In Which It Remains Nice Of You To Phone Us

Black Mask

Winter's still hanging around like somebody you owe money, thought it gets in most of its dirty work at night and we usually manage to pick up a few days of sunshine - that rarity - sometime almost every day. You understand, this here sunshine is not exactly hot enough to scalp you always, but it's still sunshine, and we are in no position to be finical about it. We take what we can get of it when we can get it and are glad in our groaning, snarling way.

The letters of the American writer Dashiell Hammett are unexpectedly vulnerable, except when he is doing the one thing he felt confident about: discussing how exactly one should go about writing detective stories. In the 1920s he lived in San Francisco and wrote for the fledgling magazine Black Mask. His notes on his stories to the editors of the publication survive long after he himself is gone. They reveal a single-minded individual concerned with the manifold possibilities of what the genre has to offer.

June 15 1923

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I have been out of town for a couple weeks — I have to go up to the hills to see some real snow at least once each winter — which is why I haven't answered your letter before this.

About the story: None of the characters is real in a literal sense, though I doubt that it would be possible to build a character without putting into at least something of someone the writer has known. The plot, however, is closer to earth. In the years during which I tried my hand at "private detecting" I ran across several cases where the "friend" called in to dispose of a blackmailer either went into partnership with him or took over his business after getting him out of the way. And I know of at least one case where a blackmailer was disposed of just as "Inch" disposed of "Bush."

I like Rose's cover on the February 15th issue!

Sincerely,

S.D. Hammett

October 15 1923

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

Since writing "Slippery Fingers," I have read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle wherein August Vollmer, chief of police of Berkeley, California, and president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, is quoted as saying that although it is possible successfully to transfer actual fingerprints from one place to another it is not possible to forge them — "Close inspection of any forged fingerprint will soon cause detection."

It may be that what Farr does in my story would be considered by Mr. Vollmer a transference rather than a forgery. But whichever it is, I think there is no longer reasonable room for doubt that fingerprints can be successfully forged. I have seen forged prints that to me seemed perfect, but not being even an amateur in that line, my opinion isn't worth much. I think, however, that quite a number of those qualified to speak on the subject will agree with me that it can be, and has been, done.

In the second Arbuckle trial, if my memory is correct, the defense introduced an expert from Los Angeles who testified that he had deceived an assembly of his colleagues with forged prints.

The method used in my story was not selected because it was the best, but because it was the simplest with which I was acquainted and the most easily described. Successful experiments were made with it by the experts at Leavenworth federal prison.

Sincerely,

S.D. Hammett

January 1 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

Thanks for the check for "The Tenth Clew."

And I want to plead guilty to a bit of cowardice in connection with the story. The original of Creda Dexter didn't resemble a kitten at all. She looked exactly like a bull-pup! Believe it or not, she looked exactly like a young white-faced bull-pup — and she was pretty in the bargain!

Except for her eyes, I never succeeded in determining just what was responsible for the resemblance, but it was a very real one.

When, however, it came to actually putting her down on paper, my nerve failed me. "Nobody will believe you if you write a thing like that," I told myself, "They'll think you're trying to spoof them." So, for the sake of plausibility, I lied about her.

Sincerely,

Dashiell Hammett

In a story titled "Zigzags of Treachery", Hammett noted, "There are four rules for shadowing: Keep behind your subject as much as possible; never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens and never meet his eye."

March 1 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I'll have another story riding your way in a day or two: one for the customers that don't like their sleuths to do too much brain-work.

The four rules for shadowing that I gave in "Zigzags" are the first and last words on the subject. There are no other tricks to learn. Follow them, and once you get the hang of it, shadowing is the easiest of detective work, except, perhaps, to an extremely nervous maqn. You simply saunter along somewhere within sight of your subject, and, barring bad breaks, the only thing that can make you lose him is anxiety on your own part.

Even a clever criminal may be shadowed for weeks without suspecting it. I know one operative who shadowed a forger — a wily old hand — for more than three months without arousing his suspicion. I myself trailed one for six weeks, riding trains and making half a dozen small towns with him; and I'm not exactly inconspicuous — standing an inch or so over six feet.

