swindle. (Hammett turned him in.) This proposition was dramatically interesting, especially if the reader was left unsure of the detective’s answer, a daring step into the jungle for this kind of fiction.
    A writer without Hammett’s work experience might have shied away from a two-year manhunt overseas as too bold a plot to be believed. But Hammett would have heard plenty suchtales around the detectives’ room: William R. Sayers’s two years spent chasing a man through Europe were hardly the toughest part of a career in which he also rode with the Pinkerton crew that ran down the Wild Bunch gang. (And William Pinkerton himself had worked months in London and Havana to bring back the brilliant English forger Austin Bidwell.) 4
    Hammett continued to cover all his bases as a struggling freelancer, sending out an ambitious range of apprentice work—poems, essays, sketches. It is probable, though, as the writer Vince Emery suggests, that his researches in the public library led him to create a series character, inspired both by his irritation with the hackneyed detective fiction he saw in the pulps and on the theory that stories with a known character would eventually command a better price.
    His next crime story, “Arson Plus,” had a striding confidence that his other work