The Main Death and This King Business (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 Later Years: 1926–1930

Dashiell Hammett served his apprenticeship under editors Sutton and Cody, but by the end of 1925 he had outgrown them. When Cody refused his demand for more money, Hammett quit the magazine, and in March 1926 he took a job as advertising manager at Albert S. Samuels Jewelry Store in San Francisco, “the House of Lucky Wedding Rings.” The pay was $350 per month (about $55,000 per year in 2015 dollars), double his monthly income from writing for the pulps. It was his first full-time job in at least three years and, more likely, since he left the army. At Samuels he impressed his boss with his energy and ingenuity, working from 8 to 6, six days a week—but it was too much. Five months later, on 20 July, he was found collapsed in his office, lying in a pool of blood. His younger daughter Josephine was not quite two months old. Eight weeks later, Samuels wrote a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau certifying that Hammett had resigned his position due to ill health. His earnings, now reduced to disability payments, dropped to $80 per month plus payment for some part-time work he did for Samuels. Moreover, the Veterans Bureau nurses insisted that Hammett live apart from his wife and children, which meant two rent payments. Within three months, he moved to 891 Post St. (the address of Sam Spade's apartment in
The Maltese Falcon
) and Jose and the girls stayed first in an apartment in San Francisco, then across San Francisco Bay in Fairfax in Marin County. Hammett, meanwhile, tried to revive his advertising career from his apartment, publishing how-to articles in
Western Advertising.

Meanwhile, a shakeup was materializing at
Black Mask.
Circulation was decreasing sharply, and Cody, whose attentions were divided among other Pro-Distributors projects, needed a new editor to revitalize the magazine. The successful applicant was a fifty-one-year old aspiring mystery writer who had submitted his first story to
Black Mask
in summer 1926. Joseph Thompson Shaw was a most unlikely candidate to edit a pulp detective-fiction magazine. He was a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he was a member of the editorial board for the school literary magazine. He was a four-time national sabers champion. He had worked as a journalist at
The New York World
, as a clerk at G. P. Putnam's publishing company, and as editor of
American Textile Journal,
before embarking on a successful career in the textile business. Then he opened his own office to sell securities on the stock exchange. He wrote a history of the textile industry,
From Wool to Cloth
(American Woolen Co., 1904), and a travel book,
Spain of To-Day
(NY: Grafton, 1909). During WWI he served as a captain in the army and after the war as an officer in the American Relief Administration in France, and as director of the Bureau for Children's Relief in Czechoslovakia. And he was socially connected. In February 1925, the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
noted that he was a member of the Pinehurst Country Club in Brooklyn, where he was frequently seen taking tea and dancing with his wife after polo and golf matches. Shaw's first mystery story, “Makings,” was published in the December 1926 issue of
Black Mask
, the month after he took over from Cody as editor.

Shaw was the first full-time editor of
Black Mask
, and he took his job seriously. Though he had no experience in pulp magazine publishing, he was an excellent businessman and a superb promoter. His primary goal was to separate
Black Mask
from the rest of the pulp-fiction field by virtue of the quality of its fiction, detective fiction. Upon assuming the editor's chair, he read through back issues of the magazine to identify the authors he wished to cultivate. He chose four, whom he called his “backfield,” employing a football metaphor: Erle Stanley Gardner, J. Paul Suter, Carroll John Daly, and Hammett, his favorite among them; for the line he named “a splendid nucleus” in Tom Curry, Raoul Whitfield, and Frederick Nebel. In the introduction to a 1946 anthology of stories from
Black Mask
, Shaw recalled his first days as editor:

We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective story differing from that accredited to the Chaldeans and employed more recently by Gaborieau, Poe, Conan Doyle—in fact universally by detective story writers; that is, the deductive type, the cross-word puzzle sort, lacking—deliberately—all other human emotional values. …

So we wrote to Dashiell Hammett. His response was immediate and most enthusiastic:
That is exactly what I've been thinking about and working toward. As I see it, the approach I have in mind has never been attempted. The field is unscratched and wide open. …

We felt obligated to stipulate our boundaries. We wanted simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief. We wanted action, but we held that action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three-dimensional form.

