This project began for the best of reasons: I wanted to read a book that did not exist on Dashiell Hammett’s years as a real detective, and about exactly how he had made his famous transformation from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story. No such work existed devoted to this hazy but important period in his life, but many of the experienced Hammett chasers helped me attempt it. Mike Humbert posted my original call for materials on his superb website on Dashiell Hammett (http://www.mikehumbert.com/Dashiell_Hammett_01_Short_Bio.html), which helped get things going. My fellow writer and Hammett fan Mike Rogers then made introductions to Rick Layman, Hammett’s biographer, who assured me that to understand how a man could actually go from Pinkerton op to world-beating writer, I needed to reread Hammett’s stories in the order he wrote them. Layman was right. Over the decades since his 1981 landmark life Shadow Man, Layman has continued to produce books that deepen people’s readings of the novels and stories, and with Hammett’s granddaughter Julie M. Rivett, he has edited Hammett’s letters and brought out collections of his screenplays and unpublished stories that challenge the limited view of Hammett left us by Lillian Hellman.
Julie Rivett was also patient with my occasional odd questions, starting with my first, highly specific query: which of Hammett’s hands bore the famous imbedded knifepoint? (The exact location was never specified in the biographies.) Julie relayed the question to her mother, Hammett’s younger daughter, Jo, author of Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. When Jo answered that she was pretty certain the knifepoint had been on his left hand, the confirmation brought the scar out of the realm of legend for me, as if she had pulled a smoke ring from the air.
A number of Hammett experts I met through the generosity of Don Herron, who is best known as the Fedora’d host of the long-running Dashiell Hammett Tour, but whose lively blog, Up and Down These Mean Streets, functions as a kind of hot-stove league for Hammett fans, featuring occasional guest lecturers such as the literary researcher Terry Zobeck. In 2012, Terry typed Hammett’s name into a Brooklyn historical search engine called Fultonhistory.com, which surprised him by hiccupping up a long-forgotten interview Hammett did with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Magazine in October 1929, just after he had moved to New York. This interview was unknown to recent biographers, and I have made generous use of it here.
Don Herron took me around San Francisco, even got me into the 891 Post Street studio where The Maltese Falcon was written, and shared his network of similarly helpful Hammett fans, including Bill Arney, who described his experience living with the spirit of Hammett’s novel in the Maltese Falcon apartment; and Mitch Soekland, who gave me the tour on behalf of its gracious current renter, the writer Robert Mailer Anderson. Vince Emery, who has devoted an entire publishing company to the study and enjoyment of Hammett (Vince Emery Productions/Ace Performer Collection) gave me some helpful advice on researching tuberculosis in Hammett’s time and information on his op career in general.
I am extremely grateful to the San Francisco detective and Hammett scholar David Fechheimer for his continuing insights into his elusive hero, and for his original interviews, which have proved so essential to anyone’s idea of Hammett. The Hammett medical file, now missing from every possible branch of the Veterans’ Administration, was fortunately copied by Fechheimer in the summer of 1976, after he was loaned it by a contact who brought it to dinner one night. Fechheimer read the whole filched document into his tape recorder, and then, after abandoning plans for his own Hammett book, sent the tape and transcript off to Richard Layman, who graciously shared it with me. So much that appears in each Hammett biography of the last four decades comes from the sleuthing of Fechheimer published in the Hammett-themed November 4, 1975 issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s City of San Francisco magazine. I hope that if he ever retires from detecting, Fechheimer will finally write his own book.
My friend Allen Barra, a writer whose deep pockets of expertise run from gunslingers and gangsters to Alabama football and Albert Camus, is also a longtime Hammett man, and supplied his short, helpful history of the various film incarnations of Red Harvest—from Roadhouse Nights to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Miller’s Crossing (which splits the difference between Red Harvest and The Glass Key); and Deadwood.
This project had many pleasures, chiefly the reading of the books themselves and touring Hammett’s San Francisco, but also my time spent at the Pinkerton archive of the Library of Congress in Washington, where for days at a time I was happily surrounded by boxes of detecting paraphernalia: crumbling codebooks, posters for missing outlaws, and op reports of nineteenth-century violence captured in disconcertingly beautiful script.
Ellen Crain, archives director at the handsome Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, was expertly helpful with research about the Frank Little killing, local miner history, and Hammett’s possible experiences in that fascinating town. The people at Second Edition Books in Butte were also helpful, and patient with my questions; they recommended a few useful works of Montana history. Laura Wellen and Paul A. Gansky assisted with my research queries at the Harry Ransom archives at the University of Texas, Austin. New York University’s Bobst Library offered its microfilmed collection of newspapers and some old detectives’ books in its Special Collections department, while the Brooklyn Historical Society luckily had a copy of the family history of the Dashiells.
Dashiell Hammett seemed to lay around our house like a visiting uncle during the last few years, and it is no small tribute to my wonderful kids how they cheerfully carried on despite the heaps of books my worldly guest left about the place, only occasionally asking how much longer he would be with us. I thank my children, Nick and Nina, for their support, and I am ever grateful to my wife, Katie Calhoun, for her love and patience and for bringing me into her family, the Calhouns, who introduced me to Montana. Katie’s oldest sister, Patty Calhoun, ambassador to all things Western, also deserves special thanks for several Hammett-related excursions we made to Butte and Anaconda.
This book started with a lunch that my agent and friend Ed Breslin arranged with George Gibson, publisher at Bloomsbury USA. George immediately saw the potential in the idea of a Hammett-as-detective book, and the proposal followed from the lunch group’s excited discussion. My profound thanks go to these two literary men for the book’s civilized beginnings, and to George for his patience, sharp edits, and enthusiastic counsel as it took shape.