The Lost Detective (21 page)

8
    Pinkerton records, Box 15, Folder 10.

9
    C.Y.R. report, Aug. 7, 1910, Pinkerton records. The brakeman’s quote “I can see it in my mind’s eye …” comes from an unsigned report in Box 157, Folder 10.

10
  J. V. O’Neill report, Pinkerton records, Box 157, Folder 9.

11
  C. B. Patterson report, Pinkerton records, Box 157. Folder 8.

12
  In reports from the investigation, the missing Sciarrabas are called cousins, and at other times, father and son. Their having the same name, Vincenzo Sciarraba, would seem odd for brothers. In this letter from 1951 (Pinkerton records, Box 87), the discrepancy is more likely a matter of an old man remembering a very old case about suspects he’d never met. See also “The Ambush of William Rice,” Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, Sunday, May 4, 1941.

13
  Hammett interview,
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, Oct. 6, 1929.

Chapter Three

1
    Michael Punke,
Fire and Brimstone
:
The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917
(New York: Hyperion, 2006). Punke’s fine narrative of the disaster cites 163 miner deaths, while briefer accounts often give 168.

2
    “I.W.W. Strike Chief Lynched at Butte,”
New York Times
, Aug. 1, 1917; and Will Roscoe, “The Murder of Frank Little: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” thesis paper, Sentinel High School, Missoula, MN, 1973. Will Roscoe’s paper remains the most extensive popular account of the Little incident. He also recalled researching the Little incident in a 2006 story for the Montana
Standard
.

3
    Punke,
Fire and Brimstone
, p. 209. See also Montana Troopers’ website,
http://www.montanatrooper.com
.

4
    Lillian Hellman,
Scoundrel Time
(New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 46.

5
    Ibid.

6
    Jo Hammett,
A Daughter Remembers
, p. 34. One of Jo Hammett’s collaborators going through these photos was the Hammett historian Don Herron.

7
    Dashiell Hammett,
Red Harvest
(New York: Vintage, 1929), pp. 3–4.

Chapter Four

1
    “World War I: The Ambulance Service,” U.S. Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History, chapter 2, section 40 at
http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/HistoryofUSArmyMSC/chapter2.html
.

2
    John M. Barry,
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
(New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 239. Also see the short Stanford University publication by Molly Billings, “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918,” June 1997, at
https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
.

3
    Barry,
The Great Influenza
, p. 187.

4
    Hammett’s initial diagnosis details are from a transcript of his Veterans’ Administration medical file, transcribed by David Fechheimer on June 17, 1976, and provided to me by Richard Layman (hereafter cited as Hammett VA medical file), pp. 1–3. The VA itself was unable to locate an existing copy in its St. Louis (national records), San Francisco, or Oakland facilities.

5
    Hammett’s VA medical file.

6
    Author’s correspondence with the New York pulmonary specialist Dr. Brian D. Gelbman, March 3, 2013. I shared with Dr. Gelbman the initial diagnosis from Hammett’s VA medical file, and described the close-packed hospital setting in which he was cared for during the influenza outbreak. He agreed it was more likely Hammett had contracted TB while in hospital, weakened initially by the influenza. The army doctors at the time agreed. Of course, with as many specialists as Hammett saw over the years, his file seems more expert some years than in others.

7
    Jo Hammett,
Hammett: A Daughter Remembers
, p. 72.

8
    “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” collected in
Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings
, p. 909.

9
    All discussions of Hammett’s weight and other medical details come from Hammett’s V.A. medical file.

Chapter Five

1
    The twelve surviving love letters, the so-called green-ink letters, turned up in “an old pasteboard hatbox, faded and dusty,” Julie Rivett has written, while the family was cleaning out the last of her late grandmother Jose Hammett’s things before the house was sold. (“On Finding My Grandfather’s Love Letters,” by Julie Marshall Rivett, which was e-mailed to the author.) The letters appear in Hammett,
Selected Letters
. I have supplemented the letters and accounts of the romance in the Layman, Johnson, and Symons biographies with other background histories of World War I nursing.

