The day is past when I’ll fight for the fun of it. But I’ve been in too many rumpuses to mind them much.
—“THE WHOSIS KID” (1925)
On February 9, 1924, a nurse sent by the U. S. Public Health Service visited the Crawford Apartments at 620 Eddy Street in San Francisco. Upstairs she found an underweight reddish-haired young man waiting for examination. He complained of weakness and of being easily tired, according to her report, and looked undernourished and lacking in muscle development. Sam Hammett admitted he was still not able to be a detective; he’d given up the part-time work almost exactly two years before that day’s appointment, when another specialist visited him in the Pinkerton offices downtown. But despite his complaints that were all too familiar, this latest interview was not all discouraging.1
Something distinguished today’s physical from so many others Hammett had endured since the army. For his profession the ex-detective reported he was working about four hours a day as a short story writer for magazines, and that his wages depended upon work accepted. Even though his sales at this time can’t have been much more than fifty dollars per month,2 the report lists him as self-employed as a “story-writer.” While admitting he was too sick for conventional work, Hammett was proud enough of his recent success to boast of it to a government nurse, even if it threatened the calculation of the pension that fed his family.
As sick and poor as he was, Hammett had a right to brag about his growing career writing for magazines. Despite his health, in 1923 he had published sixteen stories and essays in six separate magazines. Some of it was subpar work, highlighting an understandable hunger for steady sales, but there were also longer stories showing the writer he could become, with situations and themes he would revisit in his novels.
Following his secretarial course all the way through would have trained him to be a stenographer. He had completed enough training to learn what he needed of touch typing, and since his hospitalization the previous October, his disability had been restored to 50 percent. If he could keep at it, he now had skills for working faster and longer in what he hoped was his new profession.
In July 1923 The New Pearson’s published a rare autobiographical sketch of his called “Holiday,” a short third-person story about a day in the life of a young lunger named Paul Hetherwick, who leaves his San Diego hospital with a day pass and visits Tijuana, where he gambles on horses, drinks with a veteran “subharlot” at one bar, and then with a younger red-headed woman whose attractiveness unnerves him in the tumbledown setting. At the end of the night, he heads home to the hospital broke but well-oiled, pleased to be riding up top on the night coach. This unaffected little story remains the most successful writing Hammett published that was drawn directly from his own life: on his day away from the doctors, Paul smokes cigars, drinks himself nearly insensible, and rides home coughing into the chilly fog, defying his condition in a way that Hammett thought the disease respected. The following year, he would send his Continental Op to revisit the seedy strip of Tijuana saloons and their rugged hostesses in “The Golden Horseshoe.”
While a bit clunkier, “Laughing Masks” (which ran in Action Stories, November 1923) was his longest (thirteen thousand words) and most ambitious story yet, starring not his Op but a low-level gambler whose investigation of a startling scream draws him into trouble. The story incorporated San Francisco settings of the day with a hint of the writer’s own experiences, such as being hit over the head: “A white flame seared his eyeballs; the ground went soft and billowy under his feet, as if it were part of the fog … Phil sat up on the wet paving and felt his head. His fingers found a sore, swelling area running from above the left ear nearly to the crown.”3
Evolving from detective to writer, or from Sam to Dash, Hammett had still signed letters to Jose as “Sam” or “S.D.H.” in the early twenties, but became “Dashiell Hammett” to his editors, a second self gradually eclipsing his legal identity. By 1924, the year he turned thirty, he was becoming the emerging voice of The Black Mask, which increasingly favored a violent realism over classic detection and was the most significant of the tier of pulp crime magazines Hammett was now mining. The Black Mask’s new editor, Phil Cody, hailed Hammett as “one of our most popular authors.”
His stories were getting longer and better. “The Tenth Clew,” his first real jewel of a story, came out in The Black Mask in January 1924, earning him his first cover the month before his boastful visit with the government nurse. “The Tenth Clew” presents an unusual challenge for the Op in that he has a misleading surplus of evidence. (As Hammett points out in “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” the fictional detective typically faces “a paucity of clues,” while a real sleuth has “altogether too many” to sort through.) Only by throwing away much of his hard-earned knowledge of the case can the Op get his man, and even so he ends up slugged and thrown overboard from a ferry, which leads to Hammett’s beautiful evocation of coming awake in the dark, foggy bay:
A light glimmered mistily off to my left, and then vanished. From out of the misty blanket, from every direction, in a dozen different keys, from near and far, fog horns sounded. I stopped swimming and floated on my back, trying to determine my whereabouts.
