The Lost Detective (13 page)

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.

“Hello, Bernie. This is Ned. What's the price on Peggy O'Toole?”

—
T
HE
G
LASS
K
EY
(1931)

Going to and from the Pinkerton offices in the Flood Building when he was still an operative, Hammett had certainly noticed Albert Samuels Jewelers, “The House of Lucky Wedding Rings,” nearby on Market Street, with its familiar sidewalk clock. Inside each of the company's wedding bands was the trademark inscription A.S. LUCKY, since they claimed to ensure a durable marriage, and Samuels held an annual party for as many of the couples as he could accommodate who had sealed their vows with his rings.

Samuels liked his employees almost as much as his customers, and his shop and upstairs offices had a family atmosphere. A newspaper picture from December 1922 shows Samuels Jewelers' happy staff, all eighty of them from his combined stores, arranged along covered banquet tables at the company's yearly dinner dance in the Hotel Whitcomb. The rows of
dark-suited men and floral-dressed women intersect the square pillars of the hotel dining room; twenty-three of them were native Californians, Samuels reported, with the remainder including enough “representatives of many foreign countries—that a customer who couldn't talk English might summon some member of our force and have the subject expounded to him fluently in his own tongue …”
¹
After his lonely months struggling at home, Hammett must have been thrilled, when he made his skinny-dapper entrance, to be part of such a cosmopolitan workplace.

Samuels's firm was well known for its wide use of newspaper ads, some of them written by Albert himself, but others, before Hammett joined the company, created by a young man named Jay H. Haight, who had come up with the idea of sponsoring free classifieds to reunite people with their lost jewelry, regardless of its origin. “We hope to profit by the gratitude and the good will of those we assist,” Haight told a reporter. “Also we may occasionally pick up a job of repairing.”
²
These seemingly selfless classifieds were a success and a steady source of warm anecdotes of people's reunions with their missing brooches, bar pins, or gold tortoiseshell glasses. Samuels's ads in general were direct and often told an emotional story, a form Hammett could easily get the knack of.

Al Samuels would later remember being introduced to Hammett by a mutual friend as late as 1926, the year the writer began full time. But, being an observant type who liked nice things, Hammett would have been aware of the diamond shop much earlier as a Pinkerton, and may have begun freelancing for Samuels at the end of 1925, when he had begun reviewing books on advertising. Unlike some other novelists of his time
who saw advertising as a means to keep them in whiskey and typewriter ribbon, Hammett took an interest in the new writing challenges of this format, something that could be done well or badly and that paid much better than the freelance story market at the time. As he had said rather stiffly in a recent book review, “The eternal problem of the creative worker in whatever field is to bring his whole mind, his every faculty, to bear on the task under his hand.” Hammett had never learned to look down on what he was doing.

Since most newspaper copy for the store was signed by Samuels himself, it is difficult to gauge exactly where Hammett broke in, but it seems unlikely he would have been hired on directly, a man who had not worked full time since 1918, without some kind of part-time trial. In the end, Samuels would become one of Hammett's most unshakeable friends, a kind of literary benefactor to whom he dedicated his second novel,
The Dain Curse
, which opens with a search for eight stolen diamonds.

On the many postcards he drew for his friends and children, Hammett showed a spare, Thurber-like line as an amateur cartoonist. Soon he was overseeing the clean look of the firm's print ads as well as their texts in which crises were resolved for young men who had foolishly bought “size” over “quality” and whose lifeless engagement stones were replaced with brilliant blue-white diamonds in time to save the marriage. “Nothing you can wear adds more to your appearance than good jewelry,” began one Samuels ad of her husband's, lovingly saved by Mrs. Hammett. “Tastefully selected, properly worn, it will do for your dress what eyes do for your face—make it live with points of fire and color.”
³

Once on staff as advertising manager, Hammett made $350 per month, doubling his income just as he had become a father again, with the arrival of Josephine Rebecca Hammett (later called Jo) on May 24, 1926. He now worked a six-day week alongside sophisticated people who went drinking after work. Jose Hammett later blamed her husband's increased drinking and carousing on the stint at the Samuels office. But the predilection was already in him; he just hadn't the money or stable health for stepping out, and never knew how long the TB would lie quiet.

In his new surroundings, he focused particularly on Peggy O'Toole, a young art assistant with whom he chose to have an affair. “She was one of the rare red-haired women whose skins are without blemish,” he wrote in a story he sent her; “she was marble, to the eye.” O'Toole, he later told their mutual boss, inspired Hammett to create Brigid O'Shaughnessy, whose dark red hair curling beneath her blue hat is among the first things Sam Spade catalogues as she crosses the office threshold into his life in
The Maltese Falcon
. As Hammett described the flesh-and-blood Peggy O'Toole in 1926: