I’m not what you’d call a brilliant thinker—such results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck—but I do have my flashes of intelligence.
—“ZIGZAGS OF TREACHERY” (1924)
On a day in late June 1922, William A. Pinkerton, surviving son of the founder and himself the most famous detective in the world, was visiting San Francisco to attend an international convention of police chiefs, a favorite annual event in a city he called his spiritual home. The detective was now past seventy-five, a large, dapper man whose wide, soft hat echoed his younger days chasing Western train robbers. During his week in California he hoped to hear about the latest techniques in crime fighting, to dine with old lawman friends, and to hold forth about the uses of intelligence as the head of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.1
Pinkerton had checked into the St. Francis Hotel, facing Union Square, where he had stayed happily and eventfully on other visits from Chicago. He had once received a note in the hotel’s dining room inviting him to what he guessed would be an attempt on his life; Pinkerton kept the appointment, and at his signal of slyly touching his hat, detectives grabbed the assassin before he could fire.
While trying to take a walk in the springtime air, Pinkerton was approached by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, who asked if the old detective had time for a question. Pinkerton agreed, and the two men returned to his room, where he removed his hat from his center-parted gray head and bore down on his interviewer with his dark eyes.
“Shoot,” he said.
The Chronicle’s man could have asked any number of questions to ensure a more colorful interview. Speaking at a previous year’s conference, for instance, Pinkerton had made news by disparaging the work of U.S. Army Intelligence against the “radical” threat. The reporter might have also asked about the agency’s relentless manhunt that dismantled Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall gang and chased Butch himself to South America; or about Pinkerton’s youthful wounding by a train robber, Hilary Farrington, whose struggle with Pinkerton aboard a paddlewheeler ended with Farrington going over the side to his death. He might have asked about Pinkerton’s more recent call for a return to the whipping post or about the Agency’s work the previous year on Fatty Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial, which stemmed from events at this same hotel.
Instead, the reporter threw something soft and slow: “What do you think of detective stories?”
“They’re the bunk—rot,” roared the old man, prompting a follow-up: “Have you ever read a detective story that read like the person who wrote it knew what he was talking about?”
The renowned old sleuth, whose Scottish father had founded the country’s first detective agency, sniffed at the suggestion. “Never. And I don’t expect to.” He especially panned the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. “These stories about detectives tracing crime by scratches on the back of watches and all that sort of rot give the people the wrong idea about the way we work. Detective work is only using good, common sense—nothing else,” Pinkerton said. “Any man with good common sense can be a detective. I’ve picked some of my men from street cars and all sorts of occupations, and they have usually made good.”2
That summer of 1922, when William Pinkerton sermonized the reporter, Sam Hammett had been making small steps toward assembling a career as an ex-detective. Since the birth of his daughter in October 1921, he had been sleeping alone, as advised due to his TB, in a Murphy bed in the hallway of their Eddy Street apartment, to keep safely apart from the baby. The family had been kept out of total poverty by a small, grudging loan made by his father. The fact that Hammett would even overrule his pride to ask such a favor of Richard Hammett shows how desperate things had become. While often kept home by his health, since February he had also been taking secretarial courses at the Munson School on Sutter Street. In addition to learning how to take quick notes, he was mastering touch typing, with which he turned out both the stories and poems he sent to magazines and the meticulous letters of outrage he wrote to the Veterans’ Bureau about changes to his pension. He kept writing, when he could, at a table in the kitchen and sometimes in the big sunny reading room at the public library.
Reporting would eventually have presented some of the same physical challenges as detective work as he ran down stories.3 He needed work he could do at home—or, when at his worst, even flat on his back. Though bedridden much of each day, Hammett somehow continued to combine hustle with the understandably fatal view that TB would someday finish him off. “He would have done whatever he had to do to make a buck,” says David Fechheimer. “He was never a very good invalid.”* He had to come up with a less physically taxing way of making money.
Without any surviving manuscripts before he was in his late twenties, it is hard to date exactly his decision to become a writer, let alone what kind of writer he wanted to be. He may not have respected the mystery story as it was then practiced, but he did not set out to reinvent it, either. His first attempts at writing actually were short, droll pieces, allegories, poems, character sketches, and what he called “legit” fiction, a form he never gave up the dream of returning to even after the success of his crime stories. His early efforts were more literary than “hard-boiled,” a recent term for skill under fire popularized by the ghastly war.