2
    Hammett,
Selected Letters
, p. 10.

3
    Ibid., p. 20.

Chapter Six

1
    “Tuberculosis Victims to be Rehabilitated,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, July 2, 1922.

2
    Oakland
Tribune
, March 4, 1922, and
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 6, 1922. This last incident sounds some notes echoed in Hammett’s story “Dead Yellow Women,” in
Dead Yellow Women
(New York: Lawrence E. Spivak, 1924).

3
    Hammett’s VA medical file.

4
    Author’s lunch with Fechheimer, July 12, 2012. We have had a couple of lunches together in San Francisco, and he has been a generous e-mail correspondent as well about Hammett arcana and, equally important to a civilian writer, the detective life in general.

5
    Fechheimer, “We Never Sleep: The Old Pinkertons Look Back,” interview with Phil Haultain, in
City of San Francisco
magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975. p. 33.

6
    Dashiell Hammett, “Seven Pages,” in
The Hunter and Other Stories
(New York: Mysterious Press, 2013), p. 142.

7
    Introduction to Dashiell Hammett,
The Big Knockover
(New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xiii.

8
    David Fechheimer, “We Never Sleep: The Old Pinkertons Look Back,” interview with Phil Haultain, in
City of San Francisco
magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975, p.33.

9
    I compiled this account of the cable car robbery and its aftermath using mainly contemporary newspaper accounts. On January 4, 1922, the
San Francisco Chronicle
ran a full map of the thieves’ route, complete with photo insets of the company officials and the gripman and conductor, “Victims of Daylight Robbery on Street Car.” Phil Geauque appears in the January 9
Chronicle
follow-up, “Sleuths Shoot at Cable Car Bandit Suspect.” Haultain’s comments are from Fechheimer’s interview with him, “We Never Sleep …” in
City of San Francisco
magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975.

10
  Hammett’s VA medical file.

11
  David Fechheimer, “Mrs. Hammett is Alive and Well in L.A.”
City of San Francisco
magazine, vol. 9, no. 17, Nov. 4, 1975, p. 36.

Chapter Seven

1
    William Pinkerton came to San Francisco whenever he could, often for the convention of police chiefs. My
portrait of him draws from several long interviews he happily gave to the
Chronicle
in the teens and early twenties (including “Pinkerton Here to Curb Crooks,” Feb. 8, 1915; and “Fiction Wrong about Sleuths, Moving Pictures Mirror Them Truthfully, Says Pinkerton,” June 21, 1922), and from book-length histories of the Pinkerton organization (
Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye
, by James MacKay;
The Eye That Never Sleeps
, by Frank Morn; and
Pinkerton’s Great Detective
, by Beau Riffenburgh).

2
    “Fiction Wrong about Sleuths,” p. 16.

3
    It is interesting to picture him as a reporter, especially in that combative time of muckraking journalism, which might have appealed to his antiauthority bent and confirmed his violent experiences with corruption.

4
    The William Sayers story appears in “Pinkerton Man Retires: Superintendent Sayers Goes South for His Health,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, Oct. 22, 1902. William Pinkerton’s forger tale is told in “Forger Bidwell: Detective Pinkerton’s Story of his Crime and Arrest,”
Minneapolis Tribune
, picked up by the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Sept. 27, 1887.

5
    Carroll John Daly, “Knights of the Open Palm,” from Otto Penzler, ed.,
The Black Lizard Big Book of
Black Mask
Stories
(New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2010), p. 429.

6
    Hammett,
Dead Yellow Women
, pp. 94–95.

7
    Hammett,
Dead Yellow Women
, p. 95.

8
    “House Burglary Poor Trade.” He started with a nameless “type” and “just kept going,” he wrote his
Black Mask
editor.

