The Lost Detective (2 page)

Being an operative gave Hammett work as he relocated across the country (Baltimore, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco), and since the ops routinely had their reports edited or rewritten by supervisors for their Pinkerton clients, the experience made up a kind of literary training, just as Hammett later insisted.

How could the poised creator of
The Maltese Falcon
or
Red Harvest
have come to a writing career so late, seemingly without the customary years of practice and ambition? One answer lies in the hundreds of operative reports in boxes at the Pinkerton archives in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Sadly, Hammett’s own dispatches are not among them, but those of his contemporaries in the Agency show how much of his approach was encouraged by their general training: the habits
of observation, the light touch and nonjudgment while writing studiously about lowlifes. He just took it further.

His Continental Op stories clearly evolved from the form of these Pinkerton reports, which is not to say any of his colleagues could have written his stories or books, but that the seasoning he received on the job was crucial to what he later became. Among the better Pinkerton writers there was in-house competitive name-dropping of street monikers, to show they were “assimilating” with the right crooks, as the founder, Allan Pinkerton, had insisted they do.

Hammett claimed to have learned about writing at the agency, where he clearly acquired some of his craft reading dozens of memos such as this one (from 1901) by Assistant Superintendent Beutler of the New York office, whose stable of informants might have held their own in any of Hammett’s stories:

To-night, on my return from the race track, I met Informant Birdstone in Engel’s Chop house, where we had supper together. He stated that several bands of pickpockets were now being got together for the purpose of following President McKinley on his jaunting trip … The crooks are to meet in the vicinity of Houston, Tex. One band is headed by “Bull” Hurley, Charlie Hess, “Big Eddie” Fritz and Pete Raymond, a California pickpocket. Another by John Lester, Dyke and Joe Pryor, alias “Walking Joe,” “Hob nail” Reilly, Parkinson, a Chicago pickpocket, and Billy Seymour.
¹¹

It’s not a huge stretch to imagine Hob Nail Reilly or Walking Joe Pryor sharing a jail cell a few years later with any of the
gang summoned for the epic bank job in Hammett’s
The Big Knockover
: Toby the Lugs, Fat Boy Clarke, Alphabet Shorty McCoy, the type of men a sharp Pinkerton would have cultivated for his files.

Just as the
Kansas City Star
(with its famous style sheet requiring short sentences and vigorous English) helped shape the prose of the young Ernest Hemingway, out of the scores of men trained as Pinkertons, one emerged from the Agency able to make something entirely new from his experiences. “Detecting has its high spots,” Hammett recalled in the twenties, “but the run of the work is the most monotonous that any one could imagine. The very things that can be made to sound the most exciting in the telling are in the doing usually the most dully tiresome.” His deeper skills lay in that telling.

Over a five-year run, Hammett took command of the crime writing field, publishing the novels
Red Harvest
,
The Dain Curse
,
The Maltese Falcon
,
and
The Glass Key
between 1929 and 1931, and adding
The Thin Man
in 1934. By the early thirties, he was a poor man turned suddenly flush, his fortunes risen even as the country slid into depression; he had gone to New York with a woman not his wife, the writer Nell Martin, kept a car and a chauffeur and spent well beyond his considerable means at fancy hotels on both coasts, sending postcards and matchbooks to his daughters from the lobbies of his new life, which often had a flamboyant unreality like the movies.

Hammett liked to embellish his old Pinkerton career, especially when flogging new projects in newspaper interviews. Had the California cable car robbery, a bold noontime holdup of company payroll on a moving cable car, been his final case, or was it the gold theft aboard the steamer SS
Sonoma
? Did he
work for the defense on the first rape and manslaughter trial of the comedian Fatty Arbuckle in 1921, or was he already too sick? (He would give a convincing description of spotting Arbuckle in a San Francisco hotel lobby: “His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be seen as a monster but was not yet inured to it.”)

