The Lost Detective (22 page)

Chapter Eleven

1
    Hammett,
Red Harvest
, pp. 3–4.

2
    The Montana historian Jack Crowley has made a good study of the similarities between Personville and Butte in his 2008 paper “
Red Harvest
and Dashiell Hammett’s Butte,” in
Montana Professor
18, no. 2 (Spring 2008), at
http://mtprof.msun.edu
. Another good discussion can be found in George Everett’s “The Seeds of
Red Harvest
: Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville” post in the blog
Only in Butte
(
www.butteamerica.com/hist.htm
), and Don Herron paints the strikebreaking scene well in his post, “Hammett: Playing the Sap,” from his Hammett blog
Up and Down These Mean Streets
(March 5, 2011). Some reviewers have seen the novel as a muckraking work of semi-reportage like
The Jungle
. André Gide saw it as a Marxist tract.

3
    Punke,
Fire and Brimstone
, p. 211. Punke does not discuss Hammett’s claims, but the disgraced chief detective Morrissey seems a far likelier suspect in the Little death.

4
    Hammett,
Red Harvest
, p. 86.

5
    Jo Hammett,
A Daughter Remembers
, p. 62.

6
    Hammett,
Red Harvest
, p. 163.

7
    From an e-mail with the author, March 29, 2012.

8
    Date per Layman,
Shadow Man
, p. 98. Quote about “motion picture dickering” per Diane Johnson,
Dashiell
Hammett: A Life
(New York: Fawcett/Columbine, 1983), p. 73. Julian Symons also has an excellent account of Hammett’s adventures in Hollywood in
Dashiell Hammett
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 73–81.

Chapter Twelve

1
    Hammett,
Maltese Falcon
, Modern Library ed., introduction.

2
    Hammett,
Maltese Falcon
, Vintage ed., p. 90.

3
    Arney was quite generous with my e-mailed questions and even wrote me a definitive account of his life in the apartment, when I was unable to locate a copy of the brochure he’d once written about it. Also see the
New York Times
travel story “San Francisco Noir” (June 29, 2014), and Don Herron’s blog post “Hammett and Prohibition,” in
Up and Down These Mean Streets
, Dec. 25, 2014, (see “891 Post,” at
http://www.donherron.com/?p=7465
), and in the same blog, Herron’s splendid write-ups of all the Hammett apartments, covered individually in “The Tour” (at
http://www.donherron.com/?page_id=51
).

Chapter Thirteen

For Hammett’s years in Hollywood, I consulted Diane Johnson’s
Dashiell Hammett
, William Nolan’s
Hammett: A Life at the Edge
, Julian Symons’s Hammett biography, Lillian Hellman’s books, and Layman’s
Shadow Man
. But Layman’s commentaries in
The Hunter
and
Return of the Thin Man
are especially useful.

1
    Layman,
Shadow Man
, p. 125.

2
    Hammett,
Selected Letters
, p. 50.

3
    Hammett,
The Glass Key
, p. 6.

4
    Layman,
Shadow Man
, p. 125.

5
    Ibid.

6
    Lillian Hellman,
An Unfinished Woman
(New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 226. In the account of the meeting in Diane Johnson’s
Hammett: A Life
, which Johnson wrote with Hellman’s active participation, someone introduced the pair at Musso and Frank, the Hollywood bar and grill on Hollywood Boulevard that’s still there. Since Hammett was already known to her husband, and the two shared a group of friends, chances are they looked each other over at several gatherings before the extended night of drinking and T. S. Eliot.

7
    Symons,
Dashiell Hammett
, p. 74.

8
    W. E. Farbstein, “Techniques of Stopping a Run on a Bank,”
New York Herald Tribune
, April 26, 1931.

9
    Jo Hammet,
A Daughter Remembers
, p. 70.

10
  Johnson,
Dashiell Hammett
, p. 103.

11
  The story of the writing of
The Thin Man
appears in various bios and in Hellman’s
Unfinished Woman
, and in
The Last Laugh: The Final Word from the First Name in Satire
, by S. J. Perleman (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2000), whose account of Hammett’s sneaky departure from the Pierre is unrivaled. But the most thorough account of Hammett’s time at the Sutton appears in Marion Meade’s
Lonelyhearts
:
The Screwball Life of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney
(New York: Mariner/
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2010). Meade identifies Hammett’s rooms as the Diplomatic Suite.

12
  Hellman,
An Unfinished Woman
, p. 270.

13
  Dashiell Hammett,
The Thin Man
(1933; repr. New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 7.

14
  Hammett,
Selected Letters
, p. 84.

Afterword
: A Hundred Bucks

1
    Johnson,
Dashiell Hammett
, p. 126. For an account of the Stein party, see James B. Mellow,
Charmed Circle
(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1974), pp. 407–8.

2
    Mellow,
Charmed Circle
, pp. 407–8. Alma Whitaker’s
Los Angeles Times
column (Sugar & Spice) of April 2, 1935, contains the comparison to Queen Victoria and concludes, “She is either diabolically humorous or completely devoid of that trait. I’m still not sure.” See also Gertrude Stein, “Why I Like Detective Stories,”
Harper’s Bazaar
, Nov. 1937; and Stein’s own
Everybody’s Autobiography
(New York: Random House, 1937), p. 193. For further evidence of Stein’s appreciation of what Hammett could do, see her posthumously published attempt at a detective novel,
Blood on the Dining Room Floor
. Part of her impressions of the homecoming tour ran in the February 1935
Cosmopolitan
magazine.