9
    Hammett,
Selected Letters
, p. 22. Berkeley’s chief of police August Vollmer was a favorite of the Bay Area press, using “psychology instead of the Third Degree” and relying on a strange new machine to tell when suspects were lying: William Hamlin, “What Happens When Your Heart Goes Pit-a-Pat,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 20, 1921; “Super Police Trail Thieves By Radio,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, Oct. 9, 1921; “Greater Study of Crime Urged by Police Head,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, Aug. 2, 1922.

Chapter Eight

1
    This quote appears in the preface to J. Anthony Lukas’s
Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), a magnificent and forgivably sprawling account of the 1905 murder of Idaho’s former governor and the subsequent trial in which Clarence Darrow defended Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners leadership in a case made largely by the Great Detective, James McParland. The Pinkertons even managed to get one of their own, Operative 21, onto Darrow’s defense team. Lukas’s book has the best portrait of McParland and the Pinkertons of this time that I have read, and he alone suggests (as an aside) that McParland inspired Hammett’s Old Man character. It is one of the few side roads in Lukas’s story that he doesn’t eagerly explore, on the notion that it will eventually wind back around to the great main drama he’s describing. No proper Hammett biography I have seen has followed this thread.

2
    Local newspapers in Seattle or Helena or Portland would interview McParland as a visiting celebrity when he made his occasional rounds, with story headlines such as the one a Seattle paper used in 1903: “Looking After the Criminals.” When McParland’s inspection tour reached Montana later the same year, a Helena paper editorialized that “[A]t his tongue’s end is the history of every train and bank robber who has operated in the West from the cradle to the grave.”

3
    From Pinkerton records, Part A: Administrative File, 1857–1999, Reel 4, Frames 0979–0980.

4
    Allan Pinkerton,
The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives
(New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1877), p. 23. But another memorable account of the Molly Maguires investigation appears in James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett’s
The Pinkerton Story
(New York: Putnam, 1951). Horan seems to have been on such good terms with the agency that many of its files were kept in his house while he researched this official book, and here and there, his papers and other memos turn up among the folders in the Pinkerton records.

5
    This (and many other McParland stories) appears in the recent full biography, Beau Riffenburgh,
Pinkerton’s Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland
(New York: Viking, 2013).

Chapter Nine

1
    Hammett’s VA medical file.

2
    Layman,
Shadow Man
, p. 58. This assumes a penny-per-word rate, which was average, and his selling two stories per month.

3
    From Hammett,
Lost Stories
, p. 142.

4
    Hammett,
Selected Letters
, pp. 26–27.

5
    Raymond Chandler,
Trouble Is My Business
(New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 8.

6
    Layman, ed.,
Discovering the Maltese Falcon
, p. 75. This anecdote is from an interview that Layman had with Gardner.

Chapter Ten

1
    Albert Samuels, “Just About Ourselves—Eighty of Us” (advertisement),
San Francisco Chronicle
, Dec. 3, 1922.

2
    E. Sherwood, “A Jeweler Pays for Advertising Lost Articles,”
Printers’ Ink
, May 20, 1920, p. 137.

3
    Ad reproduced in Jo Hammett,
A Daughter Remembers
, p. 51.

4
    “Seven Pages” (unpublished typescript), reproduced in Layman, ed.,
Discovering the Maltese Falcon
.

5
    Dashiell Hammett,
The Glass Key
(New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 14.

6
    Hammett,
Selected Letters
, p. 30.

7
    Hammett’s VA medical file.

8
    I do not suggest this as the only possible inspiration, but Hammett did love to read crime news. Don Herron has nominated a film from 1920 as the genesis,
The Penalty
, starring Lon Chaney as a master criminal known as “Blizzard, the cripple from Hell,” and which features a messy street battle and a heist. The idea was certainly in the air. There was a time in the early twenties, before the rise of Hammett and the
Black Mask
style of writing, when movies were more realistic than novels in their
depictions of crime. William Pinkerton commented on this in 1921, finding the cinematic crime stories startlingly accurate, almost instructively so, while detective novels remained preposterous “bunk.”