Who Killed Bob Teal? and Other Stories Read Free Page B

Hammett’s response to Harry North’s rejection letter under the headline “Our Own Short Story Course”:
    We recently were obliged to reject two of Mr. Hammett’s detective stories. We didn’t like to do it, for Mr. Hammett and his Continental Detective Agency had become more or less fixtures in BLACK MASK. But in our opinion, the stories were not up to the standard of Mr. Hammett’s own work—so they had to go back.
    In returning the manuscripts, we enclosed the “Tragedy in One Act,” referred to in the letter which follows. The “Tragedy” was simply a verbatim report of the discussion in this office, which led to the rejection of the stories.
    We are printing Mr. Hammett’s letter below; first, to show the difference between a good author and a poor one; and secondly, as a primary course in short story writing. We believe that authors—especially young authors, and also old authors who have fallen into the rut—can learn more about successful writing from the hundred or so words following, than they can possibly learn from several volumes of so-called short story instruction. Mr. Hammett has gone straight to the heart of the whole subject of writing—or of painting, singing, acting … or of just living for that matter. As the advertising gentry would say, here is the “Secret” of success.
    I don’t like that “tragedy in one act” at all; it’s too damned true-to-life. The theatre, to amuse me, must be a bit artificial.
    I don’t think I shall send “Women, Politics, and Murder” back to you—not in time for the July issue anyway. The trouble is that this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I have fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.
    There are men who can write like that, but I’m not one of them. If I stick to the stuff I want to write—the stuff I enjoy writing—I can make a go of it, but when I try to grind out a yarn because I think there’s a market for it, then I flop.
    Whenever, from now on, I get hold of a story that fits my sleuth, I shall put him to work, but I’m through with trying to run him on a schedule.
    Possibly I could patch up “The Question’s One Answer” and “Women, Politics, and Murder” enough to get by with them, but my frank opinion of them is that neither is worth the trouble. I have a liking for honest work, and honest work as I see it is work that is done for the worker’s enjoyment as much as for the profit it will bring him. And henceforth that’s my work.
    I want to thank both you and Mr. Cody for jolting me into wakefulness. There’s no telling how much good this will do me. And you may be sure that whenever you get a story from me hereafter,—frequently, I hope,—it will be one that I enjoyed writing.
    DASHIELL HAMMETT
    San Francisco, Cal.
    Meanwhile, Cody published “The House on Turk Street” (15 April 1924) and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (June 1924), Hammett’s first set of linked stories and the strongest fiction he had written to that point. Together these stories form a 25,000 word novelette and begin to treat the characters and themes Hammett perfected five years later in The Maltese Falcon .
    Hammett didn’t like Cody and North, but he needed the money they paid him. Two months after Cody became editor, Hammett’s disability payment from the U.S. Veterans Bureau was discontinued due to his improving health. It is not known how much he was paid for his Black Mask stories, but the base rate is believed to have been a penny a word, though Mencken claimed to have paid a bit less. Other pulps were paying their star writers two cents a word by the mid 1920s and as much as three