The Lost Detective (14 page)

One otherwise dreary afternoon she lay with her bright red head on my knees while I read Don Marquis'
Sonnets to a Red Haired Lady
to her. When I had finished she made a little purring noise and stared dreamily distant-eyed past me, “Tell me about this Don Marquis,” she said. “Do you know him?”
⁴

O'Toole, who had also been told she inspired
Red Harvest
's Dinah Brand, eventually married someone else from the
Samuels office, a man who did not like to be reminded even decades later of her connection to literature. Hammett was still thinking of her when he wrote
The Glass Key
in 1930, in which Ned Beaumont spends the early part of the book chasing his winnings on a horse named Peggy O'Toole, leading to another gambler's greeting, “Heard you had Peggy O'Toole today.”
⁵

One day in the mid-1970s, Peggy found herself facing another San Francisco detective, who had followed Hammett's winding old trail to her doorstep. During this same time, David Fechheimer had turned up Hammett's former Pinkerton partner Phil Haultain and a contemporary from the Agency, Jack Kaplan; he found Mrs. Josephine Hammett, still living in Los Angeles with the couple's older daughter, Mary; and he made a discovery he couldn't put in print with the others.

Standing out front all these years later, Peggy explained to Fechheimer that she couldn't let him into her house because her husband didn't like her talking about her relationship with Hammett, whose letters she had nevertheless kept, whether as his old girlfriend or muse; in fact, she warned the young detective, her husband was “still pissed about it.”
^*

* * *

However able he was at his job, during his first months working for Samuels, Hammett was pushing himself too hard, keeping bad hours, and drinking far too much, often during the day. It is a testament to Albert Samuels's fondness for Hammett that he didn't fire him for his disruptive drinking, as he would have another employee. Perhaps he had a different standard for men who were writers. But the question became moot when, on the afternoon of July 20, 1926, his advertising manager collapsed in the office and was found unconscious and lying in what Samuels called a pool of blood from his hemorrhaging lungs. If found much later, Hammett might have choked to death on his own blood. In addition to the TB, he was discovered to also have hepatitis. He had lasted five hard-driving months working full time when he returned home, as sick as he had ever been, to the bed from which he had risen before.

As his convalescence dragged into September, Samuels, ever the gentleman employer, gave Hammett a notarized letter to provide to the Veterans' Bureau in hopes of starting up his relief again:

Gentlemen,

This is to certify that Samuel Dashiell Hammett resigned his position as advertising manager of the Albert S. Samuels on July 20, 1926, because ill health had made it impossible for him to perform his duties.

Very truly yours,

Albert S. Samuels

Doctors insisted that a family with a new baby needed to be physically separated from such an active TB case. This time,
Jose took the girls with her all the way home by train to Anaconda, for a separation that would last six months. Hammett's disability was once again listed as total.

During his sickest times at Eddy Street, Hammett set up a network of chairs for making his way across the living room to the kitchen and bath or to occasionally spit blood. The story of the chairs later became a kind of origins tale or symbol of his remarkable tenacity—the tough guy leaving his bed of pain to keep working. (“When he wrote
Red Harvest
, friends say,” the
Los Angeles Times
repeated in 1934, “he was so ill, he had to line up the furniture between chair and typewriter to lean on as he dragged himself back and forth.”) But his separation from his family did not at first force him to develop his fiction art; he was once again desperate for money.

Hammett soon tried to reestablish himself full time as an ad man, battling at the office with a new rival named Chipman, who, said Hammett, would “slit my throat” if given the chance. Samuels was understandably cautious about giving Hammett the entire office load he had carried before his collapse. Though often boastful after his office debates about advertising, in October, Hammett wrote his wife in Montana a surprisingly fragile letter about his situation with Samuels: “I'd like to know whether anything is going to come of the advertising racket or not. What he's [Samuels] afraid of is that I'll die on his hands. I'm not altogether sure I want the blooming thing.”
⁶
Imagining the work and added bickering of coming back and fighting for his old position, he explained, “I don't know whether that will sit well on my lungs or not.”

