THE.
HUNTER.
AND.
OTHER STORIES.
DASHIELL HAMMETT.
INTRODUCTION.
Call this volume Hammett Unplugged. It includes seventeen short stories and three screen stories, none previously collected and most previously unpublished, that stand in significant contrast to the work for which he is best known while exhibiting the best qualities of his literary genius. The earliest of the stories in this collection seem to date from near the beginning of Hammett"s writing career, and the latest might well mark the end of it. In the stories included in this volume Hammett was breaking boundaries. This collection includes no stories from Black Mask magazine, the detective pulp where Hammett made his reputation as a short-story writer; it includes no stories featuring the Continental Op, Hammett"s signature short-story character; and it includes only one story narrated by the main character, which was Hammett"s preferred approach in most of his best-known short fiction. Here he addresses subjects, expresses sentiments, and explores ideas that would have fit uneasily in the pages of Black Mask. In these stories Hammett displays his fine-tuned sense of irony and explores the complexities of romantic encounters. He confronts basic human fears and moral dilemmas. He is sometimes sensitive and more often stonily objective. He caricatures prideful men, draws sympathetic portraits of strong women, and parodies pulp-fiction plots. And violence takes a back seat to character development.
The story of Hammett"s career as a writer is well-known. He published his first story in October 1922 at the age of twenty-eight, after his career as a Pinkerton"s detective had been cut short by tuberculosis. He wrote to survive. Severely disabled during most of the 1920s, he was unable to provide for his wife and family in any other way. After a brief attempt to break into the slick-paper (which is to say middle-cla.s.s) short-story market, he found his home as a writer in the pages of the detective pulps, aimed at blue-collar, primarily male readers. He drew on his five years as a Pinkerton operative to write stories that had the authority of experience, and soon he became the most popular writer for the most popular of the detective-fiction pulps. He came to regard that distinction as a mixed blessing; he had broader interests. Of forty-nine stories Hammett published before June 1927, half neither feature a detective nor are about crime. Of the eleven new stories that appeared after The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930, five are about noncrime subjects.
With the April 1, 1924, issue, which carried Hammett"s fourteenth Black Mask story, the sixth featuring the Continental Op, a new editor took over at the magazine. Phil Cody had been circulation manager for Black Mask, and though he described himself as primarily a businessman, he took an aggressive stance as an editor. Cody insisted that the quality of the writing in his pages be elevated, championing Hammett as a model for his other writers and imposing what might be called the Black Mask editorial formula on his authors. Cody encouraged longer, more violent stories, and he insisted on action and adventure in the fiction he published rather than simply what the previous editor called "unusual subject matter." The main characters of the stories Cody published were masters of their world, offering readers vicarious triumph over the threats and frustrations of modern urban life. Cody the businessman set about cultivating a dedicated readership who knew what to expect issue after issue. From Hammett, Black Mask readers expected the Continental Op.
Hammett flourished under Cody"s editorship. But as he began to take his editor"s compliments to heart, as he developed a surer confidence in his writing ability, and as his financial situation became more stressed when his wife became pregnant with their second daughter, he asked for more money and was denied. Hammett didn"t take "no" well. By the end of 1925, he decided that he had had enough of Cody and his magazine, and he said so before quitting. In November of that year he wrote a letter to Black Mask, apparently a response to Cody"s solicitation of his opinion about the most recent issue. Hammett warned him, "Remember, I"m hard to get along with where fiction"s concerned." He then offered perceptive criticism of each story in the issue, concluding with the comment that three of the stories "simply . . . didn"t mean anything. People moved around doing things, but neither the people nor the things they did were interesting enough to work up a sweat over." Hammett was busy by that time writing stories for other markets in which interesting people from various walks of life do interesting things. Those stories are in this volume.
In fall 1926, Cody became circulation manager and vice president of Black Mask parent company Pro-Distributors, and Joseph T. Shaw was named the new editor of the magazine. Shaw"s first move was to attempt to lure Hammett back into the fold. He offered more money and promised to support Hammett"s literary ambitions. Hammett, who needed the money to help support his growing family, capitulated. Over the next two years he focused on Black Mask with stories that were longer and more violent than ever before. When the editors at Knopf, Hammett"s hardback publisher, read his first two novels, Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929), both of which had first appeared serially in Black Mask, they responded in both instances that "the violence is piled on a bit thick." With that, Hammett turned to tough-minded dramatic confrontation rather than violence as a means of advancing his plots. As he famously told Blanche Knopf in 1928, he was trying "to make literature" of his work. These stories doc.u.ment his efforts to that end.