That spring of 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, he typed up a draft of his first short story, “The Barber and His Wife,” on his new black Underwood at the kitchen table. The story features a brawny, well-dressed husband and his unsatisfied wife to whom he gives hardly a thought; a brother with recognizable lung trouble; and a cultured young man who takes the wife to the movies. It reads a bit like a lesser Sherwood Anderson story until a coolly observed scene of violence when the husband visits the young suitor’s office:
He stopped before Becker’s desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.
“Is this Mr. Becker?”
“Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”
“No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up.” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Stemler!”
His debut story was rejected before finally finding a home that fall, but in June or July of 1922, Hammett had his first sale of a sardonic parable of fewer than a hundred words called “The Parthian Shot,” bought for The Smart Set by its famous editor H. L. Mencken, the most celebrated graduate of the school Hammett had attended through eighth grade, Baltimore Polytechnic. It was impressive for anyone to receive a letter from the great Mencken, but especially thrilling if you had grown up living in Baltimore, where he was the godlike driving force at the Sun. This first sale did not go far toward paying the Hammetts’ bills, but it allowed the struggling family to do something comparatively lavish—to order in dinner to celebrate. The little dinner must have been a highlight of that summer in which Hammett’s mother died, on August 3, 1922.
His first crime story, “The Road Home,” was bought by a magazine of a lower rank, The Black Mask, which ran it that December of 1922. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had founded this magazine just two years earlier as one of several vehicles for funding their true love, the more rarefied Smart Set. (These fund-raising vehicles included an erotic sampler, Saucy Stories, and something called the Parisienne.) When The Black Mask debuted in 1920, crime and detection were only a part of the splashy mix that also featured adventure, romance, cowboys, mystery, and occult. Mencken, despite his love of street slang as a brilliant chronicler of the American language, did not publicize his connection to The Black Mask and kept his name off the masthead altogether, and he and Nathan sold the magazine after its first eight issues.
Likewise, Hammett kept his own name off his debut in The Black Mask, using the pseudonym Peter Collinson, and allegedly saving his real name for poetry.** But if he saw publishing in The Black Mask as slumming it, he certainly got over this view with time, writing mostly for lower-paying crime magazines by the mid-twenties.
“The Road Home” had no tricks or acts of genius in its detection, but an American view of crime acquired by the writer as a Pinkerton: A lean “manhunter” named Hagedorn has spent two years tracking his subject to a jungly corner of Burma. Hagedorn intends to bring back his prisoner to New York, but Barnes, who’s claimed a local gem bed worth a criminal fortune, offers Hagedorn a piece of his kingdom if he’ll return home with false proof of the crook’s death. Instead of the detective following clues to snare his man, Hammett begins mid-showdown on a river, Barnes shouting out his bribe offer and Hagedorn quietly considering the criminal’s invitation to take his share of the gems. Barnes escapes ashore, forcing the issue; Hagedorn hesitates, then follows him into the trees, saying, “Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewels of his.” It’s left unclear whether Hagedorn will do the right thing or even survive his trek into the jungle, a challenge to the pieties of the detective story. “The puzzle isn’t so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it,” Hammett would say.
“The Road Home” is flavored with words that its author, who had never been overseas, clearly dug out of the public library (muggar, Mran-ma, jahaz), but the premise derives from his firsthand knowledge of Pinkerton work: The situation resembles a less exotic story Hammett liked to tell of himself, of shadowing a suspicious jewel salesman named Finsterwald from Philadelphia to Savannah, only to have the thief finally approach him in a public park as looking vaguely “familiar” and offer him a share of his swindle. (Hammett turned him in.) This proposition was dramatically interesting, especially if the reader was left unsure of the detective’s answer, a daring step into the jungle for this kind of fiction.
