4 /“Say It with Lead”

Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Modernism’s Underworld Vernacular

It is very curious but the detective story which is you might say the only really modern novel form that has come into existence gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins.

—GERTRUDE STEIN, “WHAT ARE MASTER-PIECES AND WHY ARE THERE SO FEW OF THEM” (1935)

There are dives in New York’s underworld where a language is spoken that an ordinary citizen, listening in, would find impossible to understand. It isn’t English, French, German, or Yiddish; it is a language by itself.

—HENRY LEVERAGE, “DICTIONARY OF THE UNDERWORLD” (1925)

At the opening of his seminal essay on detective fiction, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), Raymond Chandler claims that “fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.”1 His essay continues by articulating the distinction between the English school of detective fiction and the American, or hard-boiled, school. Joseph T. Shaw, influential editor of pulp magazine Black Mask, where the hard-boiled style first emerged, had much the same thing to say about hard-boiled fiction and realism in the introduction to his retrospective anthology The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946): “These writers observed the cardinal principle in creating the illusion of reality; they did not make their characters act and talk tough; they allowed them to. They gave the stories over to their characters, and kept themselves off the stage, as every writer of fiction should.”² At some level, Chandler’s and Shaw’s point in these texts is to argue for the heightened realism (in content, at least) of hard-boiled detective writers. Chandler contrasts his (and Dashiell Hammett’s) “realistic” fiction with that of the so-called Golden Age detective writers, whose work he feminizes as domestic and overly genteel.³ In a sense, these claims to realism in hard-boiled fiction resemble those claims made by the realists of the late nineteenth century in America.

However, the distinctions Chandler, Shaw, and others have made about what constitutes realism rest on a number of assumptions about content rather than form. In his study The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (1989), Miles Orvell has compellingly maintained that when realist writers argued for the depiction of “life not literature . . . what they in fact meant was blood, sex, money, grime, garbage, immigrants, and killing snowstorms—a recognition of experience previously excluded from polite literature.”4 But these new, harsher elements—transformed into expressionist grotesques by twentieth-century writers like Michael Gold—were just as stylized in the realist and naturalist writing of the nineteenth century. This peculiar definition of gritty reality also appears in Chandler’s paean to Hammett: “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. . . . He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.” Chandler’s claims could extend to the entire hard-boiled school of writers, all of whom foregrounded the violence of the streets and “gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”⁵ For Chandler, as for the nineteenth-century American realists and naturalists, the presentation of the “seamy side of things” was a means of being “realistic.” To a degree, if indeed “fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,” then the true test of realism, according to Chandler, is in that fiction’s content more than in its style or aesthetic.

Given the concerns of The Word on the Streets, such a simple characterization of “realism” seems problematic. Is this an accurate term for what Hammett and other hard-boiled writers were attempting? Aesthetically speaking, the term seems misapplied. After all, there is little resemblance between the language and style of the hard-boiled writers and the work of William Dean Howells or Henry James; there is even a rather wide aesthetic gulf between hard-boiled fiction and the work of naturalists also interested in “the seamy side of things.” Instead, writers like Dashiell Hammett and the hard-boiled pioneer Carroll John Daly forged a new mode of writing, one where language itself maintains a harsh aesthetic relationship to the world it describes, where signifiers and signifieds do not cleanly line up, and where genteel language becomes a sign of social corruption. Far from being an example of aesthetic realism, this hard-boiled vernacular modernism, full of underworld slang and grotesque swaths of violent imagery, exhibits important stylistic and narratological techniques that aggressively fragment the aesthetic and epistemological assumptions of both realism and classical detective fiction.⁶

“The Ensuing Crime, or Its Threat, Is Incidental”: Detecting Modernism in Black Mask

We have an idea that detective fiction as we view it has only commenced to be developed. As a matter of fact, we expect the greatest and most noteworthy development in this particular field of literature than will be seen in any other. All other fields have been worked and overworked. This, as we visualize it, has been barely scratched.

—”THE AIM OF BLACK MASK” (1927)

Aficionados of detective fiction have no lack of histories of this genre, which is one of the best documented of all genres of popular fiction.7 As a result, its history is a largely settled affair: beginning with the Dupin stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the genre moves through the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, into the Golden Age writers of the early twentieth century, and finally arrives at the hard-boiled style of the 1920s and 1930s, first popularized in the pulp magazine Black Mask. The story of detective fiction is insulated; as a result, the genre exhibits a coherent and isolated developmental model. This well-established genealogy of detective fiction has—like the humor writing discussed in chapter 2—remained aloof and unconnected to broader historical narratives of American literature, in spite of the investment many canonical figures placed in both the reading and writing of detective and crime fiction. Although the genre virtually originates with the work of Poe, a major figure in the American literary canon, the histories of literary fiction and of detective fiction rarely cross paths. The fact is, however, that popular detective fiction constantly exerted an influence on fiction within the canon, and developments in canonical fiction themselves showed up in the work of mystery writers. From Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson [1894]) to Gertrude Stein (Blood on the Dining-Room Floor [1933]) to William Faulkner (Intruder in the Dust [1948] and Knight’s Gambit [1949]), canonical writers regularly produced novels and stories that drew on the conventions of detective and crime writing. At the same time, many tropes present in the world of “literary” fiction appeared in popular detective fiction: Sherlock Holmes’s fin de siècle decadence, Philo Vance’s appreciation of psychoanalysis and modernist art, the “literary” poet and writer characters of Hammett’s stories and novels.⁸ Still, the high/low dichotomy separating highbrow fiction from genre fiction remained so strong that the most popular American detective novelist of the 1920s, the former literary editor and expert on modernist art Willard Huntington Wright (who wrote under the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine), reflected on his popular success in a short autobiographical piece entitled I Used to Be a Highbrow, But Look at Me Now (1929).9

Van Dine’s pithy title suggests an inability to “look at” the detective writer as anything but lowbrow, and this particular dichotomy retains some influence in the scholarship to this point. While critics generally conceive of “literary” fiction as exhibiting a particular genealogy that moves from romanticism through realism, naturalism, and modernism, historians of the detective and crime story see shifts of a different nature. Howard Haycraft’s early construction of detective fiction history moves from the “Romantic Era” through the “Golden Age” and the “Moderns” (though at times his distinction between the Golden Age and the Moderns is difficult to discern). While Julian Symons’s history is a bit more nuanced, his categories are much the same. John G. Cawelti collapses these distinctions into two competing strands: the classical detective story and the hard-boiled detective story. Yet none of these critics address the larger literary context—broader narratives of Anglo-American literary history—in which these writers were publishing. From the side-by-side magazine publication of writers like Van Dine and Sinclair Lewis in Cosmopolitan to the 1934 Modern Library publication of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), detective fiction has always demonstrated a strong affinity with the elite or “highbrow” world of literary fiction. When some connection is noted by critics, their tendency is to identify one or two of the most “literary” figures from the crime-fiction canon (for example, Hammett, Chandler, or James M. Cain) and elevate them to the realm of the literary, separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff much like Edmund Wilson did in his 1945 essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”¹⁰ To see a small handful of writers as exemplary and deserving of literary attention is also to miss some of the fundamental interrelationships between detective fiction and the larger trends of literary history.

At its very root, detective fiction is dependent on two competing nineteenth-century literary forms: realism and romanticism. For classical (or ratiocinative) detective fiction to function properly, the writer must insert a romantic individual into a realist world.¹¹ The protagonist is generally the exemplary model of reason, but (as in the case of Dupin, Holmes, and others in the same vein) the application of reason appears so highly idiosyncratic that its results remain difficult to replicate. This romantic figure (in Poe) becomes the figure of late Victorian decadence (in Doyle) and frequently retains her/his decadent sensibilities (though modifying them with modernist tastes) in the work of classical detective writers of the 1920s and beyond.¹² While the characterization is firmly romantic, the fictional world of the classical detective story exemplifies the emerging late nineteenth-century standards of American realism. In these stories the world is finally a legible environment, even if the reader may need the mediator of the amateur genius to demonstrate the legibility of this world and to prove that it is—in spite of any initial doubts—coherent, representable, and comprehensible.13 William W. Stowe has called the classical detective’s approach to detection a “practical semiotics,” in which the crime provides a series of signifieds that must be properly decoded.¹⁴ As a result detective and mystery writers in the classical mode have consistently obsessed over the notion of “fair play,” a concept dependent on the ideas espoused by realism, producing any number of “rules” for writing detective fiction: the environment must be accurately described by a disinterested third party so that the reader will have an equal opportunity to solve the mystery.¹⁵ Often, the classical detective writer uses a Watson character who functions as a stand-in for the reader and whose sensibilities (in contrast to the detective) are anything but exemplary; at other times, the stories are told in the third person to preserve a strict objectivity.¹⁶

The emergence of the hard-boiled detective story in the early 1920s, then, changes far more than just the subject matter (as Chandler argues). This new form throws the most basic elements of the classical detective story into doubt. Here, the detective does not complete his job by demonstrating a superior intellect. His (and it is almost always “his,” especially in the genre’s early years) manner of investigation is frequently predicated on a trial-and-error model. In looking at a number of these texts, it becomes clear why such an approach is necessary: the world is no longer legible according to the principles of realism. Networks and associations are not only better hidden, but they also extend far beyond the reaches of the locked room or English country house that provide the settings for so many classic mysteries. Crimes in the hard-boiled story are rarely isolated incidents of violence in a world of order. Rather, they often seem to be mere symptoms of a much larger social and economic disease of twentieth-century crime. Murders and other violent acts come and go, as do solutions. But the focus is less frequently on a symbolic restoration of order as it is on the survival of the detective in a continually hostile and unpredictable environment. Illuminating these distinctions, Stowe contrasts the “practical semiotics” of the classical detective story with the hard-boiled “hermeneutical interpreter,” whose “interpretative process [is] a dialogic investigation rather than the application of a method.”¹⁷

Far from exhibiting the facility with reason seen in figures like Dupin and Holmes, the hard-boiled detective’s encounter with the world is usually physical and often violent. As Cawelti notes, in opposition to the privileged position of rational observer of realistic details that the classical detective inhabits, “the hard-boiled story . . . typically implicates the detective in the crime from the very beginning,” suggesting that the realist boundaries between subject and object have become unstable in this twentieth-century mode.18 As the subjectivity of the detective gets closer and closer to the world he is investigating, the details of that world begin to appear more difficult to discern objectively, and the description of them frequently lapses into the grotesque. Paramount in the hard-boiled story is the detective’s active engagement with the world, not only through his physical action but also through his linguistic and narratological control over how the story is experienced.

