The Lost Detective (15 page)

Personville conflates Anaconda with nearby Butte and the smaller mining village whose name it echoes, Walkerville. But it actually borrows more from Butte:

The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.
¹

The story opens with the Op having a drink in a real Butte location, the Big Ship, a miner’s nickname for Butte’s biggest boardinghouse, the Florence Hotel. The real Butte was certainly set “in a notch between two mountains,” a hillside town running up to the Mountain Meadow cemetery where the body of Frank Little was carried by grieving miners in 1917.

Like Butte at this time, Personville had a “Broadway line,” which the Op rides to visit Elihu Willsson, whose home
corresponds on the map to where the surviving home of another copper king, William A. Clark, sits in Butte.
^2
*

The Op is called to town by Elihu Willsson’s son, Donald, who, as the editor of one of his father’s newspapers, has been naïvely running a reformist campaign to clean up Personville. Donald Willsson is quickly killed before the two men can meet, and not wanting to waste the trip from San Francisco, the Op gets himself hired by old Elihu himself to restore the town he once ran.

Elihu’s check for ten thousand dollars to the Continental Detective Agency unleashes the bloodletting to come as the Op sets to work pitting the gang members against one another to empty Personville “of its crooks and grafters.” At one point a battered black touring car whips past him “crammed to the curtains with men,” and the Op grins with pride: “Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid.” The Op has a dark gift for sowing violence, cracking open the weak confederacies of criminals, and tying up loose ends outside the courts. This is put on spectacular display in Personville, where he quickly sizes up police chief Noonan as helpless and genially corrupt. Hammett knew that the real Butte bloomed with such evil characters—soiled lawmen such as the former chief detective Ed Morrisey, who was not unlike the sorry ex-detective Bob MacSwain in
Red Harvest
. Fired as a violent drunkard and
suspected (but never charged) in the death of his wife, Morrissey also hired himself out as a gunman and was discussed for decades as a suspect in the Frank Little killing. (A citizen definitely worthy of Poisonville, Morrissey was found beaten to death in 1922.)
³

At the center of the storm he has caused, the Op finds a lucky ally in Dinah Brand, a “deluxe hustler” and gossipy moll who greets him with a “soft, lazy” voice. She has “the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear,” her part is crooked, her rouge uneven, her dress is “a particularly unbecoming wine color,” and one stocking has a run, but, the Op deadpans, “This was the Dinah Brand who took her pick of Poisonville’s men, I had been told.” He warms to her, too, as she matches him drink for drink while dangling criminal gossip for sale: “I’m a girl who likes to pick up a little jack when she can.” She sketches for him the town’s outlaw cast of bootleggers, grifters, and crooked cops, but wants payment: “You can think it’s not going to cost you anything, but I’ll get mine before we’re through,” she says. Recognizing the Op’s mission, she offers, “If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you.”
⁴

Dinah Brand is probably the most lifelike female character Hammett ever created, and as with a number of his fictional people, she was probably modeled in part on some vivid acquaintance; she resembles a type of woman he favored in his dalliances, “rumpled, frowsy, edging into blowsy,” as Jo Hammett describes her in
A Daughter Remembers
, “and perfectly comfortable with herself and with men—the kind of woman, I noticed over the years, that my father was attracted to.”
⁵
It is hard to know if, while writing his Poisonville novel, Hammett
was already spending time with Nell Martin, the spirited woman who would later accompany him to New York. “I used to think I knew men,” Dinah complains at one point, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.”
^**

Not only does the Op get a disturbing taste for death in Personville, but he befriends this woman who seems to have already fleeced many of the town’s men, except for the passive lunger she keeps around to abuse, Dan Rolff. When the Op uncharacteristically confesses to Dinah that he fears he is “going blood-simple like the natives,” she comforts him with laudanum, and he has two gumshoeing hallucinations, as dogged as they are poetic. In one, he trails after a woman whose face is hidden by a veil, following her voice through “half the streets in the United States”; in the second dream, he chases around a strange city “a small brown man who wore an immense sombrero”:

Keeping one hand on the open knife in my pocket, I ran toward the little brown man, running on the heads and shoulders of the people in the plaza. The heads and shoulders were of unequal heights and unevenly spaced. I slipped and floundered over them.
⁶

The Op wakes to a worse nightmare: he is gripping a fatal ice pick. Thinking he was solving one crime, he also must clear
himself of Dinah’s murder. He has gone “native” to the point that even one of his steadiest fellow operatives, the terse Canadian Dick Foley, becomes unsure of his innocence; enough so that the Op sends him back to San Francisco. The book ends with the Op fretting over the language of his agency reports to the Old Man but still catching “merry hell” for his tactics.

One mystery at the center of this book is how Hammett wrote something so convincingly realistic. The traditional account suggests that his first novel grew out of the nightmarish things he saw during his brief time spent in Butte as a Pinkerton, when dozens of agents roamed undercover on behalf of the mining companies. It seems quite a leap of faith to accept Hammett’s story about being in Butte in 1917, when he was a relatively new operative in Baltimore, and being offered a bribe to kill Frank Little. But it is not impossible he was there in 1920, the year of a second round of strikes, riots, shootings, and federal troops, when he worked out of the Spokane office. This hews more closely to how the Pinkerton Agency functioned, assigning from the Denver office and drawing operatives primarily from other northwest branches. More easily dispatched from Spokane than from Baltimore, Hammett may have done some service working undercover, if he was healthy enough, between his move west to Spokane in May 1920 and his collapse that November, after which he went off to the Cushman hospital to meet the young nurse who became his wife.

Like so much with Hammett in the early twenties, even if on paper he should have been immobilized, it does not mean he obeyed. If he came to Butte that spring, he would have arrived just weeks after the Anaconda Road Massacre of April 21, 1920, an event in which sixteen striking miners were shot from
behind during a protest outside the Neversweat Mine, and another, Tom Manning, died later from his wounds. Troops returned to Butte, but calm had not been entirely restored when Hammett would have walked its streets.

There is another, more literary reason to believe he was there in 1920: he describes the town too well not to have seen it. Another possibility, that he visited his wife and daughters there in 1926, when his TB became contagious and when Jose brought the girls home to Anaconda, is not likely and is not how the family remembered it: he was far too sick in 1926 for such a long train trip. Being such a gifted observer, Hammett only needed to visit Butte for a week or so to be able to describe things he saw and, especially, heard in billiard halls, hotel lobbies, and the precinct house; or at the fights; or in the room of an appealingly disheveled young woman. He also had another source for background, though she rarely gets credit.

His authenticity, the “skin of realism” of his writing, springs from Hammett’s own detecting experiences. However, his wife, Jose, had grown up in the dingy model town for Poisonville, and would have known her way around it in all its ugliness. She knew the violent history from her vantage point as the adopted daughter of “Captain” William Kelly, an executive at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Even if she didn’t present what she remembered in the style Hammett preferred, her memories would have made excellent atmosphere for a novelist to tease out and rearrange however he liked.

According to his granddaughter Julie Rivett, Hammett’s daughter Jo remembered that he “got irritated with her mother when she talked about the strikes in Anaconda. Grandma, I’m
told, described in positive terms how the strikebreakers were given special privileges—extra food, chocolates, and such. To her, it seemed a wonder.”
⁷
Hammett, who had known strikebreaking more intimately, had not experienced it as wondrous or privileged work but as an ugly and dangerous assignment. Still, despite the gulf in their perspectives, it is hard to dispute he would have gleaned meaningful background from Jose when creating the world of Personville.

“The Cleansing of Poisonville” began appearing serially in
Black Mask
in November 1927. The magazine’s editors hailed the debut of “the first, complete, episode in a series dealing with a city whose administrators have gone mad with power and lust of wealth. It is also, to our minds, the ideal detective story—the new type of detective fiction which
Black Mask
is seeking to develop … Poisonville is written by a master of his craft.”