A writer without Hammett’s work experience might have shied away from a two-year manhunt overseas as too bold a plot to be believed. But Hammett would have heard plenty such tales around the detectives’ room: William R. Sayers’s two years spent chasing a man through Europe were hardly the toughest part of a career in which he also rode with the Pinkerton crew that ran down the Wild Bunch gang. (And William Pinkerton himself had worked months in London and Havana to bring back the brilliant English forger Austin Bidwell.)4
Hammett continued to cover all his bases as a struggling freelancer, sending out an ambitious range of apprentice work—poems, essays, sketches. It is probable, though, as the writer Vince Emery suggests, that his researches in the public library led him to create a series character, inspired both by his irritation with the hackneyed detective fiction he saw in the pulps and on the theory that stories with a known character would eventually command a better price.
His next crime story, “Arson Plus,” had a striding confidence that his other work lacked, from its opening sentence in which a detective rolls a cigar across the desk of a fat small-town sheriff to earn his cooperation. The story introduced a savvy little hero whose adventures allowed Hammett to exploit both his detecting experiences and growing knowledge of San Francisco. His narrator was unnamed but spoke in the style of the classic op reports, tracing his days and nights of methodical plugging—interviewing comely nieces and elderly house servants, matching alibis against hotel registers, visiting a dead man’s grocer, and even checking his final laundry ticket. Of all the available ways to write about detecting since Edgar Allan Poe’s Parisian investigator C. Auguste Dupin first appeared in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Hammett opted to do something that grew out of what he had actually been trained for: creating elevated stories from the characters and situations he knew well, instead of adding to the fiction club of gentleman puzzlers or quick-draw artists. This approach would eventually set crime writing on its head.
* * *
Hammett’s nameless Op first appeared in October 1923, when The Black Mask published “Arson Plus” (again by “Peter Collinson”). Its narrator resembles many of the operatives whose dispatches are collected in the Pinkerton archives at the Library of Congress, only unlike most of the standard op reports Hammett knew well, “Arson Plus” begins to make literature out of the tedium of investigation:
Having ruined our shoe-shines, McClump and I got back in our machine and swung off in a circle around the place, calling at all the houses within a mile radius, and getting little besides jolts for our trouble.
A skinny near-convalescent writing about his little man of action, Hammett had created a streetwise yet incorruptible hero who is devoted to the job at hand, however unsavory the client, a code Hammett had absorbed from Pinkerton’s:
“Next morning, at the address McClump had given me—a rather elaborate apartment building on California Street—I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress.” In ordinary circumstances, Mrs. Trowbridge’s appearance would have made it well worth the wait, explains the Op, “But I was a busy, middle-aged detective, who was fuming over having his time wasted; and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty. However, I smothered my grouch, apologized for disturbing her at such an early hour, and got down to business.” The detective must smother all kinds of distracting feelings to keep his eye on the job.
These lines mark one of many times Hammett’s Op declines to name himself—though he does describe himself as portly, around forty, and five foot six—while slogging his way through twenty-six stories, two linked novellas, and two full-length novels.
In May of that year, The Black Mask had published the first story about a “tough guy” private investigator, Terry Mack. Chronologically, Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” ran weeks ahead of Hammett’s debut of his Continental Op that fall. But beyond being set inside a detective’s office, the two stories had very little in common. Daly’s “Three Gun” Terry character was the flashy, sharpshooting opposite of the Op, while another of Daly’s heroes, Race Williams, debuted in the June 1 issue in a timely story about an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, “Knights of the Open Palm.” It was just the kind of thing Hammett was trying to correct in detective fiction, unrealistic action delivered in an unconvincing vernacular: “I’m what you might call a middleman—just a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks. Oh, there ain’t no doubt that both the cops and the crooks take me for a gun, but I ain’t—not rightly speaking.”5
By comparison, Hammett’s Op had wrung some handy knowledge from his rough life of sleuthing: Abductions rarely occur at night or in cities, and those that do more likely are staged by the victim for ransom; no one can strangle you from the front if your arms are free to reach up and snap his pinkies; when a “Chinese” starts shooting, he always empties his gun; you can shadow anyone pretty naturally if you don’t meet the subject’s eye; it’s best to stand aside of the door during “unannounced” visits in case bullets burst through it; even a light tap to the head with a metal revolver has a surprisingly concussive effect; you can often draw good information or even a confession “out of a feeble nature” by putting your face close to the subject’s and talking loudly; people talk more freely in a room with a closed door; and any hop head who tells you his name is “John Ryan” is not to be trusted (“it’s the John Smith of yeggdom”).
