The Lost Detective Read Free Page B

lacked, from its opening sentence in which a detective rolls a cigar across the desk of a fat small-town sheriff to earn his cooperation. The story introduced a savvy little hero whose adventures allowed Hammett to exploit both his detecting experiences and growing knowledge of San Francisco. His narrator was unnamed but spoke in the style of the classic op reports, tracing his days and nights of methodical plugging—interviewing comely nieces and elderly house servants, matching alibis against hotel registers, visiting a dead man’s grocer, and even checking his final laundry ticket. Of all the available ways to write about detecting since Edgar Allan Poe’s Parisian investigator C. Auguste Dupin first appeared in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Hammett opted to do something that grew out of what he had actually been trained for: creating elevated stories from the characters andsituations he knew well, instead of adding to the fiction club of gentleman puzzlers or quick-draw artists. This approach would eventually set crime writing on its head.

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    Hammett’s nameless Op first appeared in October 1923, when The Black Mask published “Arson Plus” (again by “Peter Collinson”). Its narrator resembles many of the operatives whose dispatches are collected in the Pinkerton archives at the Library of Congress, only unlike most of the standard op reports Hammett knew well, “Arson Plus” begins to make literature out of the tedium of investigation:

    Having ruined our shoe-shines, McClump and I got back in our machine and swung off in a circle around the place, calling at all the houses within a mile radius, and getting little besides jolts for our trouble.

    A skinny near-convalescent writing about his little man of action, Hammett had created a streetwise yet incorruptible hero who is devoted to the job at hand, however unsavory the client, a code Hammett had absorbed from Pinkerton’s:
    “Next morning, at the address McClump had given me—a rather elaborate apartment building on California Street—I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress.” In ordinary circumstances, Mrs. Trowbridge’s appearance would have made it well worth the wait, explains the Op, “But I was a busy, middle-aged detective, who was fuming over having his time wasted; and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty. However, I smothered my grouch, apologized fordisturbing her at such an early hour, and got down to business.” The detective must smother all kinds of distracting feelings to keep his eye on the job.
    These lines mark one of many times Hammett’s Op declines to name himself—though he does describe himself as portly, around forty, and five foot six—while slogging his way through twenty-six stories, two linked novellas, and two full-length novels.
    In May of that year, The Black Mask had published the first story about a “tough guy” private investigator, Terry Mack. Chronologically, Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” ran weeks ahead of Hammett’s debut of his Continental Op that fall. But beyond being set inside a detective’s office, the two stories had very little in common. Daly’s “Three Gun” Terry character was the flashy, sharpshooting opposite of the Op, while another of Daly’s heroes, Race Williams, debuted in the June 1 issue in a timely story about an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, “Knights of the Open Palm.” It was just the kind of thing Hammett was trying to correct in detective fiction, unrealistic action delivered in an unconvincing vernacular: “I’m what you might call a middleman—just a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks. Oh, there ain’t no doubt that both the cops and the crooks take me for a gun, but I ain’t—not rightly speaking.” 5
    By comparison, Hammett’s Op had wrung some handy knowledge from his rough life of sleuthing: Abductions rarely