He was also trying to make more money from his work. Perhaps because his health was improving a bit, clearly because of his pressing financial needs, Hammett began promoting his writing career with renewed energy in 1928. He sent his first novel to Knopf, unagented, and they accepted it for publication. The same year, he traveled south to Hollywood to try to sell his stories for adaption as movies. By that time the new sound movies were clearly about to transform the movie industry, and Hammett wanted in on the action. He began writing fiction in a form that could be easily filmed-paying attention to restrictions of time, place, and action. It is fair to say that by the end of 1929, Hammett"s fiction was shaped by an intent to make not just literature, but movies of his work. By 1930, he had sold Red Harvest (the unrecognizable basis for Roadhouse Nights [1930] featuring Helen Morgan, Charles Ruggles, and Jimmy Durante in his first movie role) and "The Kiss-Off," which was the original story for City Streets (1931, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney), to Paramount. Warner Bros. released the first of what would be three film versions of The Maltese Falcon in 1931. During the early 1930s he worked for Howard Hughes"s Caddo Productions, Universal Studios, and MGM, among others. "The Kiss-Off" and two other of Hammett"s original screen stories-"Devil"s Playground," which was not produced, and "On the Make," which became Mr. Dynamite (1935, starring Edmund Lowe)-are included in this volume.
After publication of his most successful novels, The Maltese Falcon, The Gla.s.s Key, and The Thin Man, when Black Mask couldn"t afford him any longer, Hammett turned again to the slick-paper market during his breaks from movie work. He published stories in Collier"s, Redbook, and Liberty-"On the Way," which appeared in the March 1932 Harper"s Bazaar, is included here because it has not been collected previously-and he wrote others that were not placed, but his primary interest was the movies by that time. He was under contract to MGM, writing the original stories for their Thin Man series published in our Return of the Thin Man (2012).
To our minds, this volume includes some of Hammett"s finest short fiction, and there is strong evidence that he valued these stories. Hammett was not a h.o.a.rder. He disposed of books, magazines, and ma.n.u.scripts as soon as he was done with them. But he saved the typescripts and working drafts of stories in this book for more than thirty years, moving from coast to coast, hotel to hotel, and among several apartments. They were important to him. While many of these stories were clearly prepared for submission, with a heading on the typescript giving Hammett"s address, the word count, and the rights offered, there are only two pieces of evidence that he actually sent any of them out. A sheet is attached to "Fragments of Justice" with a note in Hammett"s hand, "Sold to the Forum, but probably never published." Forum magazine published three book reviews by Hammett between 1924 and 1927, but not "Fragments of Justice." In a letter to his wife, Jose, Hammett remarks that one story sent to Blue Book in 1927 "came sailing back"; the story he referred to is unidentified, but a good guess is "The Diamond Wager," published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1929 under the pseudonym Samuel Dashiell. Blue Book, distinguished at the time for their publication of Agatha Christie"s Hercule Poirot stories, was among the highest-paying detective-fiction pulps, the kind of market Hammett would have been trying in 1927, and "The Diamond Wager" seems tailor-made for them.
After publication of The Maltese Falcon established Hammett as one of the finest writers in America, he could easily place his fiction in most any market he chose, but before that he was typed as a genre writer, a hard tag to overcome. His primary readership was mystery fans interested in realistic fiction about crime. Before publication of The Maltese Falcon, a story submission to the slicks by Dashiell Hammett would have gone into the slush pile with hundreds-more likely thousands-of other submissions. It would have been a hard sell. With two exceptions, "The Hunter" and the light satire "The Sign of the Potent Pills," the stories in this volume are not detective stories. They are Hammett"s attempts to resist and then to break out of the mold that came to define him as a writer.
After 1934, when The Thin Man was published and Hammett began devoting his full energies as a writer to screen stories, he stopped publishing his work. For the next twenty-seven years remaining in his life he published no new fiction. For the first sixteen years of the period, until 1950, he didn"t need the money and had other interests; for the last ten he seemed to lack the energy and the spirit to write. After Hammett died, in January 1961, his literary properties fell under the complete control of Lillian h.e.l.lman, who set about carefully and expertly reviving his literary reputation-as a detective-fiction writer. There is evidence that she began editing some of the stories in this volume for publication-her light edits appear on a couple of typescripts-but she restricted her efforts to republishing what she regarded as his best detective fiction, because that was where the market lay. h.e.l.lman sold Hammett"s literary remains-or most of them, one a.s.sumes-to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, from 1967 to 1975, and guarded access to the archive carefully. These stories were first discovered in the Ransom Center archive in the late 1970s, but publication was restricted. Over the last thirty-five years, Hammett"s unpublished stories have been regularly "rediscovered," but for practical reasons, having to do primarily with licenses to publish and the indifference of the trustees who held sway until they were replaced at the end of the last century, these stories remained unpublished. Make no mistake: the stories in this book are not newly discovered; they are made newly available to a wide readership.