Hammett’s Op is suspicious of brilliance and puts his faith in doing the basic parts of his job well and hoping for occasional “flashes of intelligence.” Though he is hard or congenial as the situation requires, this “little block of a man” sometimes surprises himself with what he’ll do for the job, such as shooting a woman criminal in the leg who had gambled that gallantry would leave him unable to fire as she fled. (“I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.”) If he goes home, he is often interrupted while changing into his pajamas or is jangled awake by a call from his chilly master at the agency, known only as the Old Man. The Op knows his crooks, and strikes the balance of criminal expertise, anonymity, and loyalty to the client that Allan Pinkerton had prescribed.
The idea that he was modeled on a particular Pinkerton drawn from life comes mainly from Hammett, as relayed by one half of the writing team of Ellery Queen, Frederic Dannay, who later edited a number of Hammett paperback collections. Sometime in the late thirties, Dannay had dined with Hammett at Lüchow’s, the cavernous, celebrated German restaurant on Fourteenth Street in New York City known for its house band and beer garden specialties.6 After talking about many subjects and sampling “various liquids ranging from pale yellow to dark brown,” Dannay remembered, the “amber fluids” at last loosened Hammett’s tongue and he gave up “the lowdown” about his character. The Op was based “on a real-life person—James (Jimmy) Wright, Assistant Superintendent, in the good old days, of Pinkerton’s Baltimore agency, under whom Dashiell Hammett actually worked.”7
The key to this story might be the amber fluids drunk by the diners and a bit of detective’s whimsy on Hammett’s part, since the name he cited went back decades as a Pinkerton alias. As explained earlier, the existence of a genuine Jimmy Wright is difficult to confirm. If anyone, the Op better resembles Hammett’s real San Francisco boss Phil Geauque, still working as an active Secret Service agent in the thirties. It’s most likely, though, that the Op was a composite or “type,” as Hammett described his character in 1929:
I’ve worked with half a dozen men who might be he with few changes. Though he may be “different” in fiction, he is almost pure “type” in life. I’ve always tried to hold him as close to the “type” as possible because what I see in him is a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit—as callous and brutal and cynical as is necessary—towards a dim goal, with nothing to push or pull him towards it except that he’d been hired to reach it—a sort of Manuel whose saying is: “The job’s got to be done.”8
All Pinkertons signed an agreement against disclosure, and the fate of the cowboy detective Charlie Siringo had shown that even the most sanitized detective memoir could be punished by the Pinkertons. So Hammett had to create his own mythical agency, as lawyers had forced poor Siringo to do. A fan of inside jokes to amuse himself, Hammett named the firm that employed his Op the Continental Detective Agency, after the Continental Building in Baltimore, where he had first been hired by Pinkerton’s, and he gave it a location that is clearly modeled on the Flood Building in San Francisco. A later story in True Detective magazine was even credited “By Dashiell Hammett of the Continental Detective Agency.” In a sense, Hammett worked there the rest of his life.
Following “Arson Plus,” a second Op story, “Slippery Fingers,” ran in the October 15 issue of The Black Mask, also attributed to “Peter Collinson.” “Slippery Fingers” does not rank with Hammett’s best, but it is significant for another reason. The murderer in the tale schemes with an expert to make counterfeit gelatin fingerprints, which he wears after leaving his real bloody prints all over the death scene. This kind of forgery seemed plausible to many in 1923, as the criminal science of fingerprint identification was taking hold with the public, but not to Berkeley’s police chief August Vollmer, a champion of fingerprint identification and of the emerging lie detector technology. Vollmer was a highly successful and gentlemanly crime fighter with a national reputation, recently elected president of the International Organization of Chiefs of Police, whose new techniques William Pinkerton himself had approved the year before.