Detectives whose primary means of investigation involved action over cognition were not new to mystery fiction readers of the 1920s. While the late nineteenth-century detective is most frequently assumed to be cast in the same mold as Sherlock Holmes, one American detective made far more appearances than Holmes, beginning in 1886 (a year before Doyle created Holmes): Nick Carter, “Master Detective.” Carter was a series character whose adventures were imagined by a host of in-house writers for dimenovel publishers Street & Smith.¹⁹ Carter’s exploits were far more like the melodramatic adventure tales that populated dime novels throughout the late nineteenth-century than the measured, ratiocinative tales of Holmes. A master of disguises known as “the little giant” to the underworld, Carter tracks criminals through late Victorian New York City in stories where he is frequently captured and escapes with an expert use of timing and violence.²⁰ Like the later hard-boiled figures, Carter infiltrates the criminal underworld, is occasionally knocked out while in action (“without any warning whatsoever, he received a violent blow on the head and sank senseless to the deck”), and fights his way out of trouble.²¹ Still, Carter’s relationship to crime is that of the incredibly talented amateur. Like Holmes and Dupin, Carter is consulted by the police after they have exhausted all possibilities in attempting to solve a particularly perplexing crime. His manner—when not in disguise—suggests all the refined sensibilities of a late Victorian gentleman, and, like a host of dime-novel protagonists, his speech exemplifies a natural aristocracy.²² Nick Carter’s city is certainly a dangerous one, but with the proper manipulation of costume, language, and violence, the detective will always solve the crime.

In transforming detective fiction from its ratiocinative coldness, the hard-boiled writers looked back to these action-packed adventure novels but began to subvert their realist assumptions with a variety of new strategies rooted in the experimental language of the streets. As with the other writers discussed in this study, many of the thematic and topical concerns were quite contemporary and in sync with critical discourse on modernist culture: the new sexual codes and gender roles of the Jazz Age; the increasing fascination with twentieth-century urban spaces; the emphasis on psychology; the complicated relationship to capitalism and other forms of power (gangsterism, fascism, etc.). However, as with other examples of vernacular modernism, the most important transformation in the hard-boiled story is not necessarily the story’s content, but how it negotiates its content via narration and language. As Shaw noted in the introduction to The Hard-Boiled Omnibus, “The formula or pattern [of the hard-boiled story] emphasizes character and the problems inherent in human behavior over crime solution. In other words, in this new pattern, character conflict is the main theme; the ensuing crime, or its threat, is incidental.”23 Here, the crime is far less important than how the characters perceive, interact with, and ultimately represent that world. The hard-boiled detective story’s relationship to the world is much like the work of the high modernists—as a form of self-conscious textual mediation of “reality.”

A number of critics have gestured toward the idea that the hard-boiled detective story itself (particularly as exemplified by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) resembles a form of modernism. In many cases, critics see the hard-boiled style as a watered-down version of the modernism of Ernest Hemingway.²⁴ Fortunately, recent criticism has acknowledged that the emergence of the hard-boiled style in the pages of Black Mask preceded Hemingway’s earliest American publications by over two years, and that hard-boiled mainstays like Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett had each published over twenty stories in Black Mask before Hemingway’s first undeniably hard-boiled short story, “The Killers,” appeared in Scribner’s in March 1927. Ken Worpole, critic and historian of British working-class reading practices, has a much more nuanced consideration of this relationship, noting that “Hemingway’s style itself had developed in a continuous relationship with the ‘toughguy’ school of thriller writing and could not be separated from it.”²⁵ While Hemingway was earning his modernist credentials by typing Gertrude Stein’s nearly thousand-page epic The Making of Americans (1925), the hard-boiled writers, like other writers in this study, were working through literary transformations in the American vernacular language as most clearly exemplified in the work of Ring Lardner.²⁶ And while Hemingway remained occupied with an obsession to write “one true sentence,” the hard-boiled pulp writers sometimes churned out thousands of words a day—a practice that is tempting to think of as a commercial form of “automatic writing.”27 The approach was certainly different, but these comparisons have as much to do with their similarity in ideological outlook as they do with their minimalist prose style.

Critics utilizing a “culture of modernism” model have emphasized how the hostile urban environment (and the accompanying corruption and decay that provide the background for much of hard-boiled writing) replicates the dismal outlook of modernism itself. James Naremore, for example, has claimed that Hammett’s The Glass Key is “better described as Hammett’s The Waste Land,” primarily because of its ideas about stability and identification in a modern environment, something Eysteinsson describes as a “pessimistic view of modern culture often associated with modernism (which its adversaries sometimes call ‘wastelandism’),” a worldview not limited to the modernists nor especially characteristic of all modernist writing.²⁸ Like Naremore, Jon Thompson sees Hammett as the exemplary hard-boiled modernist, not because of his style but because of “his skepticism toward bourgeois law and order, his philosophical and ideological relativism, the contradictory sexual politics of his fiction, and his rejection of rationality.”²⁹ What Thompson describes might effectively be characterized as an antimodern or antirational response to modernity, though his argument largely ignores Hammett’s aesthetic innovations.

Thompson’s interest in “relativism” and the “rejection of rationality,” however, points toward a more comprehensive means of thinking about the hard-boiled detective story as a form of modernism, rooted in the relationship between language and epistemology. The detective story has always depended on certain assumptions about what the characters actually know and how they understand the world around them. Indeed, for the ratiocinative detective, the acquisition of knowledge and proper interpretation of this knowledge are crucial in the solution of the crime. As in modernism, this ability to know (and, especially, to decode signs) breaks down in the hard-boiled detective story. Nothing in the world of Hammett, Chandler, or other hard-boiled writers is “elementary, my dear Watson.” The detective in this genre occupies the epistemological position of a modernist subject; knowledge is always conditional, relative, and fragmentary, and the subject’s function (like that of Poirier’s “grim reader” of the high modernist text) must necessarily try to make sense of the incredibly incomplete and often inadequate set of information provided.

With knowledge fragmented and the world illegible by traditional methods of “semiotic” detection, the hard-boiled detective is frequently forced to “stir things up” (as Hammett’s Continental Op self-consciously does in Red Harvest) in order to gain answers to his questions and move towards what ultimately becomes a provisional solution, at best. This involvement, often violent and usually illegal, breaks down the subject/object division that underscores the classical detective story, the conventions of realism, and the stable division between law and order. The classical detective story insists that the subject (whether narrator or detective) remains distant from the details of the crime; tampering with evidence, for example, to gain a conviction would be out of the realm of possibility in a Holmes story. In the hard-boiled detective story, such techniques are common. Because the crimes themselves are not neat and insular semiotic puzzles, the hard-boiled detective, like the modernist artist or reader, must remake the text of the world into something that resembles, if only fleetingly, coherence. In other words, the world is never completely comprehensible in objective terms in either the high modernist text or the hard-boiled detective story. In both cases some aesthetic intervention, whether a thick layer of classical allusions or the stylized violence of “stirring things up,” remains necessary for any proper understanding of contemporary modernity.

In addition to having an active, “hermeneutic” engagement with the world, the hard-boiled detective also occupies the position of an aesthetic subject, the creator of the narrative text. While plenty of texts that preceded the 1920s used violence as a means of engaging the world, a fundamental change in narratological strategy characterizes this newly formed genre.30 Rather than using a third-person narration or a removed first-person “Watson,” these writers largely depend on the compromised subject position of the heavily invested—and often unreliable—first-person detective. Almost inevitably an unreliable narrator, the hard-boiled detective unfolds the clues (and the accompanying confusion) as he finds them; there is no objective authority or plot device that will reveal the criminal mastermind’s nefarious plot at the story’s conclusion. Instead, the highly subjective narration of the detective is the reader’s only entrée to both the crime and the world in which it occurs. In such a narrative style, the reader knows that the information received through this narration is necessarily incomplete, but the epistemological assumptions of the genre—and, I might add, of broader characterizations of modernism—recognize that any story, told by anyone, is always incomplete, partial, and highly subjective. Only the hard-boiled detective—or the modernist artist—can, however briefly, bring the chaos of the early twentieth century into focus long enough for any pretense of aesthetic coherence.

This subjectivity is underscored by the stylistic narration of the hard-boiled detective. The major shift in the genre, the one that reveals it to be a form of vernacular modernism, is its insistence on utilizing characters that speak with a combination of bravado, thieves’ cant, and professional argot. The language of the detective (or, occasionally, criminal) narrator is fundamentally compromised because he speaks or writes not in a language that insists on its objectivity, but rather in the corrupted language of the very figures he is investigating. This linguistic distinction is crucial; in effect, it rejects the divisions between subject and object that inform nineteenth-century realism’s genteel hierarchies and casts off the ideological work they perform. As with other vernacular modernists, this language is not objectively descriptive and rather creates another world, a textual world that exists on its own terms. Hard-boiled figures invent their own phrases and adopt particularly inventive expressions from the underworld to describe the kinds of environments that standard realist aesthetics is incapable of handling. Even Chandler acknowledged this stylistic formalism in “The Simple Art of Murder,” his ode to hard-boiled “realism”:

[Hammett] had a style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. . . . All language begins with speech, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying.31

The “American language” of Hammett’s fiction, Chandler writes (channeling Mencken), “only looks like speech,” but is in fact a language that can communicate more than one realizes. In much the same way Yezierska and Jolas characterized immigrant language, Hammett’s use of the vernacular transforms the language of the streets into something that “could say almost anything.”

As with Jolas’s publication of “Slanguage: 1929” in transition, the hard-boiled language of Hammett and others also grew out of a broader interest in the lexicographical interest in varieties of American vernacular language. While glossaries of criminal argot have a long history in the study of slang (they are among the first specialized dictionaries of slang), hard-boiled writing of the 1920s foregrounded this language as a particularly modern form of linguistic experimentation.32 As detective fiction changed, the pulp magazines that were publishing the genre also saw the value of slang lexicography. Flynn’s, which would publish Chandler, Hammett, and Carroll John Daly under its later title Detective Fiction Weekly, serialized Henry Leverage’s “Dictionary of the Underworld” in 1925, noting in some installments that “here is another chunk of the vocabulary Flynn’s is publishing weekly, both as a help to its readers in reading some of its underworld stories and as a matter of general interest.”³³ The need for a textual apparatus for reading crime stories emphasized the experimental linguistic focus of the hard-boiled style. The first installment presented underworld slang as impenetrable and fluid:

There are dives in New York’s underworld where a language is spoken that the ordinary citizen, listening in, would find impossible to understand. It isn’t English, French, German, or Yiddish; it is a language by itself. . . . Flynn’s intends to present to you in successive issues a dictionary of this argot. We realize we are offering the vocabulary of a fluid, ever-changing tongue. By its very nature it must be incomplete. It will include words common to every-day slang. Every flapper uses some of these words. But they have been included because frequently they convey a different significance in underground channels. Then there are words that none but a crook or hobo would use or understand.³⁴

Both Chandler’s description of the hard-boiled style and Flynn’s “Dictionary of the Underworld” present this “fluid, ever-changing” language as artful and self-conscious, in some cases opaque and in need of scholarly (or pseudoscholarly) paratextual apparatus.