This book is arranged into four broadly defined sections-with a special appendix. Within each section stories are arranged into roughly chronological order, sometimes on the basis of guess and instinct, though the headings, paper, and typographical arrangement offer reliable clues in most cases. The texts are essentially as Hammett left them. We have resisted editing and modernizing his style: compound words, for example, are hyphenated as Hammett wrote them, and his old style of forming possessives is retained. In some cases punctuation has been judiciously standardized. In one instance an unt.i.tled story, which we call "The Cure," has its t.i.tle supplied, with the advice and consent of the people best positioned to judge what t.i.tle Hammett might have chosen-his daughter and granddaughter.
The appendix deserves special attention. Provided courtesy of a generous private collector, it is the elegant beginning of a Sam Spade story or novel, perhaps. It alone among the several fragments Hammett left behind was chosen for inclusion in this print edition of The Hunter and Other Stories. Interesting though they may be, literary fragments are of primary interest to a limited audience. A selection of Hammett"s unfinished starts is included as a feature of the e-book edition of this collection.
R. L.
CRIME.
COMMENTARY.
The four stories in this section provide a prismatic view of Hammett"s experiments over a decade with the treatment of crime. These stories show Hammett trying different forms-from a standard Black Masktype story, to parody, to Golden Age models, to the type of hard modernism a.s.sociated with Hemingway-and varying types of narration. Three of the stories are narrated in the third person, though each in a different variety, and the other is told in the first-person voice of a wily and affected dilettante with a keen interest in fine jewels, suggesting a more famous Hammett villain.
"The Hunter" is a detective story in the mold of the Black Mask Continental Op stories, but with an important difference. Here the detective, named Vitt, is as hard-boiled as a detective gets. He has a job to do, and he does it with neither distraction nor emotional involvement, and then he turns ironically to his own mundane domestic concerns at the end. Judging from the return address on Eddy Street, where Hammett lived from 1921 to 1926, it was likely written about 1924 or 1925, when Hammett wrote six stories published in magazines other than Black Mask and introduced two new protagonists in stories told in the third person, as "The Hunter" is-Steve Threefall in "Nightmare Town" (Argosy All-Story Weekly, December 27, 1924) and Guy Tharp in "Ruffian"s Wife" (Sunset, October 1925).
"The Sign of the Potent Pills" is a farce that builds on the depiction of the detective as something less than a heroic crime fighter. The return address is 891 Post Street, where Hammett lived from 1927 to 1929. In January 1926, Hammett published "The Nails in Mr. Cayterer," a satirical story about a writer-detective named Robin Thin similar in tone to "The Sign of Potent Pills." (Another Robin Thin story, "A Man Named Thin," was published shortly after Hammett"s death in 1961.) In this typescript someone crossed out the first two paragraphs of the story. They have been restored here, because they provide the only mention of the billboard that gives the story its name and identify Pentner, who calls the police at the end. Lillian h.e.l.lman edited the story, and the first paragraphs seem to have been cut by her. h.e.l.lman"s edits have been accepted only when they corrected clear typographical errors or undeniable infelicities.
"The Diamond Wager," a clear imitation of the Golden Age mystery stories popular at the time, was, by our guess, written in 1926 and rejected by the pulp Blue Book, though not published until 1929 in another pulp, Detective Fiction Weekly. There is no known typescript. The story is told in the first person by a master criminal and was published while The Maltese Falcon was being serialized in Black Mask.
"Action and the Quiz Kid" is possibly the last story Hammett completed. It is set in New York and refers to Joe DiMaggio"s home runhitting prowess. DiMaggio was a star for the minor-league San Francisco Seals in 1932 and 1933. He was bought by the New York Yankees in 1934, but sat out a season with a knee injury. When he played his first season for the Yankees in 1936, he hit twenty-nine home runs; in 1937, he had forty-six homers, the most in his career. A reasonable guess is that this story was written early in 1936, after Hammett was released from the hospital in January and then spent the rest of the year recuperating in and around New York City. A so-called slice-of-life story, "Action and the Quiz Kid" is typical of Hammett"s late interest in character as opposed to plot.
THE HUNTER.
There are people who, coming for the first time in contact with one they know for a detective, look at his feet. These glances, at times mockingly frank, but more often furtive and somewhat scientific in purpose, are doubtless annoying to the detective whose feet are in the broad-toed tradition: Fred Vitt enjoyed them. His feet were small and he kept them neatly shod in the shiniest of blacks.
