The Lost Detective (11 page)

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.

We who worked under him were proud of his cold-bloodedness.

—
T
HE
B
IG
K
NOCKOVER
(1924)
^*

Down the years, Hammett must have wondered what might have happened had he gone on chasing crooks for the agency; whether, once he had run out his string as an operative, he could have settled into a desk job bossing younger detectives. His Continental Op certainly speculates about the mental toll of such a life from time to time, still huffing after grifters though he is old enough to leave the field to the kids. The Op fears few things, but one of them is clearly his boss at the Continental’s San Francisco branch, known only as the Old Man, a pitiless, white-haired picture of what “fifty years of crook-hunting” can do to a human being. The Old
Man is the Op’s cold-blooded future if he stays on, emptied of “everything except brains and a soft-spoken, gently smiling politeness” that is the same no matter how things turn out. Whatever the Op does in the service of his job, he must answer for in his reports to the Old Man, or skirt the truth and risk catching “merry hell.” Pontius Pilate, the ops call the Old Man privately, because he smiles sending them out on dicey missions to be “crucified.”

The Old Man first turned up in Hammett’s story “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (1924), when the sleeping Op is summoned to the office on a Sunday morning by the “neat,” businesslike voice of his boss calling on the phone. Even in stories where he doesn’t speak, the Old Man’s detectives are often worrying aloud how to explain their code infractions to him. He makes a useful, grounding presence, the figure through which all trails of information converge in the office, and he gives direction to the men’s searches in the field: “If the Old Man said something was so, then it probably was, because he was one of these cautious babies who’ll look out the window at a cloudburst and say, ‘It seems to be raining,’ on the off-chance that somebody’s pouring water off the roof.” The Old Man bears a strong likeness to the best-known Pinkerton detective of all after the founder himself, James McParland,
^**
longtime head of the agency’s Western Division, known to his admirers and
enemies alike simply as the Great Detective. In 1911 the IWW leader Big Bill Haywood, who had survived a murder charge at the hands of McParland and Pinkerton’s, summed up the opinion of many in the labor movement:

When a detective dies, he goes so low that he has to climb a ladder to get into Hell—and he is not a welcome guest there. When his Satanic Majesty sees him coming, he says to his imps, “Go get a big bucket of pitch and a lot of sulphur, give them to that fellow and put him outside. Let him start a Hell of his own. We don’t want him in here, starting trouble.”
¹

In the latter years of his fame, with his white hair and grizzled mustache, his piercing, bespectacled gaze, and his thick, slouching body that had once been powerful, McParland looked very much as Hammett’s Op describes the Old Man:

A tall, plump man in his seventies, this boss of mine, with a white-mustached, baby-pink, grandfatherly face, mild blue eyes behind rimless spectacles, and no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope.

During the decades that McParland ran Pinkerton’s Western Division, he made inspection tours of its satellite offices (Spokane, Seattle, Portland) every few months.
²
As a Pinkerton, Hammett could not have overlapped with the Great Detective, as McParland died the same month Hammett was discharged from the army with TB, in May 1919. But the trail was hardly cold. Detectives would still be talking about McParland throughout the agency offices he’d supervised, two of which
(Spokane and Seattle) employed Hammett. McParland’s reputation lingered long in San Francisco, too.

Dispatching a crooked superintendent in 1908, McParland sounds in his report every bit as hard as Hammett’s Old Man:

He said: “What! Am I discharged?” I replied: “Yes, what could you expect?” He said: “Won’t you allow me to resign?,” to which I replied: “No, I do not allow a man to resign who has admitted himself to be a thief and a forger and when conclusive evidence proves him to be a traitor … A man of your character should be killed and your carcass thrown to the dogs and if I killed you, Mr. Cary, in this room this minute I would not consider I would have to ask the forgiveness of God Almighty for doing so.” He immediately handed over the keys.
³

Born in Armagh County, Ireland, in 1843, James McParland had joined the Agency in Chicago in 1871, after that city’s Great Fire claimed his liquor store. Two years later, he was working as a conductor on the rear platform of a Chicago streetcar one day, monitoring employee pilferage for the agency, when Allan Pinkerton spotted him while considering candidates for the assignment that would earn McParland his newspaper title, the Great Detective: infiltrating an Irish gang of Pennsylvania miners known secretively as the Sleepers, or Molly Maguires.

McParland met Pinkerton’s criteria for the dangerous posting: Irish-Catholic, unmarried, gregarious, “hardy, tough,” and conversant in the history of Northern Ireland’s secret organizations, a subject on which he wrote a seven-page
treatise for his boss to secure the job.
^†
“If this man is mentally correct, and willing,” the founder thought, “he is just the instrument fitted for my mining operation.”
⁴
Adopting an authentically shabby outfit and meticulous cover biography as James McKenna (whose backstory included a murder rap he was fleeing in Buffalo), McParland boarded a train and began wandering the Shenandoah Valley in search of any point of entry to the Mollies. A deadly outgrowth of the labor battles between the mining companies and a weakened union, the Molly Maguires committed acts of terror and murder against company executives as well as fellow miners who displeased them (especially Welshmen). In the late 1860s they killed at least a dozen men per year, a figure that had waned slightly by the time McParland arrived.