Despite the celebration of innovative and experimental street language by both hard-boiled writers and pulp publishers, pulp literature has been closely aligned with the almost machinelike output of dime novels and thus seen as antithetical to the self-conscious aesthetics of literary modernism. Michael Denning and others have called the work of dime novelists “anonymous, ‘unauthored’ discourse,” as if the demands of production themselves were so intense that writers were unable to put any stylistic stamp of individuality on their fiction; likewise, Erin A. Smith has compared pulp writers to “manufacturers, paid for making a product much as factory workers were.”35 Much the same could be said of many of the pulp magazines published in the first half of the twentieth century, but countering this trend was the nearly ubiquitous acknowledgement and celebration of authorship on magazine covers that began to dominate the pulps in the mid-1920s. Certainly, the consistent featuring of authors’ and characters’ names on pulp covers suggested that writers had developed a sense of personal craft and an identifiable style. The sign of authorship, almost a fetish among modernists, was in full effect in the pulps, and writers became known not only for the use of series characters but also for the employment of unique stylistic tropes. The promotion of authorship was especially prominent in the pages of Black Mask, the pulp magazine that saw the birth of the hard-boiled style and jump-started the careers of some of the best-known names in twentieth-century American detective and crime writing.

Founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as a quick means to recoup their Smart Set losses, Black Mask spent its early years searching for an identity among the enormous number of pulp magazines on the marketplace. Of all these magazines, Black Mask has received the most attention from critics and scholars of detective fiction, in large part because it produced so many important genre writers.³⁶ Such criticism has generally focused on the individuals whose names graced the covers with regularity. But while individual writers became known for their own quirks, the magazine as a whole also began to move toward its own self-conscious deployment of style by the late 1920s, under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw. To a great degree the critical attention on Black Mask, as opposed to many of its contemporaries, is warranted. While other pulp magazines specialized in genres—romance, Western, aviation, mystery, etc.—Black Mask took its specialization even more seriously. Over and above specializing in a single genre, Black Mask promoted a particular style of detective story, making it the only major pulp magazine to self-consciously address not just what content its stories contained, but how those stories would be told.

While this editorial transformation began to take shape when Shaw took over the editorship in November 1926, the most explicit statement of editorial principles appeared a few months later, in June 1927. “Black Mask has a definite purpose and a definite aim,” begins the editorial “The Aim of Black Mask.” The piece proceeds to delineate “our requirements of plausibility, of truthfulness in details, of realism in the picturing of thought, the portrayal of action and emotion. All stories submitted to Black Mask are judged and selected with these cardinal requirements in mind, together with the necessity for swift movement in starting and in the development of the plot.” The ratiocinative school of detective fiction is the subtle target of the critique that follows: “The reader of today gets his impression quickly. He judges the character of a man by what he does and not, as formerly, by the author’s description of his physical appearance.”37 Three major characteristics of the hard-boiled story are referenced here: the privileging of action over objective, realist description, and the emphasis on implied interiority in the phrase “realism in the picturing of thought.” Although by the late 1940s, film noir had all but turned this interiority into a caricature with the man of action and a constant voice-over narration, by mid-1927, hardly more than six months into his editorship, Shaw had identified and articulated the direction that the emerging genre, and his magazine, would take.

By October 1929, after Shaw had spent nearly three years at the helm of Black Mask, the hardback publication of Hammett’s work by Knopf made the editorial voice even clearer in its proclamation of a new era in detective fiction: “The day of the Sherlock Holmes type of story is practically ended. Despite the fact that the Fu Manchu and Philo Vance stories have been quite popular, the trend is all toward the serious and realistic presentation in fiction of crime, criminals, the underworld, and police and detective methods as they actually are in real life.” Shaw’s obsession with depicting the “real” in a magazine that sought to present a highly stylized world of crime should not confuse here; his push toward realism is a kinesthetic one, which rejects the static description of nineteenth-century writing for a “realism” of action and narration. Later in the same piece, he focuses on what particular elements of the “real” he sees as primary: “In few stories are the characters fantastic creations of the writer’s imagination. Nearly always they are figures drawn from real life, thinking and speaking and acting as real men think and speak and act.”³⁸ These three emphases, “thinking and speaking and acting,” essentially define the world of the hard-boiled. Any encounter with the environment is inevitably mediated through a highly individualized thought, speech, or action, as the first-person narration of so many hard-boiled stories makes clear. Thinking and speaking precede acting and are the self-conscious medium through which the reader experiences the “realistic” action.

The new editorial emphasis on style upset more than a few Black Mask authors, including Erle Stanley Gardner, who complained in letters to Shaw and circulation manager Phillip C. Cody that they were trying to “Hammettize” the magazine.³⁹ Gardner claimed that Shaw had “gone arty” with the magazine, emphasizing “style” over content and alienating his pulp readership. “Personally I don’t think the wood pulp reader cares so much for style,” Gardner wrote to Shaw after the magazine had begun serializing the critically acclaimed The Maltese Falcon.40 And though Gardner would freely admit to Shaw that “frankly, Hammett is an artist. I am a hack writer,” he maintained that “if a reader wants Black Mask fiction he buys the black mask [sic]. If he wants Saturday Evening Post fiction he buys the Post. If he wants some of the Menken [sic] type he knows where to go for it.”⁴¹ Trade magazines saw a similar trend toward a particular kind of stylization: a Writer’s Digest piece on Black Mask in 1930 advised potential authors, “Don’t try to wish any mediocre stuff on this editor—you’ve got to be good! Simple, clipped style preferred to fine writing, so don’t use any fancy language. Your detectives and gangsters, above all, must sound authentic; their dialogue must ring the gong. Study the magazine—hard—before you aim at it!”⁴²

Gardner was largely correct with this characterization of Shaw’s editorial practice; indeed, he had gone “arty” to a degree. Though Gardner continued to appear in the magazine, during much of Shaw’s editorial tenure the writer’s more fanciful (he would call them “romantic”) tales of Ed Jenkins “the phantom crook” would not receive the same kind of publicity as the work of “Hammettized” writers like Frederick Nebel, Paul Cain, and ultimately Raymond Chandler. And though Shaw continued to emphasize “plausibility” as a concern, Gardner was right to point out the “arty” language and structures of Black Mask’s preferred writers. He later wrote to his friend (and Black Mask circulation manager) Phil Cody, “This grim, hard-boiled thing isn’t realism because with all the private detectives I’v [sic] ever known I’ve never known one like those boys in B.M. used to write about, and no one I’ve talked to ever has either. Therefore, I say that stuff isn’t realism. It’s more fiction than the weirdest type of imaginative yarn.”⁴³

Though Shaw maintained a policy that stressed “plausibility,” he would acknowledge the centrality of the character-driven elements of the hard-boiled style. In these texts, not only do we find that “character conflict is the main theme” and that “the ensuing crime, or its threat, is incidental,” as Shaw would later write in The Hard-Boiled Omnibus, but we also see the characters themselves become mediators of the fictional reality, frequently implicated in the crimes they are purportedly working to solve.⁴⁴ Importantly, however, Shaw had clearly identified these changes by the end of the 1920s, at the moment when Hammett and others (such as Carroll John Daly and Raoul Whitfield) began to cross over into the hardback publishing market. The vision for what the detective story could become was itself a product of the 1920s, the decade most clearly associated with modernism.

As Ron Goulart writes in The Dime Detectives, “Although the twenties was a transition period, it was not the heyday of the hard-boiled private eye.”45 Goulart’s history of the pulps spends the majority of its time on the 1930s, when the hard-boiled transformations of Black Mask began to be disseminated over the scores of other detective pulps on the market. Certainly, his estimation is correct; the 1920s were a period of experimentation in detective and crime writing (as well as in other pulp genres) rather than the moment of the full fruition of the hard-boiled style. This experimentation, however, lines up almost uncannily with other linguistic and formal experiments associated with high modernism. There is a great value in examining the detective stories of the early Black Mask stars in order to see exactly how this mode emerged both stylistically and epistemologically. The two most popular Black Mask writers in the 1920s were undoubtedly Daly and Hammett. In a 1924 readers’ poll, the editors hesitated to announce a favorite: “Two authors ran such a close race in the voting that we will not tell which actually got first place. They are Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett.”⁴⁶ A close examination of the 1920s work of these two writers will provide a window into exactly how hard-boiled writers effected this watershed transformation of the detective genre through a self-conscious deployment of a real and invented underworld vernacular, exemplifying the genre’s own “Revolution of the Word.”

“A Halfway House between the Dicks and the Crooks”: Destabilizing Realism in the Work of Carroll John Daly

I define a hack as a man who refuses as a matter of principle to improve the production apparatus.

—WALTER BENJAMIN, “THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER” (1934)

There is nothing subtle about the methods of Race Williams.

—NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF THE AMATEUR MURDERER (1933)

If one figure complicates the purported highbrow aspirations of the hard-boiled detective story, it is Carroll John Daly. Had the style been pioneered by the more or less canonical Hammett, then the genre’s history would become a great deal easier to see as somehow “literary.” Daly, on the other hand, has been savaged by critics of the genre; few scholars have any positive things to say about him or his popular series character Race Williams. One of the few scholarly publications on Daly sums up his career by calling him “a third-rate word-spinner who hatched a second-rate protagonist who did his thing in these fourth-rate productions best left on the broom-closet’s top shelf in the back.”47 Philip Durham called him “a careless writer and a muddy thinker who created the hard-boiled detective, the prototype for numberless writers to follow.”⁴⁸ And, in his seminal history of pulp detective fiction, Ron Goulart rightly notes that Daly “has been for most historians and critics of the hard-boiled detective field a somewhat embarrassing founding father. He’s a key figure, the creator of an important character, but he was not a very good writer and, for a man said to have a sense of humor, he seemed completely unaware of how silly both he and Race Williams sometimes sounded.”⁴⁹ Even longtime devotees of the hard-boiled such as E. R. Hagemann and Robert Weinberg have lamented Daly’s subliterary output. In the important anthology The Black Mask Boys, editor William F. Nolan described Daly’s first Race Williams novel The Snarl of the Beast thus: “The writing was impossibly crude, the plotting labored and ridiculous, and Race Williams emerged as a swaggering illiterate with the emotional instability of a gun-crazed vigilante.”⁵⁰ While the presence of a Race Williams story in an issue of Black Mask reportedly boosted sales of the magazine by 15 percent during his editorial tenure, Joseph T. Shaw chose not to include Daly in his seminal anthology The Hard-Boiled Omnibus, the first attempt at creating a hard-boiled canon, virtually writing Daly out of the history of a form and style he helped originate.⁵¹

One of the reasons Daly has been so roundly maligned by the historians of the genre is the tendency to collapse author and narrator, a mistake seldom made in the study of “literary” fiction but often made in the realm of popular fiction. If Daly’s character was “a swaggering illiterate,” such an approach suggests, Daly himself must also be illiterate. In fact, editorials in Black Mask consciously played with and satirized this idea. In a letter about his first Race Williams story, “Knights of the Open Palm,” Daly sends “even the best of wishes to H. C. North, the associate editor, who makes ungentlemanly remarcks [sic] about my spelling,” prompting the editors to reply: “We are pleased that Mr. Daly is not offended at our remarcks.”⁵² In spite of this tongue-in-cheek banter, Daly’s letter also emphasizes his attention to the craft of writing, especially in the revision of his stories, which he calls “the bread and butter of the fiction builder.” He makes essentially the same claims in a 1927 article in the Editor about the revision process on his first novel, The Snarl of the Beast.⁵³ Daly’s comments on revision may be a sort of posturing, but the work that precedes his hard-boiled writing suggests that his move to the vernacular style was a very self-conscious choice, grounded in his own understanding of narration and desire to find new genre forms. Regardless of attempts to dismiss Daly, he remains a force to be reckoned with in the history of the hard-boiled detective story. Erle Stanley Gardner, one of the most prolific Black Mask writers of the 1920s and 1930s, called Daly the “originator” of the style and modeled some of his own early characters (such as Ed Jenkins and Bob Larkin) on Daly’s popular character Race Williams.54 And the first identifiably hard-boiled story by Daly, “The False Burton Combs,” appeared in the December 1922 issue of Black Mask, when Hammett was still trying to break through in more highbrow magazines like the Smart Set.⁵⁵

While “The False Burton Combs” featured Daly’s first hard-boiled narrator, his first publication in Black Mask was anything but hard-boiled. In October 1922 Daly published the psychological terror story “Dolly,” a tale of murder and madness told by a borderline insane narrator. “Dolly” is an example of what Christopher Breu has termed “psychological noir,” common in the early years of Black Mask.⁵⁶ After all, the original subtitle of the magazine was “An Illustrated Magazine of Detective Mystery, Adventure, Romance and Spiritualism”; the presence of the supernatural and psychotic loomed large in the early years of Black Mask. This kind of writing dominated the magazine in its first five years, as indicated by the numerous publications by Harold Ward under both his own name and the pseudonym Ward Sterling (forty-five stories and serial installments between the two names in the first forty issues of the magazine). Ward’s specialty was the tale of psychological terror, and he clearly references his influences in “Under the Crimson Skull,” when he details “a setting fit for the description of a Dante—a Poe—a De Maupassant.”⁵⁷

Daly’s “Dolly,” like the work of Harold Ward, draws heavily on the first-person style of Poe. In this story, the unnamed narrator, the son of “a well-known alienist,” becomes morbidly obsessed with the throat of a woman named Dolly.⁵⁸ To obtain his father’s consent to marry her, he hatches a plan to feign an insanity only cured by Dolly’s presence, keeping a journal which he

filled . . . day after day with thoughts of Dolly; weird, uncanny thoughts—thoughts that could only come from a disordered mind. It was mostly about her throat and the fascination which it held for me; that if Dolly was not for me she would be for no one else. For when my fingers played along that soft, white surface came a desire—a desire which I knew I could not long control—to close my fingers tightly about that warm flesh, and crush forever the breath from that beautiful body.59

In a truly Poe-inspired conclusion, the narrator’s initial performance of insanity overcomes his ability to reason, driving him to kill Dolly in a fit of actual insanity. In both content and style, Daly looks back to the work of Poe and to the contemporary work of H. P. Lovecraft, who began publishing “weird, uncanny” tales in amateur fiction magazines in 1916.

While the narration and subject of “Dolly” are anomalous among Daly’s other publications in Black Mask, this piece helps to demonstrate both Daly’s development as a writer and the emergence of the hard-boiled style in general. This is the last time that Daly would publish a Black Mask tale in this overwrought style, reminiscent of nineteenth-century gothic fiction. As in his later work, Daly consistently privileges the first-person, the primary component Christopher Breu uses to identify the elements of “psychological noir,” a precursor to the hard-boiled that included stories “reflect[ing] the legacy of . . . gothic true-crime and fiction narratives.”⁶⁰ The introduction of a narrative subjectivity suggests the importance of the individual experience of the world, but this shift alone does not push Daly’s work toward any stylistic experiments. In addition to the gothic narrator of “Dolly,” Daly would also experiment with third-person narration (in his first novel, The White Circle [1926], for example), but the vast majority of his publications after “Dolly” demonstrated significant shifts in voice and tone. Gone from his fiction was the voice of the bourgeois narrator in the mode of psychological romanticism, rooted in late nineteenth-century notions about society and psychology. After “Dolly,” his characters would be thrust into the twentieth century by their very explicit use of the American vernacular.

Leaving the style of “Dolly” behind, though, was not necessarily a commercial or an editorial choice on Daly’s part. While editors used “Dolly” to premiere the short-lived “Daytime Stories” series (“not to be read at night by people with weak nerves”), readers praised the story for months afterward. Although the story was published in October 1922, the last reference to “Dolly” in the readers’ column appeared in the 15 July 1923 issue, fifteen issues later.⁶¹ In the meantime, Daly had published “The False Burton Combs” and debuted two new hard-boiled characters, “Three Gun” Terry Mack and Race Williams, who would become Daly’s most famous Black Mask creation. If the readers’ letters are any indication, their tastes in early 1923 remained conflicted: continuous praise of “Dolly” pointed to a preference for melodramatic, psychological nineteenth-century narration, while a letter published in the same issue as the debut of Terry Mack noted that “since the new editor has taken charge the magazine has greatly improved—masculine logic in choosing detective fiction beats feminine curiosity—no offense to the fair sex intended.”62 The reader’s letter references the brief editorship of George W. Sutton Jr., whose editorial tenure ended in this issue, to be followed by Phillip C. Cody. Under Cody’s editorship, the emphasis fell even more squarely on this “masculine logic,” as Cody began publishing Daly, Hammett, and Erle Stanley Gardner with increasing frequency.

Daly’s place in this transformation of the editorial policy of Black Mask is central, but one commonly repeated mistake suggests that Daly’s work was so poor that even the pulps published him reluctantly. At one point, George Sutton reportedly told Daly, “I don’t like these stories—but the readers do. I have never received so many letters about a single character before. Write them. I won’t like them. But I’ll buy them and I’ll print them.”⁶³ As the exclusion of Daly from the canonizing Hard-Boiled Omnibus implied, Joseph T. Shaw, editorial successor to Cody, also apparently disliked Daly’s work. Still, Daly’s name and his characters’ names were almost always featured on the magazine’s cover when his work appeared; Daly’s stories routinely provided inspiration for the cover painting, as well. If the editors did not like Daly’s work, readers certainly did, but this evaluative discrepancy serves to reinforce negative stereotypes about the readers of pulp magazines, a group Vanity Fair called “those who move their lips when they read.”⁶⁴ Such strict cultural hierarchies in the interwar period might prove even more damning to Daly’s reputation: if Daly was derided even by pulp editors, how could his work claim to engage in modernist experimentation?

What complicates this, however, is the fact that Daly was not published exclusively in the pulps in the early 1920s. Like Hammett, who published early work in the Smart Set before shifting to what he pejoratively called “blackmasking,” Daly attempted and succeeded in publishing at least one story in the slick magazines.⁶⁵ In April 1923 Daly published “Paying an Old Debt” in the American Magazine, one of the more successful competitors with the Saturday Evening Post in the middlebrow marketplace. Unlike Hammett, however, Daly’s pulp and slick writings were not fundamentally different in their style. This story, published four months after “The False Burton Combs” and a month before “Three Gun Terry,” utilizes virtually the same vernacular narrator that all of Daly’s pulp stories would use beginning in the next month. In “Paying an Old Debt,” subtitled “A burglar’s story,” the narrator is a thief who reforms when taken on as a servant by a rich man. Thematically, this story differs from Daly’s pulp work, where the righteous vigilante never regrets his use of violence, but like the semiliterate narrators Terry Mack and Race Williams, the unnamed narrator of “Paying an Old Debt” acknowledges his linguistic insufficiencies: “Why, if I was to write the way I talked no one could understand me.”66 The appearance of Daly’s work in the American Magazine suggests the degree to which the vernacular narrator pioneered by Ring Lardner in the Saturday Evening Post had become part of the mainstream of American magazine fiction.

While Lardner exerted a vast influence on slick fiction in the early 1920s, not many stories with vernacular narration appear in the early years of Black Mask. Few stories were published using any kind of vernacular narrator, while the majority of them feature the gothic narrative style of “Dolly” or the third-person conventions of the action-packed melodrama. One exception to this was C. S. Montanye’s “Looking Out for Orchid,” published in the second issue of the magazine (May 1920). In both style and content, Montanye’s piece is incongruous in this issue. Clearly derivative of Lardner, this story features narration by a “wardrobe mistress” who tries to protect a young female vaudevillian star from the advances of an admirer. The narrator utilizes slang and misspelling and even appropriates sports metaphors that echo Lardner’s own technique: “They was more curves to her than they is to any big league pitcher livin’, or them relics of the happy days of yestereen—corkscrews.”⁶⁷ Not only an exception in the magazine, this story is a unique piece in the larger body of his Black Mask work; in his other publications in the magazine, Montanye produced detective stories, largely following classical models.