Another thing: a detective may shadow a man for days and in the end have but the haziest ideas of the man's features. Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms - all as seen from the rear - are much more important to the shadow than faces. They can be recognized at a greater distance, and do not necessitate his getting in front of his subject at any time.

Back — and it's only a couple years back — in the days before I decided there was more fun in writing about manhunting than in that hunting, I wasn't especially fond of shadowing, though I had plenty of it to do. But I worked under one superintendent who needed only the flimsiest of excuses to desert his desk and get out on the street behind some suspect.

Sincerely,

Dashiell Hammett

Frederic Forrest as Dashiell in Wim Wenders' movie

August 16th 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I don't like that "tragedy in one act" at all; it's too damned true-to-life. The theater, to amuse me, must be a bit artificial.

I don't think I shall send "Women, Politics, and Murder" back to you — not in time for the July issue anyway. The trouble is this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I've fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.

There are men who can write like that, but I am not one of them. If I stick to the stuff that I want to write — the stuff I enjoy writing — I can make of a go of it, but when I try to grind out a yarn because there is a market for it, I flop.

Whenever, from now on, I get hold of a story that fits my sleuth, I shall put him to work, but I'm through with trying to run him on a schedule.

Possible I could patch up the "The Question's One Answer" and "Women, Politics and Murder" enough to get by with them, but my frank opinion of them is that neither is worth the trouble. I have a liking for honest work, and honest work as I see it is work that is done for the worker's enjoyment as much for the profit it will bring him. And henceforth that's my work.

I want to thank both you and Mr. Cody for jolting me into wakefulness. There's no telling how much good this will do me. And you may be sure that whenever you get a story from me hereafter, — frequently, I hope, — it will be one that I enjoyed writing.

Dashiell Hammett

November 3, 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I was born in Maryland, between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, on May 27, 1894, and was raised in Baltimore.

After a fraction of a year in high school — Baltimore Polytechnic Institute — I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners and the like. Usually I was fired.

An enigmatic want-ad took me into the employ of the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, and I stuck at that until early in 1922, when I chucked it to see what I could do with fiction writing.

In between, I spent an uneventful while in the army during the war, becoming a sergeant; and acquired a wife and daughter.

For the rest, I am long and lean and grayheaded, and very lazy. I have absolutely no ambition at all in the usual sense of the word; like to live as nearly as possible in the center of large cities, and have no recreations or hobbies.

Dashiell Hammett

Harry Block was one of Hammett's editors at Knopf.

July 14 1929

Dear Mr. Block,

I'm glad you like The Maltese Falcon. I'm sorry you think the to-bed and the homosexual parts of it should be changed. I should like to leave them as they are, especially since you say they "would be all right perhaps in an ordinary novel." It seems to me that the only thing that can be said against their use in a detective novel is that nobody has tried it yet. I'd like to try it.

Dashiell Hammett

It was nice of you to phone me, even if you did have to get plastered to do it.

- Hammett in a letter to Lillian Hellman

In Which Dashiell Hammett Follows Closely Behind

Black Mask

Winter's still hanging around like somebody you owe money, thought it gets in most of its dirty work at night and we usually manage to pick up a few days of sunshine - that rarity - sometime almost every day. You understand, this here sunshine is not exactly hot enough to scalp you always, but it's still sunshine, and we are in no position to be finical about it. We take what we can get of it when we can get it and are glad in our groaning, snarling way.

The letters of the American writer Dashiell Hammett are unexpectedly vulnerable, except when he is doing the one thing he felt confident about: discussing how exactly one should go about writing detective stories. In the 1920s he lived in San Francisco and wrote for the fledgling magazine Black Mask. His notes on his stories to the editors of the publication survive long after he himself is gone. They reveal a single-minded individual concerned with the manifold possibilities of what the genre has to offer.

June 15 1923

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I have been out of town for a couple weeks — I have to go up to the hills to see some real snow at least once each winter — which is why I haven't answered your letter before this.