Nevertheless, he kept building his industry reputation by writing essays such as “Advertising IS Literature,” which ran in
the October 1926
Western Advertising
. “Whether he likes it not,” Hammett wrote from experience, “every man who works with words for effects is a literary worker.” The worker's only “liberty” was “in deciding how adept he shall be.”

As he was building his career back up with Samuels, a man named Joseph Shaw took the helm of
The Black Mask
. He quickly dropped “The” from its title and began assigning for the fall of 1926. Starting out as a newspaperman, Shaw had been known as “Cap” to his friends since the Great War, in which he attained captain's rank as a bayonet instructor. He had also been a national champion in sabers. A man with little experience editing magazines, he nevertheless had a clear idea for the intriguing enterprise he had been handed.

One of the most important goals Shaw set for himself was to bring Dashiell Hammett and his popular Op back into the fold. Neither had appeared in
Black Mask
since March 1926. Shaw wrote Hammett a letter in which he pledged him more money and proposed longer works, to be serialized by
Black Mask
, stretching beyond the constraints of the magazine story form. Hammett was delighted; it was, he said, just what he had had in mind himself, and he seemed especially pleased that Shaw was paying him the three hundred dollars Hammett felt his predecessor Phil Cody still owed him. Hammett usually called it “applesauce” when people praised him while wanting something, but he reported it proudly to his wife.

That fall of 1926, a nurse named Esther Haley, who specialized in TB cases, found Hammett living alone briefly at 20 Monroe Place; on a follow-up in November, she saw him at 1309 Hyde Street, where the whole family was reunited in an
arrangement that nevertheless passed Nurse Haley's inspection for hygiene: the patient had a room to himself away from the children. She noted that his weight was up ten pounds and, while he still had night sweats, he said he was doing some writing for magazines. When Haley saw him next, in March 1927, Hammett was alone in a studio at 891 Post Street, still resting, he told her, but also doing advertising work from home. The wife and children, Haley recorded, lived in an apartment on Sacramento, near Hyde. By April's exam, he explained he was a little worse, although with no blood spitting, and that his rotten teeth bothered him tremendously.
⁷

During this time, he had nevertheless written something extraordinary for Cap Shaw, a novella called
The Big Knockover
. He was also now reviewing mysteries for the
Saturday Review of Literature
, a platform he relished, raising himself and his realist school of detective fiction even as he pointed out the weak stew served by others. His focus had switched back almost entirely to writing. In the January 1927
Black Mask
, Shaw announced Hammett's coming return in the next issue: “Dashiell Hammett has called back the Continental detective from his long retirement and is setting him to work anew.”

When it began running in excerpts in February 1927,
The Big Knockover
featured a brazen, over-the-top double holdup of San Francisco banks, one of which may have been modeled on the Old Mint building. You can feel Hammett stretching out at last, achieving the full, striding voice of his longer works. “I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy's dive,” it begins,

Paddy—an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain—showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a
chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:

“Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send 'em over for life in the end.”

The Big Knockover
has many elements: spare, slangy prose; the Op's serving as guide to scruffy locales up and down San Francisco; and poetic lists of criminal names, proof of Hammett's strong grounding in Pinkerton studies. It also features a criminal operation seemingly far larger than the Op or the police force of his wide-open town can handle.

The Op is skeptical when he first hears of the audacious bank “caper” from a stuttering newsie, but his source is gunned down moments later by a young Armenian boy who saunters off “hands in pockets, softly whistling
Broken-Hearted Sue
.” Intrigued by a traffic jam he sees on Market Street the next day, the Op walks over toward the Financial District and the Seaman's Bank. As he gets closer, he hears “roaring, rattling, explosive noises” and sees a man trying to set his dislocated jaw back in place. Finally, he reaches the block between Bush and Pine Streets, where “Hell was on a holiday.” Where the Seaman's National and Golden Gate Trust Company buildings face each other, a double looting is going on, involving a robbery gang of perhaps a hundred and fifty crooks. “For the next six hours,” says the Op, “I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.”