Transferring genuine prints from one crime scene to another might be possible, Vollmer told the Chronicle that fall, but “Close inspection of any forged finger-print will soon cause detection.” This was alarming news to the young author of a new story featuring such forgery. Clearly worried over possible challenges to his story and his knowledge as an ex-detective, Hammett wrote to the editor at The Black Mask:
It may be that what Farr does in my story would be considered by Mr. Vollmer a transference rather than a forgery. But whichever it is, I think there is no longer reasonable room for doubt that fingerprints can be successfully forged. I have seen forged prints that to me seemed perfect, but, not being even an amateur in that line, my opinion isn’t worth much.9
Hammett contradicts the only expert he has named, August Vollmer,† and then concludes that “quite a number of those qualified to speak on the subject will agree with me,” and while claiming to have seen forged prints, he admits he would be unable to recognize them, a shrewd dodge. Both The Black Mask and a competitor, Detective Story Magazine, had started their own fingerprint departments the year before, and Hammett may have particularly feared a challenge to his forensics knowledge from a house specialist. “I found I could sell the stories easily when it became known I had been a Pinkerton man,” he remembered. “People thought my stuff was authentic.” This letter is a rare example of Hammett defending his authenticity, which was so important to the reception of what he wrote and the writer he became.
Having now published at the high and lower ends of the magazine spectrum, he brought his worldly detective voice to the cultured readers of The Smart Set, where he had broken in with his short, droll “The Parthian Shot” the year before and published two other sketches since. “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” a deadpan teaser of twenty-nine authentic-sounding snippets and scenes from his former profession, appeared in the March 1923 issue. In it, he carefully never mentioned Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency but wrote as “Dashiell Hammett” in the role he would play the rest of his life, of the literate ex-detective.
He began:
Wishing to get some information from some members of the W.C.T.U. in an Oregon city, I introduced myself as the secretary of the Butte Civic Purity League. One of them read me a long discourse on the erotic effects of cigarettes on young girls. Subsequent experiments proved this tip worthless.
Hammett knew the Smart Set audience well. Aiming to entertain but not offend, he recalled nothing as ugly as strikebreaking, but his selections highlighted the kind of quirky jobs Pinkerton’s might have asked of its operatives, without naming the agency or its clients—discharging a woman’s housekeeper for her; circulating among unimpressive forgers, pickpockets, and embezzlers scattered among cities and countryside. Most house burglars “live on their women,” he observed, while “Of all the men embezzling from their employers with whom I have had contact, I can’t remember a dozen who smoked, drank, or had any of the vices in which bonding companies are so interested.” A forger he knew left his wife because she had learned to smoke cigarettes while he was in prison. As biography, “Memoirs” is sadly slim, but anything more specific might have been unpublishable, drawing the quick wrath of Pinkerton’s, and wouldn’t have fit Smart Set’s high tone.
True or even partially true, these tales certainly went down more easily the way Hammett told them, but there was a limit. “I once knew a man who stole a Ferris wheel,” he reported, a claim for only the truest believers. (A decade later he would add that he had found the giant stolen ride at a competing amusement park and resented reports since made that he had “stolen” it himself, as if rescuing the enormous wheel were more believable than stealing it.)
“I was a pretty good sleuth,” Hammett boasted in 1929, “but a bit overrated because of the plausibility with which I could explain away my failures, proving them inevitable and no fault of mine.” In fact, plausibility would be a key part of his art.
While his first writing sales were a boost to his spirits, they did not add up to a living. As a satirist or poet he might not have distinguished himself from the pack, but the credibly gritty feel of his crime writings was already setting them apart from the more lurid and fanciful stuff found in detective magazines.
* To further cloud the issue of his employment, Hammett listed himself in the 1923 City Directory as “broker,” a possible lingering cover for sleuthing work.
** “Peter Collins” was an old carnival term for “Nobody” that Hammett might have learned as an operative. “Peter Collinson” therefore meant “Son of Nobody.” In publishing this first detective story, he might also have feared repercussions from the Agency, although he also used the “Collinson” byline for such harmless early efforts as “The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody.”
† Despite his pronouncements on the subject, Vollmer was pranked himself by one of his Berkeley officers, who claimed to have successfully transferred Vollmer’s own prints to a crime scene, stoking the debate about fingerprint forgery/transference and outraging his boss.