It and Other Stories (2 page)

Lillian Hellman's appointees to the Dashiell Hammett literary trust ceded control to the Hammett family in 2003. Because rights to the five novels had already been transferred to Jo Hammett, in 1995 in a negotiated agreement based on copyright extension law, the change in administration applied mainly to Hammett's short stories—and to the Op in particular. The new trustees (including Hammett's grandson, Evan Marshall, and the editors of this volume) took seriously their responsibility to Hammett's legacy. What followed was a new season of engagement and publication, in the United States and abroad. Hammett never ventured overseas, but his Op is a veteran traveler, with recent excursions that include Brazil, Italy, Romania, Poland, Germany, England, and, most notably, France, where a Hammett renaissance has resulted in a flock of new translations and paperback compilations, as well as, in 2011, an omnibus volume that collected virtually all of Hammett's available fiction.

This electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories comes 93 years after his “little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit” narrated his first investigation in
Black Mask
magazine in 1923. It is the first opportunity for readers across the globe to enjoy both what Hammett called “a more complete and true picture of a detective at work” and to witness the growth of his creator, who changed the face of not just American crime fiction, but realistic, literary, and entertaining fiction worldwide. The stories are presented chronologically, with section introductions providing context and insights into Hammett's evolution under his three
Black
Mask
editors—George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody, and Joseph Thompson Shaw. Headnotes original to each story's publication are included, along with Hammett's remarks in letters to the editors. “Three Dimes”—an incomplete Continental Op adventure preserved in Hammett's archive—is included as a bonus to the complete volume.

We offer no pulp paper. No cloth-covered boards or dust jacket. No lurid cover art. No sewn binding or ribbon. Just Hammett's words, as originally published in
Black
Mask
,
True Detective Stories
, and
Mystery Stories
. Our only modifications are silent corrections to spelling and typographical errors preserved on the rare, fragile pages of Hammett's original magazine offerings. Modern publishing provides distinct advantages to those of us who edit—who collect and prepare materials for publication—leaving us grateful for today's more durable manuscripts, nimble word-processing technologies, and the easy mutability of e-files.

Hammett, however, was a man of an earlier era—writing with typewriters or pen, pencil, and paper, computers unconceived. He read bound books, hardcopy magazines, and newspapers in those decades when “papers” was not a metaphor. His image lingers in vintage shades of black and white, bound up with the Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles, washed in afterlife with Lillian Hellman's painterly recollections. It's tempting, then, to imagine our crime-fiction champion rejecting e-reading in favor of bookbinding's tactile pleasures and traditions. “I tell you, it wasn't like this when I was young,” Hammett wrote in 1950. “The world's going to hell: some people claim radio and movies are responsible, but I think it started with the invention of the wheel. If man had been meant to revolve he wouldn't have been born with flat feet.”

He was kidding, of course.

Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today's e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It's a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.

 

J.M.R.

INTRODUCTION

The Early Years: 1923–1924

Dashiell Hammett may have been born with the urge to write, we can't know, but it was happenstance that set the course for his literary fame. His first choice of careers was private investigation. When he turned twenty-one, he joined Pinkerton's National Detective Service as an operative, a job he enjoyed for three years, from 1915 to 1918, before joining the army. He served in a medical unit at Fort Bragg, Maryland, an intake center for soldiers infected with Spanish Influenza returning from the war in Europe. Hammett contracted the flu himself, and that activated a latent strain of tuberculosis probably spread from his mother. He left the army after just less than a year with a sergeant's rating, an honorable discharge, and a disability rating that fluctuated over the next ten years between 20% and 100%, usually hovering midway in between.

After a period of convalescence, Hammett returned to detective work sporadically, until he was hospitalized with tuberculosis for some six months from November 1920 to the following May. Upon his release from the hospital, he moved to San Francisco and married his nurse, Josephine Dolan, in July 1921. Their daughter Mary was born in October. Hammett tried to support his new family as a detective, but he was unable. He retired permanently from the agency in either December 1921 or February 1922, depending on which evidence you choose to accept, due to disability. He was twenty-six, often a virtual invalid, and he needed money.

In February 1922 he commenced a year and a half of study at Munson's School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper reporting objective,” as he wrote in his disability log for the Veterans Bureau. The training shows. His early fiction has a journalistic quality about it—in the best sense. It is clearly written, detail oriented, and plainly narrated, without the strained and sensationalistic flourishes that mark the fiction of other early pulp writers. In October 1922 he began submitting humorous and ironic sketches to
The Smart Set,
the high-brow magazine edited and partially owned by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At their suggestion, after publishing three of his sketches, he lowered his sights to pulp magazines, which offered him steady, if not hefty, paychecks but required that he alter his subject matter. He made his living during most of the twenties on the back of what soon became his series character, the Continental Op, a professional detective.

Hammett's Continental Op is inseparable from the pulp magazine
Black Mask,
which was barely three years old and under new ownership when the Continental Op was introduced. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight published Op stories first appeared there between October 1923 and November 1930, as well as two four-part serial novels featuring the Op. Founded in 1920 by Mencken and Nathan to publish what Mencken called in
My Life as Author and Editor
“hacks of experience,” writing for “murder fans.”
Black Mask
had no literary pretensions in the beginning. Its sole purpose was to make money. Mencken claimed in a 1933 letter to his friend Philip Goodman that he and Nathan could “get out a 128-page magazine at a cash outlay of no more than $500” and did so in the case of
Black Mask
. With “no desire to go on with the
Black Mask
.” Mencken and Nathan sold it in summer 1921 to Eugene Crowe and Eltinge Warner (just before Crowe's death), having earned about $25,000 each for their efforts. From the beginning the magazine was aimed at a blue-collar audience who wanted entertaining stories. Though it is known now as the publication that pioneered hard-boiled detective fiction, in the 10 October 1923 issue, the editor bragged that
Black Mask
published “Rugged adventure and real man and woman romance; rare Western yarns, swift-acting logical detective stories, weird, creepy mystery tales, and the only thrilling, convincing ghost stories to be found anywhere.” In that mix, Hammett found no models, and his sure-footed stories stood out—initially because of their confident, plausible prose and notable absence of gratuitous violence.