Lardner’s influence looms even larger in Daly’s own “Kiss-the-Canvas Crowley” (1 September 1923). Another obscure Daly story, this first-person narrative follows the brief career of a boxer whose fame stems from his ability to be knocked down in the ring. When his manager suggests he take on the nickname “Kiss-the-Canvas” Crowley to drum up publicity, he assents: “I’m a student and have read the books, so I took a leaf from one of the old proverbs: ‘When in Rome do as the Italians do.’ So I let ’em book me under the new moniker.”⁶⁸ After his career is over, Crowley turns manager himself to get revenge on Billy Tiernan, the manager who ended his career. Crowley’s discovery, a rural fighter he calls “Special Delivery Smitty” after Smitty knocks him out in a Pennsylvania roadhouse, turns out to be much weaker than Crowley thought. His plan to double-cross Tiernan by winning a fight he had agreed to lose is foiled, and Crowley gets paid by Tiernan, who knows that “Kiss-the-Canvas Crowley is honest to the core.” As Tiernan and his winning fighter leave his office, Crowley muses, “Somethin’ tells me that it ain’t no time for speechmakin’. When they leave me I’m standin’ there all alone and I do a smile. The old proverb is right. ‘Honesty is the best insurance’ after all.”69

An oddly humorous outing for Daly in Black Mask, this story highlights the crucial connection between the vernacular humor of Lardner’s sports stories and the hard-boiled narration on which Daly would begin to focus exclusively after this publication. Lardner’s “Champion,” a far more sinister boxing story that appeared in 1916, may have been part of the inspiration for Daly’s work.⁷⁰ The narrator Crowley, though, exhibits many of the narrative attributes of both the Lardneresque humor figure and the Terry Mack/Race Williams character type that would dominate Daly’s writing. The constant reference to and misquotation of proverbs recalls the humorous tradition of Lardner and Loos; the suggestion is that these clichéd phrases mean very little, which results in their frequent misuse or perversion via language. Clearly, Crowley (like Loos’s Lorelei Lee) has heard these phrases and recognizes their importance, but ultimately his memory fails him and he provides colorfully inaccurate versions of the proverbs, suggesting a bankruptcy of meaning in overused language of this sort. At the same time, Crowley engages in obsessive self-questioning, a technique that would become a hallmark of the Race Williams stories: “What did I say? I didn’t say nothin’. What did I do? I did a-plenty. I just took one clout at his ugly mug.”⁷¹

While “Kiss-the-Canvas Crowley” provides a crucial link between the late-1910s humor writing of Lardner and Daly’s own transformation of style, Daly’s first few stories in the hard-boiled vernacular utilize this kind of language to different, though related, ends. It is here that the critique of the realist detective stories of the so-called Golden Age begins to develop. In Daly’s stories, the use of the vernacular distances the words themselves from their referent, creating a synthetic, purely textual environment in which vernacular language strips away its realist relationship to the world. In the hard-boiled style, the language of violence and, in Daly’s case, of masculine bravado, replaces the realist language of a disinterested spectator and expert reasoner. As the title of one Daly story would have it, the hard-boiled figure must “Say It with Lead,” not with the overwrought and formulaic realist language of classical detective fiction.

The origins of the hard-boiled detective can be traced to Daly’s second publication in Black Mask, “The False Burton Combs,” published in December 1922, the year Michael North has called “the scene of the modern.”72 In this story, the unnamed narrator, “a gentleman adventurer,” agrees to impersonate a reformed bootlegger who expects his silent and anonymous partners to make an attempt on his life. The story opens with a direct engagement of the narrator’s class position: “I had an outside stateroom on the upper deck of the Fall River boat and ten minutes after I parked my bag there I knew that I was being watched.” While the protagonist’s social and economic identity—as both “gentleman adventurer” and the occupant of a stateroom—may recall the genteel amateur of Sherlock Holmes or Nick Carter, his narrative position and his choice of language indicate a very different genealogy, the man of the street. When the narrator senses that he’s being followed, he notes, “There was nothing to be nervous about—my little trip was purely a pleasure one this time. But then a dick getting your smoke is not pleasant under the best of circumstances”: not exactly the language of nineteenth-century gentility.⁷³ In this shift in language, so clearly distinct from the language of both adventure and detective fiction of the first two decades of the twentieth century, hard-boiled detective fiction begins to display its own brand of vernacular modernism. For, after all, what does the narrator mean when he speaks of “a dick getting your smoke”? Daly’s 1922 readers, unaccustomed to reading this sort of language in any sort of fiction (and particularly in Black Mask fiction of the time), must have spent some time puzzling through this phrase on first encountering it. Even Flynn’s 1925 “Dictionary of the Underworld” provides little help with the term “smoke,” a repurposing of the term that Daly may have invented.⁷⁴ Daly pulls the language away from its normal referent, forcing his readers to become “grim readers” of vernacular modernism: to put together pieces of a broken and rearranged language that seems almost foreign in its streetwise inventiveness. Like the underworld slang gathered by Henry Leverage for Flynn’s, Daly’s vernacular “isn’t English, French, German, or Yiddish; it is a language by itself.”

“The False Burton Combs” is laced with a variety of contemporary slang terms, many of which have passed into the common vernacular through the immense popularity of crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As with the examples in transition’s “Slanguage: 1929” and Mencken’s “Declaration of Independence,” others seem highly idiosyncratic and dated: “If things got melodramatic why I guess I could shoot as good as any bootlegger that ever robbed a church. They’re hard guys, yes, but then I ain’t exactly a cake-eater myself.”⁷⁵ As with Lardner’s humor, the language of Daly’s character works to reshape the world through text; language is important as a marker of class, but it also suggests a profound difference between text and the world. Unlike the realist detective stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “The False Burton Combs” is not a text in which language provides a transparent means of engaging reality. Instead, the entirety of the experience of the world is heavily mediated and aestheticized through the slang-inflected narration.

What emerges in a nascent form in “The False Burton Combs” becomes far more explicit in stories featuring Daly’s most popular series character, Race Williams. Appearing first in June 1923, Williams would ultimately be featured in fifty-four stories in Black Mask; nearly half of these became the basis for seven novels published between 1927 and 1935. After leaving Black Mask in 1934, Daly continued to publish Race Williams stories through the 1950s in other pulps, including Dime Detective, Thrilling Detective, Popular Detective, and Smashing Detective Stories. The first decade’s worth of these stories, however, all published in Black Mask, demonstrate the vast changes that the genre was undergoing in its shift toward the hard-boiled. As the few scholars who have discussed Daly’s work have shown, his Race Williams stories are fascinating in the ways in which they engage, whether centrally or tangentially, a number of 1920s obsessions: the Ku Klux Klan (“Knights of the Open Palm”), trade union corruption (“Three Thousand to the Good”), live radio broadcasting (“I’ll Tell the World”), the swindling of Native Americans out of oil revenues (“Half-Breed”), and other contemporary social issues.76

While critics like Sean McCann have convincingly argued for the importance of social engagement found in the Williams stories, an even more crucial legacy of these stories in crime and detective fiction is the wholesale transformation of narrative form and choice of language. In the opening of “Knights of the Open Palm,” Williams makes the famous claim that he would repeat in some form in almost every story he narrated:

As for my business, 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. I do a little honest shooting once in a while—just in the way of business. But my conscience is clear; I never bumped off a guy what didn’t need it. And I can put it over the crooks every time—why, I know more about crooks than what they know about themselves. Yep, Race Williams, Private Investigator, that’s me.⁷⁷

By the time Daly published “I’ll Tell the World” in 1925, Williams would insist on being called a “confidential agent” (as opposed to “Private Investigator”) to avoid any association with detectives, though he would later return to calling himself an “investigator.” The distinction here is a crucial one. At one level it suggests an affinity with pulp adventure fiction (and a continuity with the “gentleman adventurer” of “The False Burton Combs”), as opposed to the ratiocinative detective story, what Race likes to call the “detective of fiction.”78 At the same time, it privileges an individual agency in the action of the character. Rather than merely detecting or investigating, an agent actually acts within her/his world. As “a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks,” Williams begins to destabilize the assumptions of the realist detective story by problematizing the binary between the law breaker and the law enforcer, and by doing so in a language that also sits between these two binaries and questions their fundamental differences.

In the classical detective story, “the dicks and the crooks” are in general quite easily identifiable.⁷⁹ While a uniformed police officer (such as the Prefect in Poe’s Dupin tales) might have some difficulty understanding the differences between the two, the amateur detective (frequently in the employ of the police) will lend his talents to the legal authority and resolve any confusion in these identities. Nick Carter, on the other hand, might be quite adept at using disguises to infiltrate criminal gangs, but his identity as a detective is never compromised in these adventures. Race Williams, however, demonstrates an identity that does not necessarily presuppose two separate and opposed positions: this is not a disguise he can remove and return to bourgeois gentility.

By positing the existence of a “halfway house” between the two opposing groups that effectively define the genre of crime fiction, Daly begins to tear down the realist framework and epistemological structures of the classical detective story. The creation of a liminal space, simultaneously inside and outside the law, also undermines the distinction between subject and object that is so crucial to both realism and the detective story. Williams’s narration initiates a fundamental distrust in the figure of the detective/narrator, whose complicity in violent acts and whose use of vernacular language make a mockery of the objectivity necessary in both realism and the ratiocinative detective story. No longer is the language of the narrator a transparent conduit for representation of a “reality.” Instead, the slang-filled stories of Daly create a textual environment that bears little resemblance to the world of nineteenth-century realism. As a result, Race Williams, the violent “confidential agent,” creates a story in which the compromised vernacular narration calls into question the very accuracy of its contents. As Williams says at the opening of the first novel in which he appears, “It’s the point of view in life that counts,” and Race’s point of view, replete with slang and action, began to dominate the pages of Black Mask in the late 1920s.80

While many critics have been eager to dismiss Daly as a hack, the equivalent of an awkward growing pain that would be sloughed off with the emergence of Hammett as the dominant influence, a close look at Walter Benjamin’s definition of a hack as “someone who refuses as a matter of principle to improve the production apparatus” might complicate this general understanding of Daly’s work.⁸¹ Daly did not necessarily improve the means of production for pulp writers; in an economic sense, the magazines were much the same before and after he published in them. Still, if “production apparatus” is understood in an aesthetic sense, Daly did promote drastic changes to the way the genre of detective fiction operated. Far from replicating the hegemonic standards of the classical detective story or the tale of the gentleman adventurer, Daly sought a third way, a twentieth-century “halfway house” in which binary oppositions between “the dicks and the crooks” came under question, and the means and narration of the detective assumed an aesthetic primacy over the “solution” to any mystery. While Daly’s work is at times formulaic and repetitive, the formulas he established were indeed a new vernacular “production apparatus,” one that launched the hard-boiled style and led to the more celebrated careers of writers like Dashiell Hammett.