Hammett's enthusiasm was amplified by Shaw's check for $300, the money Hammett felt Cody had owed him earlier in the year. Shaw also passed along what he represented as lavish praise from Cody and Gardner. By February 1927 Hammett was back in the fold. He responded with his most accomplished short fiction to date, the “The Big Knock-Over,” the linked story “$106,000 Blood Money,” and “The Main Death,” all Op stories and his only submissions to
Black Mask
for the next year, totaling just under 45,000 words. They are also his most violent.

With “The Big Knock-Over” Hammett's writing took on a new energy. The language was sharper than before; the plotting was more interesting; the dialogue was surer; and the dramatic scenes were more vivid. There was more action than in Hammett's earlier stories, and the action was linked to real-life crime, as Shaw reminded readers in his introductory blurb, which mentioned the Illinois gang wars and a recent mail-truck robbery in Elizabeth, New Jersey that netted more than $800,000 and eventually left six people dead: “Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness–yet can anyone be sure that it isn't likely to occur?” The Op's comment in “The Gutting of Couffignal” about M. P. Shiel's
The Lord of the Sea
well describes Hammett's stories for Shaw: “There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats … It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.” Readers agreed.

The star of Shaw's backfield produced, and the new editorial formula worked. In May 1927 Shaw announced that the circulation of
Black Mask
had increased 60%: “BECAUSE IT'S GOT THE STUFF! The stories in it are the best of their kind that can possibly be gotten, written by men who not only know how to write, but know what they are writing about.”

Unlike his predecessors, Shaw nurtured his authors' careers and he took a special interest in Hammett's. In January 1927 Hammett became the mystery-fiction reviewer for
The Saturday Review of Literature
. Co-founded in 1924 and edited by Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby, who also chaired the editorial board of the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club,
The Saturday Review
was regarded as the most influential literary magazine in the United States. Hammett did not then have the cachet to land that job, but Shaw did. A fledgling literary agent as well as an editor, he had the social and business connections to recommend his star writer. Book reviewing was significant to Hammett's literary development. In his tough criticism of current mystery publications, he was forced to articulate his editorial standards, and that effort showed in the increased care he took with his own stories and his growing confidence that he could make detective fiction, which he regarded as subliterary in the hands of its most popular practitioners, respectable.

At Shaw's urging, Hammett began planning his foray into novel writing and book publication. The first installment of his four-part serialized novel, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” appeared in
Black Mask
monthly from November 1927, one year after Shaw became editor. In February 1928, when the last monthly installment was published, Hammett sent what he called his “action-detective novel” to the editors at Alfred A. Knopf, who published Conrad Aiken, Willa Cather, H. L Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and an array of classical literature. Since at least 1918, Knopf had maintained an imprint called The Borzoi Mysteries under the direction of Blanche Knopf, Alfred's wife, but little attention had been paid to that line until Hammett arrived and Shaw began feeding
Black Mask
authors to the firm. Mrs. Knopf offered Hammett a three-book contract if he would change the title of his first novel, and in February 1929 she published
Red Harvest—
dedicated to Joseph Thompson Shaw
—
which received glowing reviews, followed in July by Hammett's second Continental Op novel,
The Dain Curse
, also first serialized in
Black Mask
. Encouraged by Hammett's success, Knopf published Shaw's novel
Derelict
, in 1930, along with two books by Raoul Whitfield,
Green Ice,
a crime novel, and
Silver Wings
, a collection of juvenile “Flying Ace” stories.

After publication of
Red Harvest,
Hammett began to attract international attention as an important new novelist whose modernist literary sensibility set him apart from the genre writers associated with the pulps. He was compared favorably to Ernest Hemingway by Herbert Asbury in the
Bookman
, and the
New Statesman
in London called him an author of “obvious intelligence.” Meanwhile, he attracted the attention of Hollywood studio heads in need of talented writers who could handle dialogue to prepare scripts for the new talking movies, introduced commercially the year
Red Harvest
was published. Hammett accommodated them, confiding to Blanche Knopf that he would concentrate on writing more fiction that could be adapted to the screen.

By 1931, Hammett had written two more novels, both serialized in
Black Mask
before book publication by Knopf—
The Maltese Falcon
, introducing Sam Spade, and
The Glass Key,
about the political fixer Ned Beaumont. The last Op story, “Death and Company,” was published in November 1930. That story marked the end of Hammett's interest in his fat, laconic detective and the end of his tenure at
Black Mask
. He had learned how to write fiction in his Op stories, and now his fiction had made him rich. He moved to New York, where he was the toast of the town.

 

R.L.