Today’s Almanac-May 27, 2010
There were mysteries before, and detective stories. But before Dashiell Hammett, born May 27, 1894, there was never the gritty realism of the genre that would become known as hard-boiled detective fiction. He was born on a southern Maryland farm but grew up on the streets of Baltimore and Philadelphia. He left home and school at the age of thirteen to work a variety of menial jobs. In 1915 he stumbled on a job with the Baltimore office of the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency, housed in the Continental Building. He fell under the tutelage of agent James Wright, a profane street smart veteran on whom Hammett would later model his first detective hero known only as the Continental Op. In 1917 Hammett found himself assigned to a frequent task of the Pinkertons-strike breaking-in Butte, Montana where he witnessed the castration and lynching of Frank Little, a leading organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) strike against Anaconda Copper. Pinkerton agents were widely suspected of complicity in the murder with vigilantes of a local businessmen’s committee. Hammett’s revulsion at the role of strike breaker and scab herder launched his left wing sympathies, but he continued as a working detective until leaving the agency in 1918 to enlist in the Army for service in World War I. He was assigned to the Ambulance Corps as a sergeant, but before he could be sent to France he fell victim to the world wide Spanish Influenza epidemic. Desperately ill, he was hospitalized in Tacoma, Washington where he contracted tuberculosis in his weakened condition. He fell in love with his nurse, Josephine Dolan and married her. Upon recovery and discharge from the Army Hammett returned to the Pinkerton Agency and was assigned to the San Francisco office. He worked on a variety of cases and was said to bear scars on his head and legs from encounters with criminals and suspects. Still weakened, Hammett quit the agency in 1921 and tried his hand at advertising to support his young family. But he was restless and drank heavily. He turned to writing. He submitted and published his first story in the magazine Smart Set in 1922. Turning to his years as a detective for inspiration, he found a more congenial home in the popular pulp magazine The Mask where his gritty crime stories introduced and developed the character the Continental. In 1926, after the birth of a second daughter, doctors advised the family not to live with Hammett to avoid tuberculosis infection. He set them up in a San Francisco apartment and visited on weekends. But the marriage crumbled, although he would continue to support the family with his writings. In 1929 Hammett published his first novel Red Harvest featuring the Continental Op and drawing on his own experiences in Butte for a story of industrial tyranny, municipal corruption, wide spread violence between competing gangs of gun thugs originally brought into town as strike breakers, all sorted out by the world weary detective framed for murder. The novel was a huge success and Hammett followed it up the same year with another Continental Op yarn, The Dain Curse. In 1930 Hammett launched a new character, Sam Spade, a private eye with his own moral code negotiating the seamy edges of society. The Maltese Falcon became Hammett’s most famous book and drew him to Hollywood where the first movie version of the story staring Ricardo Cortez was released in 1931. Meanwhile he finished The Glass Key, his own personal favorite of all of his novels. The same year he began a thirty year affair with a script girl and aspiring writer, Lillian Hellman. Their relationship was stormy due to Hammett’s drinking and chronic womanizing. But he adored and her fierce her intellect. By the mid ‘30’s he was living comfortably in Los Angeles. Drawing on his relationship with Hellman he created Nick Charles a gin soaked “retired” detective living off his wealthy, witty wife Nora who winks at his infidelities and matches him drink for drink. The Thin Man was Hammett’s last novel. He thereafter published a handful of stories, dabbled as a screenwriter, and at least lent his name to radio scripts. In collaboration with Hellman he spent most of his time supporting left wing causes. Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, he became a fierce anti-fascist and joined the American Communist Party in 1937 and was a prominent member of the League of American Writers. During the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact Hammett dutifully followed the Party line and helped establish the writers group’s Keep America Out of War Committee. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor he pulled strings to re-enlist in the Army as 48 year old tubercular wreck. He spent most of the war in the Aleutian Islands editing a newspaper for the troops and co-writing an official history brutal, neglected northern campaign. Always a heavy smoker, he came back from service wracked with emphysema on top of his still active TB. He resumed his political activities as the post-war Red Scare heated up. Then living in New York he was elected President of the Civil Rights Congress of New York in 1946 and set up bail fund for those accused of political offenses and served as one of its three trustees. In 1947 the bail fund was designated officially as a Communist Front Group on the new Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organization. Two years later the committee fronted $260,000 in secured bonds for the release of 11 men appealing their convictions under the Smith Act for “plotting to overthrow the United States Government by force and violence.” When some of them jumped bail after losing their appeals, Hammett was subpoenaed to testify as to the whereabouts of the fugitives and the sources of the bail money. He refused to supply a list of donors and invoked the Fifth Amendment to all questions in a hearing before the District Court. He was convicted of contempt of court. He served five months in prison and was slapped with an Internal Revenue Service bill for $100,000 in unpaid taxes upon his release. In 1953 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in its investigation of Communists in Hollywood. He freely testified as to his own activities but refused to “name names.” Along with Hellman, he was placed on the infamous blacklist. Hammett’s health continued to deteriorate as his drinking worsened. He spent most of the last years of his life as a virtual hermit in a small rural cottage in Katonah, New York visited occasionally by Hellman. He died of lung cancer in New York City in 1961 and as a veteran of two World Wars was buried with full honors in Arlington National Cemetery. Raymond Chandler, one of Hammett’s literary heirs summed up his contribution to the mystery genre, “Hammett wrote... for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse ... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”