He was a pale plump man with friendly light eyes and a red mouth. The fortunes of job-hunting not guided by definite vocational training had taken him into the employ of a private detective agency some ten years ago. He had stayed there, becoming a rather skillful operative, although by disposition not especially fitted for the work, much of which was distasteful to him. But he liked its irregular variety, the a.s.surances of his own cleverness that come frequently to any but the most uniformly successless of detectives, and the occasional full-tilt chase after a fleeing someone who was, until a court had decided otherwise, a scoundrel of one sort or another. Too, a detective has a certain prestige in some social divisions, a matter in no way equalized by his lack of any standing at all in others, since he usually may either avoid these latter divisions or conceal his profession from them.
Today Vitt was hunting a forger. The name of H. W. Twitch.e.l.l-the Twitch.e.l.l-Bocker Box Company-had been signed to a check for two hundred dollars, which had been endorsed Henry F. Weber and cashed at the bank. Vitt was in Twitch.e.l.l"s office now, talking to Twitch.e.l.l, who had failed to remember anyone named Weber.
"I"d like to see your cancelled checks for the last couple of months," the detective said.
The manufacturer of boxes squirmed. He was a large man whose face ballooned redly out of a too-tight collar.
"What for?" he asked doubtfully.
"This is too good a forgery not to have been copied from one of "em. The one of yours that"s most like this should lead me to the forger. It usually works out that way."
Vitt looked first for the checks that had made Twitch.e.l.l squirm. There were three of them, drawn to the order of "Cash," endorsed by Clara Kroll, but, disappointingly, they were free from noteworthy peculiarities in common with the forgery. The detective put them aside and examined the others until he found one that satisfied him: a check for two hundred and fifty dollars to the order of Carl Rosewater.
"Who is this Rosewater?" he asked.
"My tailor."
"I want to borrow this check."
"You don"t think Rosewater-?"
"Not necessarily, but this looks like the check that was used as a model. See: the Ca in Carl are closer together than you usually put your letters, and so is the Ca in Cash on this phoney check. When you write two naughts together you connect them, but they"re not connected on the forgery, because whoever did it was going by this two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check, where there is only one. Your signature on the Rosewater check takes up more s.p.a.ce than usual, and slants more-written in a hurry, or standing up-and the forged one does the same. Then the forgery is dated two days after this check. This is the baby, I bet you!"
Only two men in the Rosewater establishment had handled Twitch.e.l.l"s check: the proprietor and his bookkeeper. Rosewater was heavy with good eating. The bookkeeper was manifestly undernourished: Vitt settled on him. The detective questioned the bookkeeper casually, not accusing him, but alert for the earliest opportunity: he was so distinctly the sort of idiot who would commit a low-priced crime that could be traced straight to him, and, if further reason for suspecting him were needed, he was the most convenient suspect at hand.
This bookkeeper was tall and concave, with dry hair that lay on his scalp instead of growing out of it. Thick spectacles magnified the muddle in his eyes without enlarging anything else the eyes may have held or been. His clothing tapered off everywhere in fine frayed edges, so that you could not say definitely just where any garment ended: a gentle merging of cloth and air that made him not easily distinguished from his background. His name was James Close. He remembered the Twitch.e.l.l check, he denied knowledge of the forgery, and his handwriting bore no determinable resemblance to the endorsed Henry F. Weber.
Rosewater said Close was scrupulously honest, had been in his employ for six years, and lived on Ellis Street.
"Married?"
"James?" Rosewater was surprised. "No!"
Posing, with the a.s.sistance of cards from the varied stock in his pockets, as the agent of a banking house that was about to offer the bookkeeper a glittering if vague position, Vitt interviewed Close"s landlady and several of his neighbors. The bookkeeper unquestionably was a man of most exemplary habits, but, peculiarly, he was married and the father of two children, one recently born. He had lived here-the third floor of a dull building-seven or eight months, coming from an address on Larkin Street, whither the detective presently went. Still a man thoroughly lacking in vices, Close had been unmarried on Larkin Street.
Vitt returned briskly to the Ellis Street building, intent on questioning Close"s wife, but, when he rang the bell, the bookkeeper, home for luncheon, opened the door. The detective had not expected this, but he accepted the situation.
"Got some more questions," he said, and followed Close into the living- and dining-room (now that the bed was folded up into the wall) through whose opposite door he could see a woman putting, with thick pink arms, dishes on a kitchen table. A child stopped building something with blocks in the doorway and gaped at the visitor. Out of sight a baby cried without purpose. Close put the builder and his materials into the kitchen, closed the door, and the two men sat down.