About the story: None of the characters is real in a literal sense, though I doubt that it would be possible to build a character without putting into at least something of someone the writer has known. The plot, however, is closer to earth. In the years during which I tried my hand at "private detecting" I ran across several cases where the "friend" called in to dispose of a blackmailer either went into partnership with him or took over his business after getting him out of the way. And I know of at least one case where a blackmailer was disposed of just as "Inch" disposed of "Bush."

I like Rose's cover on the February 15th issue!

Sincerely,

S.D. Hammett

October 15 1923

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

Since writing "Slippery Fingers," I have read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle wherein August Vollmer, chief of police of Berkeley, California, and president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, is quoted as saying that although it is possible successfully to transfer actual fingerprints from one place to another it is not possible to forge them — "Close inspection of any forged fingerprint will soon cause detection."

It may be that what Farr does in my story would be considered by Mr. Vollmer a transference rather than a forgery. But whichever it is, I think there is no longer reasonable room for doubt that fingerprints can be successfully forged. I have seen forged prints that to me seemed perfect, but not being even an amateur in that line, my opinion isn't worth much. I think, however, that quite a number of those qualified to speak on the subject will agree with me that it can be, and has been, done.

In the second Arbuckle trial, if my memory is correct, the defense introduced an expert from Los Angeles who testified that he had deceived an assembly of his colleagues with forged prints.

The method used in my story was not selected because it was the best, but because it was the simplest with which I was acquainted and the most easily described. Successful experiments were made with it by the experts at Leavenworth federal prison.

Sincerely,

S.D. Hammett

January 1 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

Thanks for the check for "The Tenth Clew."

And I want to plead guilty to a bit of cowardice in connection with the story. The original of Creda Dexter didn't resemble a kitten at all. She looked exactly like a bull-pup! Believe it or not, she looked exactly like a young white-faced bull-pup — and she was pretty in the bargain!

Except for her eyes, I never succeeded in determining just what was responsible for the resemblance, but it was a very real one.

When, however, it came to actually putting her down on paper, my nerve failed me. "Nobody will believe you if you write a thing like that," I told myself, "They'll think you're trying to spoof them." So, for the sake of plausibility, I lied about her.

Sincerely,

Dashiell Hammett

In a story titled "Zigzags of Treachery", Hammett noted, "There are four rules for shadowing: Keep behind your subject as much as possible; never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens and never meet his eye."

March 1 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I'll have another story riding your way in a day or two: one for the customers that don't like their sleuths to do too much brain-work.

The four rules for shadowing that I gave in "Zigzags" are the first and last words on the subject. There are no other tricks to learn. Follow them, and once you get the hang of it, shadowing is the easiest of detective work, except, perhaps, to an extremely nervous maqn. You simply saunter along somewhere within sight of your subject, and, barring bad breaks, the only thing that can make you lose him is anxiety on your own part.

Even a clever criminal may be shadowed for weeks without suspecting it. I know one operative who shadowed a forger — a wily old hand — for more than three months without arousing his suspicion. I myself trailed one for six weeks, riding trains and making half a dozen small towns with him; and I'm not exactly inconspicuous — standing an inch or so over six feet.

Another thing: a detective may shadow a man for days and in the end have but the haziest ideas of the man's features. Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms - all as seen from the rear - are much more important to the shadow than faces. They can be recognized at a greater distance, and do not necessitate his getting in front of his subject at any time.

Back — and it's only a couple years back — in the days before I decided there was more fun in writing about manhunting than in that hunting, I wasn't especially fond of shadowing, though I had plenty of it to do. But I worked under one superintendent who needed only the flimsiest of excuses to desert his desk and get out on the street behind some suspect.

Sincerely,

Dashiell Hammett

Frederic Forrest as Dashiell in Wim Wender's movie

August 16th 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I don't like that "tragedy in one act" at all; it's too damned true-to-life. The theater, to amuse me, must be a bit artificial.

I don't think I shall send "Women, Politics, and Murder" back to you — not in time for the July issue anyway. The trouble is this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I've fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.