“What’s the Use of Getting Poetic about It?”: Muckers and Modernism in Dashiell Hammett’s Fiction

THE CLEANSING OF POISONVILLE is not a serial, but in reality is a series of adventures of the Continental detective who is drawn into a fight for life with the crooked bosses of a city, who have gone mad with the power of their own corruption. Outside of their gripping interest, these stories are remarkable if only for the fact that their manner of telling points the way to a new type of detective fiction, which in BLACK MASK is coming to take the place of the old, worn-out formula sort of gruesome-murder-and-clever-solution detective story.

—ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE SERIALIZATION OF HAMMETT’S RED HARVEST IN BLACK MASK, NOVEMBER 1927 (EMPHASIS ADDED)

I’m one of the few—if there are any more—people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. I don’t mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else’s seriously—but the detective story as a form. Some day somebody’s going to make “literature” of it ... and I’m selfish enough to have my hopes, however slight the evident justification might be.

—DASHIELL HAMMETT TO BLANCHE KNOPF, 20 MARCH 1928

While Carroll John Daly first utilized the hard-boiled style in his detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett more often appears in genre histories as the style’s progenitor, an influence on countless writers who followed, in the pages of Black Mask and elsewhere. Hammett’s engagement with the dichotomy of high and low culture has been of frequent interest to scholars of both the detective story and of modern American writing. Critics struggle with how properly to understand Hammett’s relationship to canonical literature. His novels were praised by reviewers of the time and published by Knopf, one of the leading publishers of modernist fiction. His celebrated novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) was reprinted in a Modern Library edition in 1934, the same year the company published the first official American edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. If any American detective writer before World War II enjoyed literary credibility by association, it was Hammett.

Hammett’s success in the realm of highbrow publishing, however, was not merely the result of a few publishers and critics enjoyably slumming in genre fiction. His work was taken quite seriously by the writers of far more canonical texts, most notably Gertrude Stein. When Stein returned to the United States in 1934 for the first time in over thirty years, she wanted to meet two cultural celebrities: Charlie Chaplin and Dashiell Hammett. Stein’s literary celebrity had risen after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932), prompting the publication of a reduction of her The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925) by Harcourt Brace as The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family (1934), as well as the 1934 New York production of her play Four Saints in Three Acts, a play first published in transition’s “Revolution of the Word” issue. As Stein describes their meeting in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), the host of the dinner was not quite sure who Hammett was: “She said yes what is his name. Dashiell Hammett said Miss Toklas. And how do you spell it. Alice Toklas spelt it. . . . Ah yes said Mrs. Ehrman now what is he. Dashiell Hammett you know The Thin Man said Alice Toklas. Oh yes said Mrs. Ehrman yes and they both hung up.”82 At the dinner, Stein and Hammett discussed writing. In Stein’s version, she asks Hammett why it is that in the twentieth century, men all write about themselves, they are always themselves as strong or weak or mysterious or passionate or drunk or controlled but always themselves as the women used to do in the nineteenth century. . . . He said it’s simple. In the nineteenth century men were confident, the women were not but in the twentieth century the men have no confidence and so they have to make themselves as you say more beautiful more intriguing more everything and they cannot make any other man because they have to hold on to themselves not having any confidence.83

It should come as no surprise that Hammett and Stein discussed the differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing; after all, these figures are two of the most important influences on twentieth century writing in their respective circles. In a lecture given the following year, Stein would even call the detective novel “the only really modern novel form that has come into existence,” and she worked through a significant period of writers’ block in 1934 by penning her own enigmatic and challenging detective story, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.⁸⁴ While Stein thought about the relationship of detective fiction to ideas of the “modern,” Hammett would often use self-consciously “high” literary figures in his work, sometimes as pretentious buffoons (“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” [1924]), sometimes as megalomaniacal killers (as in The Dain Curse [1929]), and sometimes as detective stand-ins (Robin Thin, the poet-detective, in “The Nails in Mr. Cayterer” [1926]).⁸⁵

This engagement with the literary has prompted critics to experiment with ways of allying Hammett’s work with modernism. Stephen Marcus’s seminal appreciation of Hammett in Partisan Review called him a modernist in all but name: “What Hammett has done . . . is to include as part of the contingent and dramatic consciousness of his narrative the circumstance that the work of the detective is itself a fiction-making activity, a discovery or creation by fabrication of something new in the world, or hidden, latent, potential, or as yet undeveloped within it.”⁸⁶ James Naremore called Hammett’s prose “closer to the spirit of literary modernism” than Raymond Chandler’s, and even went so far as to call The Glass Key (1930) “Hammett’s The Waste Land.”⁸⁷ Also emphasizing Hammett’s thematic concerns, Jon Thompson “explore[s] the ways in which the combination of a number of ideological elements—Hammett’s individualism, his skepticism toward bourgeois law and order, his philosophical and ideological relativism, the contradictory sexual politics of his fiction, and his rejection of rationality—produced the hard-boiled modernism found in The Glass Key and Hammett’s other fiction.”88 Indicative of more recent shifts in modernist studies, Christopher T. Raczkowski suggests that the work of Hammett engages “modernist concerns about (or sense of crisis in) vision and epistemology; especially as visual practices and ideologies impact society through the legal and criminal apparatuses of the state that vie for explanatory authority around the genre’s many corpses.”⁸⁹ Along a different set of lines in contemporary modernist criticism, David M. Earle has seen Hammett and other pulp writers as part of a Foucauldian “subjugated knowledge” of modernism, a strain he calls “pulp modernism.”⁹⁰

While these critics all explore possible means by which Hammett might be included in a broader definition of modernism, the only work to engage Hammett’s obsession with the idea of the “literary” directly is Mark McGurl’s The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Examining Hammett’s letter to Blanche Knopf where he betrayed a desire to “make ‘literature’” out of detective fiction, McGurl calls Hammett a “low modernist,” a combination of terms that simultaneously rejects and embraces existing modernist hierarchies.⁹¹ This insistence on seeing him as “low” comes, in large part, from the inability of Hammett’s work to match up with his optimistic plans, laid out in that same letter, where Hammett says, “I want to try adapting this stream-of-consciousness method, conveniently modified, to a detective story, carrying the reader along with the detective, showing him everything as it is found, giving him the detective’s conclusions as they are reached, letting the solution break on both of them together.” Certainly, Hammett’s awareness of stream-of-consciousness fiction and desire to emulate its method suggest that he had clear ideas of what he thought literary fiction was, and if he was going to “make ‘literature’” out of detective fiction, he would have to move in this direction. Ultimately, he never wrote his stream-of-consciousness detective novel; later work like The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon utilized different narrative strategies, eliminating all access to the characters’ thoughts. While he calls this new method “something altogether different from the method employed in ‘Poisonville,’” his Continental Op stories and novels (including Red Harvest, the novel “Poisonville” would become) come the closest to realizing this goal of a stream-of-consciousness detective fiction immersed in the vernacular language of the streets.⁹²

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Hammett had only begun to think about the concept of “literature” when the possibility of publishing Red Harvest with a reputable publisher like Knopf arose in 1928. Hammett’s writing career in the 1920s had its own complex relationship to the idea of literature. Initially, Hammett attempted to publish in Mencken and Nathan’s the Smart Set with very little success. Still, Hammett’s first publication, “The Parthian Shot,” finally appeared in this magazine in October 1922 (the same month Daly published his first Black Mask tale “Dolly”). Shortly thereafter Hammett began publishing in the pulps, placing his first story in Black Mask in December 1922, quite possibly at the suggestion of Mencken, whose ownership of and editing interest in Black Mask had ended about a year earlier.

Hammett’s shift to the pulps was not an eager one. When he began what he would later decry as “blackmasking,” he used the pseudonym Peter Collinson, presumably to differentiate his “serious” work in the Smart Set from his more commercial fare in Black Mask and another pulp, Brief Stories.93 Hammett’s literary ambitions were to be a part of “the smart set,” but his work found a more comfortable home in the pulps, and after publishing two stories in the 15 October 1923 issue of Black Mask (one as Hammett, the other as Collinson), the Collinson pseudonym disappeared and Hammett put his own name to the rest of his pulp work. Unable to break into the world of literary fiction, Hammett resigned himself to working as an ad man by day and a writer of pulp stories by night. Like many other pulp writers who harbored secret desires of literary success, though, Hammett would not stop thinking about what constituted literature. Instead, in articles devoted to the art of writing ad copy, he would theorize about the nature of the “literary,” while exploring the practice of literature in the pulps.

While Hammett’s later comments on his pulp writing have often dismissed the idea that he harbored literary pretensions in his detective stories, in the late 1920s Hammett’s own definition of literature was rather permeable. In the 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf, he considered the possibility of “making literature” out of detective fiction, turning pulp fiction into high art. Nearly two years earlier, after the publication of “The Creeping Siamese” in March 1926, Hammett had practically given up writing fiction entirely because of a disagreement with Black Mask editor Phil Cody. For almost a year Hammett stopped writing for the magazine. In the interim, Joseph T. Shaw took over the editorial duties and begged Hammett to return to the pages of the magazine. At this time, however, Hammett was working hard on his other career, his day job as a writer of advertising copy for the Samuels Jewelry Agency. Hammett’s ad copy was creative and well received, and critics have suggested important links between his work in advertising and his detective fiction writing.⁹⁴

While writing ad copy, Hammett was also theorizing about the nature of advertising in a series of articles published between October 1926 and March 1928 in Western Advertising, one of the more prominent trade journals on the west coast. The first of these, published during Hammett’s absence from the pages of Black Mask, shows that even when not publishing fiction Hammett was thinking about the concept of “literature.” Titled “The Advertisement IS Literature,” this piece provides a fascinating glimpse into Hammett’s reading practices in the mid-1920s, as well as into his own idea of what writers he perceived as sufficiently “literary” and what critics were reasonable judges of this quality. “The test by which advertising copy must stand or fall,” Hammett writes, “is the test by which we evaluate every branch of literature. Goethe, Carlyle, Croce, Spingarn, Mencken are a few of the many who have put it into words. ‘What has he tried to do? How well has he succeeded?’”95 By concluding this list of critics with Mencken, Hammett not only alludes to his earlier desire to be published in the Smart Set, but also sets up the remainder of the article, which argues that the language of advertising (as well as literature) should be clear, but necessarily stylized.