3
    Johnson,
Dashiell Hammett
, p. 126.

4
    These titles are assembled from a number of interviews and letters over the years, one of them given quickly to a
Los Angeles Times
reporter who found Hammett on his way to visit his daughter in LA.

5
    Hammett,
Selected Letters
, p. 417.

6
    Raymond Chandler,
The Simple Art of Murder
(New York: Vintage Crime, 1988), p. 15.

7
    Hellman,
An Unfinished Woman
, p. 54.

Asbury, Herbert.
The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld
. New York: Garden City Publishing, 1933.

Barry, John M.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Blum, Howard.
Dark Invasion. 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America
. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

Burnett, W. R.
Little Caesar
. New York: Avon, 1945. First published 1929 by Dial Press.

Chandler, Raymond.
The Simple Art of Murder
. New York: Vintage Crime, 1988.

——.
Trouble Is My Business
. New York: Vintage Crime, 1992.

Dashiell, Benjamin Jones.
Dashiell Family Records
, Vols. 1–3. Baltimore, MD: B. H. Dashiell, 1928–1932.

Dillon, Richard H.
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown
. Fairfield and Vacaville: JSP Pub, 1962.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan.
The Valley of Fear
. New York: Berkley Publishing, 1915.

Edwords, Clarence E.
Bohemian San Francisco: Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes
. San Francisco, CA: Paul Elder and Company, 1914.

Fenton, Charles A.
The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years
. New York: Viking, 1954.

Friedman, Morris.
The Pinkerton Labor Spy
. Chatsworth, CA: Wilshire Book Co., 1907.

Glasscock, C. B.
The War of the Copper Kings
. Helena, MT: Riverbend Publications, 2002. First published 1935 by The Bobbs-Merrill Co.

Hammett, Dashiell.
The Big Knockover
. New York: Vintage Crime, 1989.

——.
Blood Money
. New York: Dell, 1947.

——.
The Continental Op
. New York: Dell, 1945.

——.
The Continental Op
. Edited by Steven Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1992.

——.
The Dain Curse
. New York: Vintage, 1989.

——.
Dashiell Hammett: Selected Letters, 1921-1960
. Edited by Richard Layman, and Julie M. Rivett. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2001.

——.
Dead Yellow Women
. New York: Laurence E. Spivak, 1947.

——.
The Glass Key.
New York: Vintage, 1989.

——.
Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings
. New York: Library of America, 2001.

——.
The Hunter and Other Stories
. Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013).

——.
Lost Stories
. Edited by Vince Emery. San Francisco, CA: Vince Emery Productions, 2005.

——.
The Maltese Falcon
. New York: Vintage, 1992. First published 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf.

——.
The Maltese Falcon
. New York: Modern Library, 1934.

——.
A Man Called Spade and Other Stories
. New York: Dell, 1944.

——.
Nightmare Town: Stories
. New York: Vintage Crime, 1999.

——.
Red Harvest
. New York: Vintage Crime, 1992. First published 1929 by Alfred A. Knopf.

——.
The Return of the Continental Op
. New York: Dell, 1945.

——.
Return of the Thin Man
. Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. New York: Mysterious Press, 2012.

——.
The Thin Man
. New York: Vintage, 1972. First published 1933 by Alfred A. Knopf.

——.
Woman in the Dark: A Novel of Dangerous Romance
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933.

Hammett, Jo.
Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers
. Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2001.

Hellman, Lillian.
Scoundrel Time
. New York: Bantam, 1976.

——.
An Unfinished Woman
. New York: Bantam, 1974.

Herron, Don.
The Dashiell Hammett Tour
. San Francisco, CA: Emery/Ace Performer, 2009.

Holt, Patricia.
The Good Detective: True Cases from the Confidential Files of Hal Lipset, America’s Real-Life Sam Spade
. New York: Pocket, 1991.

Horan, James D., and Howard Swiggett.
The Pinkerton Story
. New York: Putnam, 1951.

Johnson, Diane.
Dashiell Hammett: A Life
. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1983.

Johnson, Paul C.
The Early Sunset Magazine, 1898–1928
. San Francisco, CA: California Historical Society, 1973.

Layman, Richard, ed.
Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade
. San Francisco, CA: Vince Emery Productions, 2005.

——, ed.
Literary Masters Volume 3: Dashiell Hammett
. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2000.

——.
Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett
. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

Lukas, J. Anthony.
Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

MacKay, James.
Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye
. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996.

McWatters, George S.
Knots Untied: Or, Ways and By-Ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives
. Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr and Hyde, 1871.

Meade, Marion.
Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney
. New York: Mariner/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2010.

Mellow, James B.
Charmed Circle
. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1974.

Morn, Frank.
The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency
. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.

Nolan, William.
Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook
. Santa Barbara, CA: McNally and Loftin, 1969.

——.
Hammett: A Life at the Edge
. New York: Congdon and Weed, 1983.

O’Brien, Robert.
This Is San Francisco: A Classic Portrait of the
City
. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1994. First published 1948 by Whittlesey House.

Penzler, Otto, ed.
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
. New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2010.

Perelman, S. J.
The Last Laugh: The Final Word from the First Name in Satire
. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2000.

Pinkerton, Allan.
The Model Town and the Detectives
. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1876.

——.
The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives
. G. W. Dillingham, 1877.

——.
The Expressman and the Detective
. Chicago: W. B. Keen, Cooke, 1874.

——.
Thirty Years a Detective
. Warwick, NY: 1500 Books, 2007.

Poe, Edgar Allan.
Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe
. New York: Perennial, 1970.

Punke, Michael.
Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917
. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Riffenburgh, Beau.
Pinkerton’s Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland
. New York: Viking, 2013.