Sometimes it was the
Sonoma
case that had finished Hammett’s detective career; other times, the trapping of “Gloomy Gus” Schaefer for robbery, complete with a tale of Hammett’s riding down a collapsing porch while on stakeout. Had he really decided there was “more fun in writing about manhunting than in that hunting,” as he remembered it in 1924, or had his bad lungs forced his decision? “[B]eing a professional busybody requires more energy, more dogged patience, than you’d suppose,” he said five years later. “There never was anything lacking in the matter of my curiosity.”
¹²

One story he relished telling, about being offered five thousand dollars to kill an organizer for the International Workers of the World named Frank Little during a miners’ strike in 1917, shocked most people he knew since it ran so afoul of his later radical beliefs. When Hammett claimed he had once turned down a bribe to kill the Wobbly agitator (as IWW members were known), his daughter Mary recalled in 1975, “It was a shock when I heard about it and I said, ‘You mean you were working for Pinkerton against the IWW?’ And he said, ‘That’s right.’”
¹³
He didn’t care “if his clients were bums,” Mary added. “He was strictly out to do his job.”
HE DIDN’T CARE IF HIS CLIENTS WERE BUMS. HE WAS STRICTLY OUT TO DO HIS JOB
would make a nice epitaph for his most famous creation, Sam Spade.

By the time the detectives he’d invented had their own renown, the one Hammett had been himself was cloudy, cloaked in his own disguising, and unacknowledged by the Pinkerton agency that had supposedly trained him in the devilish arts. Yet all his investigators were extensions in one direction or another of the one he had been himself: the gritty little company man of the Op stories who lives for the dogged joys of sleuthing; the handsome, wolfish PI Sam Spade, who does whatever he must for his client (a “dream man,” Hammett wrote, “what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been”); the tall, tubercular fixer on an unlucky gambling streak, Ned Beaumont, battling in a town very like Hammett’s native Baltimore; and finally, the glib and cynical Nick Charles, the ex-detective from San Francisco whose life is one long charmed bender.

Hammett was not a diarist, and he pitched most of his letters as he moved around. His transformation from working detective to writer was in part a function of his sickly health, and his U.S. Army medical file tells the biography of his illness—the vagaries of his weight and lung capacity and official judgments of his disability from the time of his discharge in 1919. With tuberculosis he was slowly incapacitated out of conventional employment, especially the detective work he’d largely enjoyed. Still needing money for his family, but often too sick to leave his apartment, he took a stab at writing.

*
When recently asked to recall on which hand she remembered seeing her father’s famous knifepoint scar, Jo Hammett answered through her daughter Julie Rivett that she was pretty sure it was his left hand. This suggests he got the wound shielding himself against a knife blow with his nondominant hand.

[The detective] must appear the careless, ordinary individual, particularly to those upon whom he is to operate. Assimilating, as far as possible, with the individuals who are destined to feel the force of his authority, and by appearing to know but little, acquire all the information possible to gather from every conceivable source.

—A
LLAN
P
INKERTON
,
T
HIRTY
Y
EARS A
D
ETECTIVE
(1884)

A good detective has to be brave, vigorous, damnably clever, tireless—altogether a real person! His is an extraordinarily complicated mechanism
.

—D
ASHIELL
H
AMMETT
, 1929

I had started out with the big agency to see the world and learn human nature.

—C
HARLIE
S
IRINGO
,
A C
OWBOY
D
ETECTIVE

BALTIMORE, 1915

Even if he had finished alongside his high school classmates at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, it is difficult to imagine Samuel D. Hammett among the self-possessed upperclassmen pictured in the school’s yearbooks, old-looking boys in dark suits with class pages touting their skills in metalwork and German translation. Instead, he left school at age fourteen to help his family, and over the five and a half years since then, he had tried on a variety of professions and laid all of them aside: office messenger for the B&O railroad, paperboy, dockworker, nail machine operator, “very junior” advertising clerk, timekeeper in a cannery, salesman for his father’s hapless seafood business. He was often let go “most amiably,” he recalled.