“The Advertisement IS Literature” also suggests some familiarity with the American Language and the work of Ring Lardner. Hammett writes, “The language of the man in the street is seldom either clear or simple. If you think I exaggerate, have your stenographer eavesdrop a bit with notebook and pencil. You will find this common language, divorced from gesture and facial expression, not only excessively complicated and repetitious, but almost purposeless in its lack of coherence.”⁹⁶ The aestheticization of this complicated and incoherent “language of the man in the street” stands as one of the central concerns of Hammett’s Black Mask fiction, and is a hallmark of the “style” attributed to Hammett by Raymond Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder.” In Hammett’s stories, how people speak is generally more important than what they actually say; on top of this, the Continental Op’s slang-laden narration, while less abrasive than that of Race Williams, still suggests heavy mediation through the intricacies of a twentieth-century American vernacular. Hammett goes on to write, “You may read tons of books and magazines without finding, even in fiction dialogue, any attempt faithfully to reproduce common speech. There are writers who try to do it, but they seldom see print. Even such a specialist as Ring Lardner gets his effect of naturalness by skillfully editing, distorting, simplifying, coloring the national tongue, and not by reporting it verbatim.”⁹⁷

Implicit in Hammett’s comments here about the literary potential of ad writing lies a subtle critique of realism. The work of Lardner, for example, does not present a mimetic representation of everyday speech, but creates an “effect of naturalness” through a stylistic mediation. Hammett suggests that even Lardner’s work, so frequently lauded for its accuracy in recording American speech patterns, has undergone “editing, distorting, simplifying, [and] coloring.” If anything, what Hammett maps out here is not just a methodology for excellent ad writing, but also a kind of manifesto for the literary aspirations of his own detective writing. Any form of textual representation necessitates stylization; there can be no unmediated representation of reality. When this assumption about the textual mediation of vernacular language is considered alongside the heightened subjectivity of Hammett’s Continental Op stories, the self-consciousness of his vernacular modernism is clear.

Two stories published early in Hammett’s career illuminate his subtle critique of realism and of the classical detective model and the epistemological assumptions of the ratiocinative approach. The first, “Slippery Fingers,” appeared in the 15 October 1923 issue of Black Mask and was Hammett’s last publication under the Peter Collinson pseudonym.98 While this early story does feature Hammett’s signature Black Mask character, the Continental Op, it does not yet display the mature vernacular style that would emerge later in the 1920s. However, it takes up the question of representation quite explicitly through its focus on fingerprints as a signifier. Fingerprints have been a convention in crime fiction since at least Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), where the title character uses his interest in what he calls the “physiological autograph” to clear up the mystery of a murder as well as a case of infants switched at birth.⁹⁹ Following the appearance of fingerprinting in Twain, the physical marks themselves act as an emblem of the scientific and semiotic nature of classical detective fiction. If one looks closely enough at a fingerprint (i.e., if one reads its details carefully), both its uniqueness and its authorship become clear. As in the criminal world the detective investigates, the fingerprint offers decodable details that allow for firm and coherent solutions. The fingerprint, then, serves as a microcosmic embodiment of the realist assumptions of classical detective fiction.

The fingerprints left by the murderer in “Slippery Fingers” are, quite literally, slippery. While the prints themselves are stable indicators of identity, the murderer doctors his fingers with gelatin during the questioning and fingerprinting by the police, producing a set of fake prints. To a certain degree, this story operates as a fictional extension of part of Hammett’s epigrammatic piece “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” published in the Smart Set in March 1923: “Even where the criminal makes no attempt to efface the prints of his fingers, but leaves them all over the scene of the crime, the chances are about one in ten of finding a print that is sufficiently clear to be of any value” (CS 908). Hammett’s focus in the Smart Set piece is, appropriately enough, the debunking of popular notions about what being a detective means. In “Slippery Fingers,” fingerprints do work as signs, but the mimetic quality of the sign as signature has become compromised though artifice and mediation. Such easily interpreted signifiers simply do not exist in the world of the hard-boiled private detective.

If “Slippery Fingers” calls into question how much a detective can rely on the traditional signifiers of classical detective fiction, an even lesser-known story reveals the artificiality of genteel language present in these texts. “Itchy,” an obscure Hammett tale published in Brief Stories in January 1924, tells the story of Floyd “Itchy” Maker, whose criminal exploits are romanticized in the newspapers, which call him “a man of culture and refinement.”100 Itchy’s vernacular language is anything but refined; it is clear that the newspapers have merely attempted to transform a routine burglary into the work of a “gentleman crook” to sell more issues. Nevertheless, Itchy begins to take the characterization seriously and to let it inform his own criminal identity. Soon, all the newspaper reports agree: “He was a gentleman crook, a brother to those suave dandies of fiction who so easily confound the best policing brains of the several continents,” and Itchy begins visiting a local bookstore to buy and study the stories of gentlemen crooks, (mis)using textual models to craft his own refinement, much like Lorelei Lee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Tom Sawyer in Twain’s work.¹⁰¹ Itchy’s engagement with these texts evolves into a performative language that stresses the artificiality of figures like the genteel crook:

He read aloud to himself in his room at night, and felt that his language was being improved thereby. Every day or two he visited the bookstore, ostensibly to inquire for new books, but actually for the sake of the saleswoman’s conversation. The books could give him the right words and the correct combinations, but they didn’t give him the right pronunciations. The saleswoman could, however, and not only the pronunciations but the right sort of accent . . . After he had returned to his room he would repeat everything she had said, painstakingly aping each trick of enunciation.¹⁰²

This encounter stresses the class difference between Itchy and the saleswoman at the bookstore, as evidenced by “not only the pronunciations but the right sort of accent.” The words themselves are not enough; Itchy must master “each trick of enunciation” to become a plausible version of an implausible (and fictionalized) gentleman crook.

Ultimately, Itchy makes great strides in his attempts at self-transformation, thrilling victims “addicted” to gentleman crook stories, but these ludicrous changes finally help identify and capture him. Hammett emphasizes the ridiculousness of Itchy’s situation: “His grammar had improved by now until the double negative was rare, though tenses still puzzled him, and his accents were worth all the imitative labors they had cost him.” Finally apprehended because he is one of only three men wearing dress clothes on the streets of San Francisco, Itchy delivers a line that he has long held in reserve: “I’m tired of you. . . . You weary me. You bore me. You exasperate me. You—you’re a big slob!”103 The first part of these closing lines are drawn largely verbatim from a story Itchy has read, but his addition of “you’re a big slob” reveals the ultimate failure of his linguistic transformation and the veneer of the gentleman crook vanishes at the last moment as an impoverished concept that belongs only in genteel crime fiction.

While “Slippery Fingers” posits a world that is no longer legible under the traditional methods of realism, “Itchy” begins to emphasize the importance of language as a defining thematic concern of Hammett’s hard-boiled work. As in Daly’s fiction, Hammett’s work often featured a host of underworld slang terms like those featured in Flynn’s 1925 “Dictionary of the Underworld.” Hammett even kept a list entitled “Jargon of the Underworld,” something he may have prepared for publication in 1931, though it remained unpublished.¹⁰⁴ Hammett’s work under editor Joseph T. Shaw began to increasingly demonstrate the ways in which language could be used as an artificial form of representation, one subject to experimental innovations. After he took time off from publishing in Black Mask and began theorizing about advertising in the trade magazines, Shaw lured him back to his “blackmasking,” and Hammett published his most ambitious works to that point, the novella “The Big Knock-Over” (February 1927) and its sequel “$106,000 Blood Money” (May 1927). These stories deal with the daring daylight robbery of a downtown San Francisco bank by a veritable “Who’s Who in Crookdom” and the subsequent investigation and destruction (rather than capture) of the masterminds behind the crime (CS 555).

When the Op instigates a melee at Larrouy’s bar in an attempt to break the case open, Hammett’s narration begins to take on a decidedly modernist style, evoking the stream-of-consciousness mode that he would reference in the letter to Blanche Knopf just over a year later.

A bottle came through and found my forehead. My hat saved me some, but the crack didn’t do me any good. I swayed and broke a nose where I should have smashed a skull. The room seemed stuffy, poorly ventilated. Somebody ought to tell Larrouy about it. How do you like that lead-and-leather pat on the temple, blondy? The rat to my left is getting too close. I’ll draw him in by bending to the right to poke the mulatto, and then I’ll lean back into him and let him have it. Not bad! But I can’t keep this up all night. Where are Red and Jack? Standing off watching me? (CS 570)

Here, in a moment of extreme violence, the vernacular modernism latent in Hammett’s earlier work solidly breaks through. The first three sentences here operate as relatively standard narration for a bar fight in a hard-boiled detective novel; however, the minute the total change in the atmosphere becomes apparent (the “stuffy, poorly ventilated” room), things begin to transform. The Op acknowledges the air quality in the room because the lights have been shut off; suddenly sensory information becomes distorted. The sense of smell trumps the sounds of fists and gunfire that surround the Op in a dilated temporal moment. What follows is a series of questions, comments, and reflections directed at a variety of people. The Op is clearly talking to himself, but doing so in the present tense, placing the reader inside his experience of the barroom brawl. Rather than presenting a mimetic representation of the fight—impossible, since it is happening in the dark—Hammett presents a psychological impression of the Op’s thoughts, rendered in the vernacular, as he encounters his antagonists. The shifts in time (past, present, future), the shifts in audience (the Op himself, “blondy,” and the reader), and the shifts between placing the reader in an external reality and in the head of the Op all represent vernacular modernist efforts in experimenting with unstable point of view.

Importantly, “The Big Knock-Over” is also the first story in which the Op clearly fails at the story’s conclusion. Of course, this operates as a narrative strategy to set up the sequel, but it also calls into question one of the central assumptions of the ratiocinative detective story. In the classic form, the master narrative involves, as Cawelti notes, “restoring the serenity of middle-class social order.”105 Daly, Hammett, and the hard-boiled writers that followed not only introduced the detective of action over reason, but they also complicated the notion that readers read detective stories for the satisfying conclusion of a “solution.” The end of “The Big Knock-Over” does feature a solution to the question of who masterminded the heist, but the Op only realizes this in hindsight. The diminutive old man, Papadopoulos, fools the Op with his feeble appearance and the Op lets him go: “I had been putty in his hands, his accomplices had been putty. He had slipped the cross over on them as they had helped him slip it over on the others—and I had sent him safely away” (CS 591). The Op’s naïve reliance on “realist” appearances fails him in the end.