“Zigzags of Treachery” (also from early 1924) is almost too trickily plotted for Hammett’s new kind of realistic action-detective story—featuring an imposter with two wives, a blackmailer, an elaborately faked copy of a newspaper, a shooting death in a study, and a suppressed suicide note—but the Op’s energetic shadowing pulls you along on his gumshoe rounds while his wisecracking nicely masks the fancier sleuthing, “She didn’t buy anything, but she did a lot of thorough looking, with me muddling along behind her, trying to act like a little fat guy on an errand for his wife.”
As he typed them in his kitchen, Hammett’s Op stories seemed to improve almost with each effort, except for two that were publicly rejected that summer by The Black Mask’s editors, who were raising their magazine’s standards and focusing its mission more on a certain kind of action-driven story, a standard inspired by Hammett’s own work. A column for the August 1924 issue, Our Own Short Story Course, was strangely devoted to their decision to slap the hand of their rising star, followed by the writer’s even stranger note of contrition: “The trouble is this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket,” Hammett wrote. “I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.”4
Thanking his editors for “jolting me into wakefulness,” Hammett resolved, “There’s no telling how much good this will do me” and vowed to put the offending stories into a deep drawer. Presumably, it was Hammett’s supplicating answer that inspired the magazine to present the correspondence as a teaching course to warn off lazier submissions. But the low rate Black Mask’s editors were still paying their rising star should have been insult enough, without Hammett’s having to apologize for trying to make a living. Needing money more than he needed to feel pure, Hammett sold them a revision of one of the previously rejected tales, “Women, Politics & Murder,” for that fall, although it remained a subpar story. The other, an Op story retitled “Who Killed Bob Teal?” ran in the November True Detective Stories with the byline “Dashiell Hammett of the Continental Detective Agency.” The Hammett of three years later would not have wasted his time renegotiating a story sale at pennies per word. As he wrote Alfred A. Knopf’s editors in 1930, irked by someone’s red markings, “I am returning your invoice for excess corrections on The Glass Key … [Y]ou’ll see you’re very lucky I haven’t billed you for the trouble I was put to unediting it.”
Sometime in late 1924 or early 1925, Hammett, whose stoicism about his disease seemingly had no limit, became convinced by doctors that his TB had blown up enough that he had to live apart from his family rather than risk passing it on to his young daughter. He secured a larger apartment downstairs at Eddy Street and kept writing. For a time they may have kept both apartments, before reuniting downstairs, where he graduated from working at the kitchen table to his own writing desk.*
In late 1924, he published “Ruffian’s Wife,” about a young woman who fills her days cheerfully cleaning her apartment awaiting the return of her brutal slob of a husband on the ferry. Like his taut Western story “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams” and the surprise tale “The Second Story Angel,” in which a lady burglar fools a group of crime writers, Hammett showed he could bring off a story with a female character who was not just a femme fatale and was unlike the dames and baby dolls presented by his colleagues then in the pulps. “Ruffian’s Wife” also shows his early fondness for cinematic nighttime gunfights, what he called “shots in the dark.”
He called the writing he was doing “Blackmasking,” and sometimes recorded two thousand words in a day. Closing out the year, in December 1924 he published “Nightmare Town” in Argosy All-Story. It was a non-Op adventure, but one that would lay out the basic theme of his first novel, Red Harvest, about a town so wholly decayed with corruption, down to its last seemingly innocent old man, that it has to be destroyed to be saved. Such towns were not hard to imagine in the gangster-ridden age Prohibition had made possible. The growing sense of institutional corruption and lawlessness around the country was also shaping the public’s appetite for stories about lone private detectives who kept their own personal code.
From March to December of 1925, he published five superb stories at the more ambitious length that The Black Mask’s editors called “novelettes,” starting with a misadventure among thieves called “The Whosis Kid” (a seductive criminal betrays her male accomplices while trying to seduce the law in a preview of The Maltese Falcon); followed by “The Scorched Face,” in which the Op’s investigation involves missing rebellious girls, an orgiastic cult, blackmail, and a rash of suicides—about as much as a writer could get away with presenting in the 1920s. “Corkscrew” allowed Hammett to take the Op out of his element and into the shimmery desert of an Arizona range war, where he plays the rival cowboys and desperadoes against one another, but gains the trust of some gunslingers by getting himself repeatedly thrown from the horse they have prankishly recommended.
Hammett ended the year with his little detective in a running gun battle after the looting of a fictional island off the Northern California coast, “The Gutting of Couffignal.” But his first small masterpiece was one he set in a place that to most readers was still at least half-myth, Chinatown.