For all that, Hammett still had to send off his “Poisonville” novel unsolicited to East Coast publishing houses.

* * *

The package mailed to the Fifth Avenue “Editorial Department” offices of Alfred A. Knopf on February 11, 1928, began simply, “Gentlemen” and introduced “an action-detective novel for your consideration. If you don’t care to publish it, will you kindly return it by express, collect.” The writer went on to introduce himself: “I was a Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency operative for a number of years; and, more recently, have published fiction, book reviews, verse, sketches, and so on, in twenty or twenty-five magazines.”

Hammett listed nearly five lines of magazine credits, while saying nothing further about his former career as a genuine sleuth, a distinction that would become so important.

Although he was growing more accustomed to literary success, the answer Hammett received from Blanche Knopf must have been almost as exciting as his first small sale to
The Smart Set
almost six years earlier. Mrs. Knopf, in addition to publishing Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten with her husband, was a savvy young publisher of mysteries who knew something about the detective genre. Born the same year as Hammett, she had founded the Knopf house with Alfred, on a five-thousand-dollar loan from Alfred’s father, in 1915, the year Hammett became a detective. Blanche Knopf’s hand was in everything at the publishing house; in addition to editing many of its established writers, she had even designed the Knopf colophon of a leaping borzoi dog.

Mrs. Knopf felt that, apart from its “hopeless” title, Poisonville was quite publishable and they were “keen” about the manuscript except for the middle of the book, where, she said, “the violence seems piled on too heavily; so many killings on a page I believe make the reader doubt the story.” Beyond publishing this book, she wondered hopefully if Hammett had further “ideas for detective stories” or even any others “under way.”

In fact, he had at least one other under way and more ideas than he even could execute. In his answer, Hammett submitted a list of eight title possibilities for his “Poisonville” book, some of which were even worse:
The Poisonville Murders
,
The Seventeenth Murder
,
Murder Plus
,
The Willsson Matter
,
The City of Death
,
The Cleansing of Poisonville
,
The Black City
, and, finally
, Red Harvest
, upon which they agreed.

Hammett had piled up bodies in “Poisonville” to please the readers of
Black Mask
. But when he went back to prepare it as a
novel for Mrs. Knopf, he found that she (and her editor Harry Block) wanted him to remove a number of extra corpses and at least two dynamitings, and to begin to learn to do some of his killing offstage for a book audience. Dramatically, it didn’t much matter how corrupt the real Butte had been, or how graphic its violence, if the truth seemed unbelievable on the page.

As he reworked his first book he was finishing his second,
The Dain Curse
, and he told Mrs. Knopf that he even had plans for a stream-of-consciousness detective novel, in which the reader learned all the clues just as the investigator did. He considered himself “one of the few—if there are any more—moderately literate people who take the detective story seriously.” Mrs. Knopf was another.

Hammett still had “a flock” of book ideas even as he began to turn his attention toward Hollywood. In April 1928 he received an inquiry from Fox Films about the rights to some of his original material, which included half a dozen stories and his first novel (still in manuscript). He cabled Mrs. Knopf for advice about his “motion picture dickering” and to keep her apprised of his climbing career.
⁸

By April, he wrote her that “If … I make a more transient connection with Fox I’ll probably let the stream-of-consciousness experiment wait awhile, sticking to the more objective and filmable forms.” Wait a while it did. In June, he traveled to Los Angeles to make his pitch, staying downtown at the Alexandria, an elegant eight-story hotel with the popular Palm Court ballroom, and felt like an emerging big shot. There was even hope that Fox would commission original screenplays from him. Even though no money followed from his first
meeting in Hollywood, it does not seem to have shaken his belief that movie studios would ultimately want what he had to sell. Despite the lack of a deal, he followed through on his resolution, from then on, to write books that were more “objective and filmable.”