Inspiring his own epic heist, Hammett had certainly read a national news story about a bold posse of gunmen making a raid on the Denver Federal Reserve Bank in December 1922.
Firing their way in during business hours, they got away with two hundred thousand dollars, the record daylight take at the time, shooting up the streetscape as they sped off under fire from overwhelmed upstairs guards, one of whom died of his wounds. As he fired from the running board of the getaway car, one of the robbers was hit but was pulled inside it as the gang sped off.
⁸

What follows in
The Big Knockover
is a detecting adventure as it had never been done. In a room on Fillmore Street, the Op catalogues the notable dead crooks he recognizes on the floor, from the Dis-and-Dat Kid, “who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before”; to Snohomish Whitey, “supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919”; to “L.A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual, with a thousand dollar bill sewed in each shoulder of his coat”; to Bull McGonickle, “still pale from fifteen years in Joliet”; to Toby the Lugs, “Bull's running mate, who used to brag about picking President Wilson's pocket in a Washington vaudeville theater”; to Paddy the Mex. The Agency's founder, Allan Pinkerton, might have appreciated the low-life scholarship of such a list.

If you consider
The Big Knockover
together with its follow-up, “$106, 000 Blood Money,” which began running in May, the two parts make up Hammett's first novel. However, their author didn't see them that way and would not have his linked novellas published together.

By the baby's first birthday that May, Jose and the girls had moved across the bay to a little house in Fairfax, California, where Hammett would visit them by ferry once or twice each week, and where baby Jo eventually learned to walk. By the end of 1927, doctors would tell him his TB was gone, but
Hammett stayed on at 891 Post Street, in a studio he would later come to share with Sam Spade.

For his first published novel, he chose to take his Op on his bloodiest mission yet, away from the bay and up north into the mountains and the labor wars in Montana. With pressure from his
Black Mask
editors for ever more action, he chose a place he knew whose starkness and violence needed little exaggeration.

*
Author's correspondence with Fechheimer. The interview with Peggy O'Toole did not make its way into the all-Hammett issue of
City of San Francisco
Magazine (Nov. 4, 1975), which included the full sixty-five-page draft of Hammett's abandoned original
Thin Man
novel, set in San Francisco. The
City
issue added to the drumbeat for a planned film based on the Joe Gores novel,
Hammett
, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, the publisher of
City
. The issue, without which no Hammett biography of the past forty years would be possible, now sells for $150 online.

“This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.”

—T
HE
C
ONTINENTAL
O
P IN
R
ED
H
ARVEST

You see the cindery hillside with a high funnel sticking out of it, a masonry smokestack almost six hundred feet tall, for a long time on the dusty approach to the town. And as you enter the small, flat grid of streets the stack hovers darkly over your shoulder on its slag-covered mound, while here and there, among the lines of houses and brick storefronts, appear Deco–style holdovers such as the Washoe theater or Club Moderne.

Anaconda was founded in 1883 by a copper magnate named Marcus Daly, who had bought the nearby Anaconda mine and hoped to make his company town the capital of Montana. In Hammett’s novel
Red Harvest
, the Continental Op arrives in a grim 1920s mining town called Personville (“Poisonville” to locals) that shares some details with Anaconda. Marcus Daly’s story could be an inspiration for Personville’s old
mining “czar” Elihu Willsson, who “owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts” for forty years until 1921, when he paid an army of goons to help him break the miners’ union: “When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker”—but at a price. Like other nightmare towns Hammett wrote about, Personville had gone to the thugs. A city owned and run by Elihu Willsson had degenerated into a criminal free-for-all.