He had wandered all over San Francisco in his fiction before writing his most sophisticated story yet, the anachronistically titled “Dead Yellow Women.” It added Chinatown to his territory, edging his crime plot with deadpan satire of the then popular novels about Dr. Fu Manchu, while also spoofing the exoticism of Caucasian writers who used Chinatown as a setting for white slaver stories of beautiful tourists grabbed from opium dens.
In “Dead Yellow Women” a multiple murder case is brought to the agency by a wealthy young woman named Lillian Sheen, whose late father brought her from Manchuria as a girl. The investigation of the murders leads the Op to Chinatown, “a strip two blocks wide by six long,” for an audience with Chang Li Ching, the patriarch of the Chinese underworld. The Op turns off Grant Avenue, with its “gaudy shops and flashy chop suey houses,” at Clay Street and into a short dead-end block of unmarked gambling houses called Spofford Alley. Which door the Op takes next is where the story leaves the known map. Only on paper is this still the Op’s town. He leaves the San Francisco he knows through a door “the color of dried blood,”** following a network of dark passageways.
Pushing through the comically long warren, the Op is nearly shot by his own hop head contact, Dummy Uhl, who is hiding in the dark. At last the Op emerges into a curtained room where he meets his match in Chang Li Ching, his face “round and plump and shrewd, with a straggle of thin, white whiskers.” Chang speaks in “a burlesque … of the well-known Chinese politeness,” spoof-honoring his visitor as the “Grandduke of Manhunters,” “Disperser of Marauders,” and “Master of Mysteries.” The Op jests back at this old man, whose harsh justice in the case he needs. Later, after Chang discovers that the Op has tricked him into killing, he sends a note to the “Emperor of Untanglers.” The story ends with the Op’s chilled aside, “I don’t mind admitting that I’ve stopped eating in Chinese restaurants, and that if I never have to visit Chinatown again it’ll be soon enough.”
With a plot grounded in Prohibition smuggling and Manchurian politics, “Dead Yellow Women” ran in the November 1925 issue of The Black Mask. It hides Hammett’s library research more smoothly than earlier efforts, and showed a new level of accomplishment, being satirical while still delivering a good, tense crime story, well above what else was being published in The Black Mask at the time, a balance Hammett would later forget how to achieve. It remains the favorite Op story of his daughter Jo.
He was now gaining a readership, but despite the popularity of his Op, his writing still did not command a price his family could live on. His influence on The Black Mask was undeniable by 1925–26, where authentic new writers were appearing whose menacing work sprang at least allegedly from street experience—storytellers who were motorcycle patrolmen by day or who had paid their realist dues as police reporters. Instead of the standard drawing-room detective story, where the plot’s neat payoff justified everything, recalled Raymond Chandler, who followed Hammett into the pulps, in the new “Black Mask type of story … the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.”5
In the fall of 1925, Jose became pregnant with their second child. Hammett began to interest himself in advertising writing, another creative form that seemed to pay much better. He studied advertising theory at the public library as much as he could, and in December he became a regular reviewer for Western Advertising magazine.
Despite the emergence of this hard-boiled school in which he was prominent, Hammett couldn’t get a raise. Early in 1926 he had a falling out with Black Mask’s editor, Phil Cody, over money. Hammett’s fellow contributor Erle Stanley Gardner (who later created Perry Mason) offered that Cody dock Gardner a penny per word off his own rate and add it to Hammett’s if it meant Hammett’s work could stay in the magazine. The strange but heartfelt offer was refused by the publisher, and Hammett left Black Mask. Circulation soon fell to sixty-six thousand, and Cody quit as editor.6
Sometime during the winter through the spring of 1925 to 1926, a desperate Hammett took out a classified ad asking for any available work, and boasting “… and I can write.” This may have brought him to the attention of Albert Samuels Jewelers, but he was more likely already freelancing there when he heard about a full-time position as advertising manager.
* Since the emergence of photos of Jose and her girls in Anaconda from the fall of 1926, it is clear they went there then. But this earlier separation is hardly settled: Some accounts have them escaping to Anaconda in 1924–25, while others send them off to a little house in Fairfax, California, in 1924. Mary Jane Hammett says 1925 in the Fechheimer interview, but she also says her new sister, Jo, was there, which means it was after the latter’s birth in May 1926. Jo herself mentions the Fairfax house as the place the three went after their six-month Anaconda trip in 1926, and that she learned to walk there. I see no reason to believe they didn’t just move downstairs to a larger place at Eddy Street, perhaps briefly separating within the same building, during the scare of 1924–25.
** Visiting Spofford Alley now, with its Yin-Yin Music Association sign tucked away among massage and reflexology places, it is hard to guess which red door Hammett intended. But the myths were so thick about Chinatown that it might as well have been any of them.