Hammett used pseudonyms for his earliest
Black Mask
stories, usually Peter Collinson (from theatre slang for a phantom person). One might guess, and it is only a guess, that he was embarrassed to appear in the cheap pulps—certainly he spoke disparagingly of them later in his life. But he dropped his guard when he was asked for a comment about “the Vicious Circle,” a story about a politician reacting to blackmail published in the15 June 1923
Black Mask
as by Collinson. Hammett replied that the story, which does not feature the Op, was based on cases he experienced as a private detective. He signed the response “S. D. Hammett” and soon afterward abandoned the Collinson pseudonym altogether. Sutton missed the reference. Even though Hammett took particular care in those early stories to describe accurately how a private detective went about his job and in “Zigzags of Treachery” (1 March 1924) provided specific how-to advice, it wasn't until later that Sutton's successor recognized the real-life experience that shaped the Op's workman-like approaches to his cases.

Writers rarely develop in a vacuum. In Hammett's case, the course of his literary development seems clearly enough to have been molded by his editors. He came to write detective fiction because Mencken saw no future for him among the smart set, and at
Black Mask
he clearly was guided in the beginning by his editors' ideas about what would sell in their market, ideas that changed with the man in charge. George W. Sutton, the
Black Mask
editor who agreed after three months on the job to publish “Arson Plus,” had no literary qualifications. He, described himself this way in a farewell message to readers in the 15 March 1924 issue, the last for which he had responsibility:

The Editor is primarily a writer of automobile and motorboat articles, and all during the wonderful period that he has been at the helm of BLACK MASK, he has continued his automobile departments in various publications; using the afternoons and most of every night, every Sunday and holiday, to read the thousands of stories which come in to BLACK MASK—editing them, consulting with authors and artists, writing to readers, and attending to the thousands of details that make up the work necessary to getting out a “peppy” fiction magazine.

Sutton's “various publications” included
Vanity Fair, Collier's, Town & Country, Popular Mechanic
s, and newspaper syndication.

In 1923 Sutton wrote a memo to prospective writers called “The Present needs of Black Mask,” in which he lamented that “BLACK MASK finds it very difficult to get exactly the kind of stories it wants. We can print stories of horror, supernatural but explainable phenomena and gruesome tales which no other magazine in the country would print, but they must be about human beings, convincing, entertaining, and interest impelling.” Sutton warned in his memo: “We do not care for purely scientific detective stories which lack action; and we are prejudiced by experience against the psychological story which is not very rugged and intense.”

Though
Black Mask
is regarded, appropriately, as the birthplace of hard-boiled fiction, the hard-boiled story was still in gestation under Sutton. While crime was a staple of his
Black Mask
, it was but one ingredient of the editorial mix, and only the earliest stories of Carroll John Daly, featuring cartoonishly violent protagonists acting out what seem to be the author's homicidal, tough-guy fantasies, could properly be called hard boiled. Hammett set out to fulfill
Black Mask
's needs with stories about a short, portly, tough, nameless detective for the Continental Detective Agency, based obviously on Pinkerton's, who described his cases in procedural detail.

Hammett was known to Sutton and his associate editor Harry North only through correspondence and his fiction. Hammett lived in San Francisco; the editorial offices were in New York. Sutton made an effort to stay in touch with his writers and his readers, though. He solicited letters from his writers about the genesis of their stories, and he encouraged readers to write in with their reactions, which he published, criticisms and all. Hammett responded to Sutton's requests regularly, and his letters are included here after the stories on which they comment.

By the time his fourth Op story was published, Hammett was advertised by Sutton as having “suddenly become one of the most popular of
Black Mask
writers, because his stories are always entertaining, full of action and very unusual situations.” They were also notably restrained by
Black Mask
standards. In those first four stories the Op does not carry a gun. In the first two there are no deaths; in the third there is one offstage murder and one murder before the story begins; and in the fourth there is one off- stage murder and one shooting. In the next five stories, Hammett's last under Sutton's editorship, there are a total of five murders during the action. Though the Op had an occasional fistfight, under Sutton he never killed a person; the crooks are the murderous ones. But Sutton went back to motorsports at the end of March 1924—his
Camping by the Highway: Autocamper's Handbook and Directory of Camp Sites
was published by Field and Stream Publishing Company in 1925—and though Hammett was among the core writers on whose talents Sutton's successors planned to build, the new editor had different ideas about what makes an entertaining story.

The reputations of Hammett and the magazine that nurtured his talent rose together, and by 1930 each had altered the course of English-language literature.
Black Mask
had grown in circulation to 100,000 copies a month, and it was grudgingly respected as the unquestioned king of the pulps, beginning to show its influence in the mainstream development of tough-guy literature. Hammett, already regarded as the master of the hard-boiled detective story, was being recognized as a major force in what arguably can be called America's most talented literary generation, the generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. Hammett did not regard the Op stories, early or late, as his best work—he reserved that distinction for
The Maltese Falcon
(serialized in
Black Mask
from September 1928–January 1929) and
The Glass Key
(serialized in
Black Mask
from March to June 1930)—but there is no question that he used these stories to test characters, plots, and dialogue he used in his novels, and his genius shines through in every one.

 

R.L.