"Close," the detective said softly, "you forged that check."
A woodenness came up and settled on the bookkeeper"s face. First his chin lengthened, pushing his mouth into a sullen lump, then his nose thinned and tiny wrinkles appeared beside it, paralleling its upper part and curving up to the inner corners of his eyes. His eyes became smaller, clouded behind their gla.s.ses. Thin white arcs showed under the irides, which turned the least bit outward. His brows lifted slightly, and the lines in his forehead became shallower. He said nothing, and did not gesture.
"Of course," the detective went on, "it"s your funeral, and you can take any att.i.tude you like. But if you want the advice of one who"s seen a lot of "em, you"ll be sensible, and come clean about it. I don"t know, and I can"t promise anything, but two hundred dollars is not a lot of money, and maybe it can be patched up somehow."
Though this was said with practiced smoothness-it being an established line of attack-Vitt meant it honestly enough: so far as his feelings were affected, he felt some pity for the man in front of him.
"I didn"t do it," Close said miserably.
Vitt erased the denial with a four-inch motion of one plump white hand.
"Now listen: it won"t get you anything to put us to a lot of trouble digging up things on you-not that it"ll need much digging. For instance, when and where were you married?"
The bookkeeper blushed. The rosiness that so surely did not belong in his face gave him the appearance of a colored cartoon.
"What"s that got to-?"
"Let it go, then," Vitt said generously. He had him there. His guess had been right: Close was not married. "Let it go. But what I"m trying to show you is that you"d better be wise and come through!"
"I didn"t do it."
The repet.i.tion irritated Vitt. The woodenness of the bookkeeper"s face, unlivened by the color that had for a moment washed it, irritated him. He stood up, close to the bookkeeper, and spoke louder.
"You forged that check, Close! You copied it from Twitch.e.l.l"s!"
"I didn"t do it."
The kitchen door opened and the woman came into the room, the child who had been playing with the blocks holding a fold of her skirt. She was a pink-fleshed woman of perhaps thirty years, attrac-
tive in a slovenly way: sloppy was the word that occurred to the detective.
"What is it, James?" Her voice was husky. "What is it?"
"I didn"t do it," Close said. "He says I forged a check, but I didn"t do it."
Vitt was warm under his clothes, and his hands perspired. The woman and child made him uncomfortable. He tried to ignore them, speaking to Close again, very slowly.
"You forged that check, Close, and I"m giving you your last chance to come through."
"I didn"t do it."
Vitt seized the irritation that the idiocy of this reiteration aroused in him, built it up, made a small anger of it, and his discomfort under the gazes of the woman and child grew less.
"Listen: you can take your choice," he said. "Be bull-headed, or be reasonable. It"s nothing to me. This is all in my day"s work. But I don"t like to see a man hurt himself, especially when he"s not a crook by nature. I"d like to see you get off easy, but if you think you know what you"re doing-hop to it!"
"I didn"t do it."
A suspicion that all this was ridiculous came to the detective, but he put it out of his mind. After he got a confession out of his man he could remember things and laugh. Meanwhile, what had to be done to get that confession needed an altogether different mood. If he could achieve some sort of rage . . .
He turned sharply to the woman.
"When and where were you folks married?" he demanded.
"None of your business!"
That was better. Against antagonism he could make progress. He felt the blood in his temples, and, his autogenetic excitement lessening the field of his vision, everything except the woman"s moist pink face became blurred.
"Exactly!" he said. "But, just so you"ll know where you stand, I"ll tell you that you never were married-not to each other anyway!"
"What of it?" She stood between her man and the detective, hands on broad hips. "What of it?"
Vitt snorted derisively. He had reared by now a really considerable rage in himself, both weapon and anesthetic.
"In this state," he said, nodding vigorously, "there"s a law to protect children"s morals. You can be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minor children! Ever think of that?"
"Contributing to- Why, that"s foolish! I raise my children as decent as anybody. I-"
"I know! But in California if you"re living with a man not your husband, then you"re guilty of it-setting them a bad example, or something like that."
The bookkeeper appeared from behind the woman.
"You stop that!" he ordered. "You hear me, you stop that! Amy hasn"t done anything!"
The child began to cry. The woman seized one of Vitt"s arms.
"Let me tell you!" Defiance was gone out of her. "My husband left me when he found I was going to have another baby. He went out on a Sunday night in the rain and didn"t ever come back. Not ever! I didn"t have anybody to help me but James. He took me in, and he"s been as good a man as there ever was! The children are better off with him than they ever were with Tom. He"s better to them. I-"