The family had lived in both Philadelphia and Baltimore since Sam’s birth on May 27, 1894, at the Hammett tobacco farm, Hopewell and Aim, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland; born, as he put it, between the Potomac and Patuxent Rivers. Sam was named for his paternal grandfather, Samuel Biscoe Hammett Jr., who, after the death of his first wife in the 1880s,
had married a much younger woman named Lucy with whom he started a second family almost contemporaneous with the arrival of his grandchildren. All of them crowded into the three-story farmhouse. After losing a bitterly fought county election, young Sam’s father, Richard Thomas Hammett, sought a fresh start by moving his own family, a wife and three young children, briefly to Philadelphia. He experienced disappointments in that city, too, and in 1901 he moved the family again, this time to Baltimore and the row house rented by his wife’s mother at 212 North Stricker Street, near Franklin Square. He had gone from the house of his father to that of his wife’s mother, with brief failures in between.

Though Richard’s ambitions tended more toward politics, his social skills and temperament did not; he took a job as a streetcar conductor, and the Hammett children entered Public School Number 72. As a city boy, young Sam Hammett could cite his country roots, and when he returned on summer visits to his grandfather’s farm, he could just as rightly put on citified airs. The family would move twice more around Baltimore, only to return to the mother-in-law’s when Richard’s political and business schemes fell through. This would be Sam’s home until he was in his twenties.

From boyhood, Hammett was an incorrigible reader and prowler of public libraries whose tastes ran from swashbucklers and dime Westerns to edifying works of European philosophy and manuals of technical expertise. It was a habit that nourished him early on and sustained him through his later illnesses flat on his back. While a boy, his late-night reading sessions often left him difficult to rouse in the morning, complained his mother, Annie Bond Hammett, a small, frail,
yet forthright woman known as Lady, who supported his curiosity and certainly encouraged his confidence. The narrator of Hammett’s autobiographical fragment,
Tulip
, remembers this about his mother:

She never gave me but two pieces of advice and they were both good. “Never go out in a boat without oars, son,” she said, “even if it’s the Queen Mary; and don’t waste your time on women who can’t cook because they’re not likely to be much fun in the other rooms either.”

It was probably Annie Hammett who met the census taker at the door of their row house in Philadelphia in 1900, since it was recorded that 2942 Poplar Street was then home to three children: Reba, Richard, and a six-year-old middle child, “Dashell.” Hammett’s evolution from Sam to Dashiell is not a straight line, but his mother certainly called him Dashiell (Da-SHEEL) as a boy, a name he later put on his stories and books and, ultimately, came to be called by almost everyone.
^*
Hammett seems to have had a strong and comfortable relationship with his mother and his older sister, Reba, and would get on more easily with women
throughout his life. According to his second cousin Jane Fish Yowaiski, later interviewed by Josiah Thompson, only Sam’s mother could make him go to church.

No writing about Annie neglects to point out how she held herself a little above her husband’s family, and not without reason. She proudly told her children about her own mother’s people, who were originally French Huguenots called the De Schiells (pronounced Da-SHEEL, like Hammett’s middle name within the family), a surname Americanized as “Dashiell.” The family was at least as settled as the Hammetts, whose earliest ancestor in Maryland died in 1719. James Dashiell had arrived in the state in 1663, according to a family history, cropping the ears of his cattle in the fleur-de-lis pattern favored by his French grandmother. Sam’s mother told him tales of the Old World De Schiells filled with chateaux and knights, passing along their rather unambitious family motto, “Ny Tost Ny Tard” (“Neither Soon nor Late”).

Because Richard Hammett’s family always needed money Annie Hammett worked private nursing jobs when possible, despite a chronic cough and weakness that otherwise kept her close to home. Hammett seems to have shared his mother’s opinion that Richard Hammett was not worthy of her, or at least that he could have treated her much better: in addition to his failures as a breadwinner (as a manufacturer agent, then a clerk, salesman, and a conductor) Richard was something of a ladies’ man who liked to dress sharp for his other women. Hammett’s cousin Jane Yowaiski recalled Richard’s visits to her family in the 1930s, looking like “the Governor of Maryland” and often driven by attractive younger women whom he’d introduce as his “friend.”
¹