This dichotomy between the realist and the hard-boiled or vernacular modernist sensibility is set up as one of the themes in both stories and is emphasized in the sequel, “$106,000 Blood Money.” The Op’s partner in both stories is the young Jack Counihan,

a tall, slender lad of twenty-three or four who had drifted into the Continental’s employ a few months before. It was the first job he’d ever had, and he wouldn’t have had it if his father hadn’t insisted that if sonny wanted to keep his fingers in the family till he’d have to get over the notion that squeezing through a college graduation was enough work for one lifetime. So Jack came to the Agency. He thought gum-shoeing would be fun. . . . A likeable youngster, well-muscled for all his slimness, smooth-haired, with a gentleman’s face and a gentleman’s manner, nervy, quick with head and hands, full of the don’t-give-a-damn gaiety that belonged to his youthfulness. (CS 548–49)

Hammett’s characterization of the “gentleman” Counihan evokes the world of Fitzgeraldian romance, and Counihan himself seems like a character out of This Side of Paradise (1920).106 This characterization becomes increasingly important in “$106,000 Blood Money,” where Counihan is easily corrupted by the money Papadopoulos offers him for protection. The Op, already aware of Counihan’s part in the conspiracy, has him dress the part in “evening duds . . . everything but the high hat” in an attempt to expose his flawed nineteenth-century romantic notions about crime (CS 618).

In the story’s final showdown, Counihan gives a speech directly out of a classic detective story, ending it with “that, my dear Sherlock, about concludes the confession.” The Op counters, though, exposing the truth behind Counihan’s fiction. “You met the girl and were too soft to turn her in. But your vanity—your pride in looking at yourself as a pretty cold proposition—wouldn’t let you admit it even to yourself. You had to have a hard-boiled front. So you were meat to Papadopoulos’ grinder. He gave you a part you could play to yourself—a super-gentleman crook, a master-mind, a desperate suave villain, and all that kind of romantic garbage” (CS 631). The Op’s indictment of Counihan is simultaneously an articulation and a critique of the conventions of the classical detective story and (as in “Itchy”) of the fiction of the “gentleman crook.” Counihan has been taken in by the Sherlockian fictions of Conan Doyle—he addresses the Op as “my dear Sherlock”—and acts accordingly. The Op’s response (“romantic garbage”) is, in effect, the hard-boiled twentieth-century answer to the amalgamation of realism and romanticism in the nineteenth-century classical detective tradition. Counihan is no Professor Moriarty, and the notion that a “super-gentleman crook” could exist is downright ludicrous in the world of Hammett’s fiction.

Hammett’s repudiation of the super-detective/super-criminal dichotomy also represents a move away from Daly’s adventure-oriented tales. While Race Williams, like other Daly characters, is certainly no superdetective (“a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks”), he constantly battles criminal masterminds who provide the titles for many of Daly’s novels (the title characters in The Snarl of the Beast, The Hidden Hand, Man in the Shadows, etc.). In Hammett’s universe, virtually every character occupies Williams’s “halfway house”; there are no moral absolutes, and the characters’ drift between crime and crime prevention is often seamless and natural.

In a sense, however, Counihan’s corruption is almost predetermined due to his particular use of language. A child of the wealthy, the cleanness and standardization of his speech suggests a dangerous artifice; at the very least, it signals the fact that he does not belong in the world of the Op. Identification and relative integrity are often demonstrated via one’s language in Hammett’s work. The tougher one talks, the more trustworthy one generally is. The Op, though his actions occasionally cross the boundary into the morally questionable, performs his integrity through both his narration and his awareness of the power language has to alter reality through aesthetic manipulation.

As Hammett’s career developed, the narrative stylization in his Continental Op stories intensified, culminating in one of the most expressionistic detective novels of the twentieth century, Red Harvest. Serialized in Black Mask from November 1927 through February 1928 under the title “Poisonville,” and published in a revised form by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929, Red Harvest operates as a total renunciation of nineteenth-century conventions of realism in the detective story.107 On the surface, this novel seems rather “pulpy”: stitched together from four related stories that editors in Black Mask claimed were “not a serial, but in reality . . . a series of adventures,” the Op never learns what his original job in the mining town of Personville was and discovers the murderer of his original employer about a quarter of the way through the novel.108 What follows is a barrage of gang violence and political power plays that expose the ruthless capitalist underpinnings of the town’s corruption and ultimately decimate the town, causing the National Guard to arrive at the novel’s conclusion.¹⁰⁹ Certainly the Op “solves” a variety of mysteries at various points during the novel, but the details of these mysteries recede into the background when juxtaposed with the wide swaths of expressionist violence that dominate the action of Red Harvest.

Central to the novel is the ability of language to make and remake reality. The novel’s celebrated opening paragraph demonstrates how Hammett intends to thematize speech, language, and narration throughout Red Harvest: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.”¹¹⁰ This passage foregrounds subjectivity through the use of the initial “I” as well as the emphasis on memory, interpretation, and an epistemological relationship to the world. More important, however, are questions about the representational function of language. The Op recognizes the limitations of his own perception and the differences in regional and class pronunciation that make for a Menckenian “American language,” and he suggests how these subtle differences can create wholly new meanings. At first, the Op thinks of this as purely a case of localized mispronunciation (like Itchy’s lower-class “accents”); however, sometimes the way words are distorted by speech actually does have meaning (it is not just “meaningless humor”). Perhaps this “mucker”—”a course, vulgar person,” according to Wood and Goddard’s 1926 Dictionary of American Slang—knows more than the Op is initially willing to admit.¹¹¹ Language can be molded and transformed to more accurately describe a reality; this vernacular modernist innovation produces a veritable “richardsnary” of street language, that constantly innovative vocabulary that defines the hard-boiled world. A naïve view of language (i.e., one with realist antecedents) would not fundamentally question the ability of received language to accurately represent.¹¹² In a realist universe—or even in a classical detective story—Personville would be Personville, plain and simple. In the world of the hard-boiled, the power of vernacular language actually transforms Personville into Poisonville (not just linguistically, but phenomenologically). But the Op does not take language at face value; he has “learned better” by peeling back the layers of linguistic artifice to find a vernacular “richardsnary” underneath the realist dictionary.

In contrasting this passage with the openings of novels by Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, Dennis Porter argues that “the fact that Hammett forces the reader to pay attention to his medium suggests immediately that we are in the presence of a texte de plaisir.”113 More than merely an example of Barthes’s jouissance, Hammett’s opening points toward one of the central concerns of Red Harvest: the ways in which the stylization and manipulation of language can actually alter and redefine the world it describes. As a result, characters that speak in an inflated, genteel language (such as the lawyer Charles Proctor Dawn) are examples of pure artifice, while “muckers” tend to speak something closer to the truth, even if their language revels in a vernacular artfulness. The “brittle” language of the hard-boiled narrator acknowledges that language is by nature a mediating force, and it also serves as a baseline for the judgment of other characters’ integrity. To a degree Hammett extends this idea in the follow-up to Red Harvest, The Dain Curse (serialized in Black Mask, November 1928–February 1929; published between covers, 1929), in which the highbrow writer Owen Fitzstephan is discovered to be orchestrating his own melodramatic plot of murder. His facility with literary language is a key to his own corruption; when Fitzstephan asks the Op why he did not take copies of his literary works, the Op replies, “I was afraid I’d read them and understand them . . . and then you’d have felt insulted” (CN 207). Like the elite cultural characters in Red Harvest, Fitzstephan’s literary abuse of language compromises his integrity and links directly to his homicidal plotting.

Similarly, in Red Harvest the Op short-circuits the intentional obfuscation used by mine owner Elihu Willsson, who wants the town of Poisonville cleaned up. Willsson says, “I want a man to clean this pig-sty of a Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. It’s a man’s job. Are you a man?” Willsson’s strategy here is two-fold; he is eager for the “crooks and grafters” to be run out of Poisonville, one way or another; his use of metaphor is both a nod to the overblown language of the dime novel and a means of protecting himself from liability, since what he requests from the Op will most likely involve murder. The Op’s response is typically debunking, bringing the language back to the level of the vernacular and away from Willsson’s melodramatic metaphors: “What’s the use of getting poetic about it? . . . If you’ve got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I’ll take it on. But a lot of foolishness about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn’t mean anything to me” (CN 38). When capitalist villains appropriate the language of the hard-boiled it is, the Op makes clear, painfully obvious.

Once the Op concludes the case in Red Harvest, he must come to terms with how to remain a loyal company man and simultaneously save himself from reprimand for his significant deviations from company policy. As he says, “I spent most of my week in Ogden trying to fix up my reports so they would not read as if I had broken as many Agency rules, state laws and human bones as I had” (CN 186). At some level this is a metatextual commentary on Red Harvest itself. To a degree, the novel functions as a vernacular modernist parallel to the Op’s “report,” complete with linguistic manipulation—a “broken” vernacular language—that never allows the reader to experience Poisonville outside of the Op’s consciousness and highly stylized narration of the events. The Op’s literary work, however, is all for naught as he claims in the novel’s final sentences: “I might just as well have saved the labor and sweat I had put into trying to make my reports harmless. They didn’t fool the Old Man. He gave me merry hell” (CN 187). As with the more ambitious aesthetic experiments of high modernism, textual obfuscation can work, but not with a trained, sophisticated reader, and the Op’s vernacular narration in Red Harvest—complete with gaps and biases—emerges as the more accurate rendering of the Poisonville operation, an experience for which the hard-boiled vernacular is the best and only representational form.

Hammett’s later work, like that of other vernacular modernists, drifted in different aesthetic directions. In The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, texts that have already received attention as potentially “modernist” novels, he modifies the vernacular narration utilized in the Op stories, turning it into an almost antisubjective narrative form. Here, the reader is allowed absolutely no access to the consciousness of any of the characters. The wholesale rejection of the subjective suggests the opposite end of the modernist spectrum: the distanced poetics of Eliot and Pound, the emotionless narratives of Wyndham Lewis, and Roland Barthes’s conception of “degree zero” writing. The narration, however, remains clipped and brittle, an objective transformation of the vernacular style Hammett developed in the Op stories.

While the emotionally distanced mode of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key was certainly influential, it was the vernacular modernism of his Continental Op stories that had the most profound effect on the genre of detective fiction, inspiring writers like Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley, and others. In works like “The Big Knock-Over” and Red Harvest, the foregrounding of language as part of an epistemological artifice, one that often conceals as much as it reveals, is at the heart of the hard-boiled. As writers like Daly and Hammett realized, the world, read through an individual’s subjectivity, is not the objectively legible, realist environment of the classical detective story. Instead, it is filtered through one’s consciousness and again mediated by the language used to narrate one’s experience in that world. Not only do these writers suggest “the possibilities for writing in a modernist mode using the language of the streets” (as Jon Thompson has argued), they also use the language of the streets to imply the necessary limits of all linguistic and literary expression.114 This complex attitude toward the “language of the streets,” an attitude that invests the language of working-class figures with a self-conscious aesthetic sensibility and critiques the artificiality of the genteel, is a powerful element of vernacular modernism, an argument that also makes its way into the treacherous debate surrounding the politics of linguistic representation in African American fiction of the 1920s.