There are men who can write like that, but I am not one of them. If I stick to the stuff that I want to write — the stuff I enjoy writing — I can make of a go of it, but when I try to grind out a yarn because there is a market for it, I flop.

Whenever, from now on, I get hold of a story that fits my sleuth, I shall put him to work, but I'm through with trying to run him on a schedule.

Possible I could patch up the "The Question's One Answer" and "Women, Politics and Murder" enough to get by with them, but my frank opinion of them is that neither is worth the trouble. I have a liking for honest work, and honest work as I see it is work that is done for the worker's enjoyment as much for the profit it will bring him. And henceforth that's my work.

I want to thank both you and Mr. Cody for jolting me into wakefulness. There's no telling how much good this will do me. And you may be sure that whenever you get a story from me hereafter, — frequently, I hope, — it will be one that I enjoyed writing.

Dashiell Hammett

November 3, 1924

Letter to the Editor of Black Mask

I was born in Maryland, between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, on May 27, 1894, and was raised in Baltimore.

After a fraction of a year in high school — Baltimore Polytechnic Institute — I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners and the like. Usually I was fired.

An enigmatic want-ad took me into the employ of the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, and I stuck at that until early in 1922, when I chucked it to see what I could do with fiction writing.

In between, I spent an uneventful while in the army during the war, becoming a sergeant; and acquired a wife and daughter.

For the rest, I am long and lean and grayheaded, and very lazy. I have absolutely no ambition at all in the usual sense of the word; like to live as nearly as possible in the center of large cities, and have no recreations or hobbies.

Dashiell Hammett

Harry Block was one of Hammett's editors at Knopf.

July 14 1929

Dear Mr. Block,

I'm glad you like The Maltese Falcon. I'm sorry you think the to-bed and the homosexual parts of it should be changed. I should like to leave them as they are, especially since you say they "would be all right perhaps in an ordinary novel." It seems to me that the only thing that can be said against their use in a detective novel is that nobody has tried it yet. I'd like to try it.

Dashiell Hammett

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"Flickering Flashlight" - Adam & the Amethysts (mp3)

It was nice of you to phone me, even if you did have to get plastered to do it.

- Hammett in a letter to Lillian Hellman

In Which We Leave A Little Something For Lillian Hellman In Our Wills

The Liars

by PAUL JOHNSON

At nineteen Lillian Hellman got a job at the publishers Boni and Liveright which, under Horace Liveright, was then the most enterprising firm in New York. She later claimed she had discovered William Faulkner and was responsible for the publication of his satirical novel Mosquitoes, set in New Orleans; but facts prove otherwise. She had an abortion and then, pregnant again, married the theatrical agent Arthur Kober, left publishing and took up reviewing. She had an affair with David Cort, subsequently foreign editor of Life; in the 1970s he proposed to publish her letters, some with erotic drawings in the margins, and she took legal action to prevent him - when he died, destitute, the letters were accidentally destroyed.

from 'The Children's Hour'Married to Kober, Hellman made trips to Paris, Bonn (in 1929), where she considered joining the Nazi Youth, and Hollywood. She worked briefly as a play-reader for Anne Nichols and later claimed she had discovered Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel; but this was not true either. In Hollywood, where Kober had a staff-writing job, she read scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at $50 a week. Hellman's radicalism began with her involvement in the trade-union side of the motion picture industry, where writers were bitter at their treatment by the big studios. But the crucial event in her political as well as her emotional life occurred in 1930 when she met Dashiell Hammett, the mystery-writer.

As she subsequently romanticized both him and their relationship, it is necessary to be clear about what kind of man he was. He came from an old, genteel-poor Maryland family. He left school at thirteen, did odd jobs, fought in the First World War and was wounded, then gained his inside knowledge of police work as a Pinkerton detective. At the agency he had worked for the lawyers employed by Fatty Arbuckle, who was broken by the court case in which the film comedian was accused of raping Virginia Rappe, who died afterwards. According to what detectives told him, the woman died not of the rape but of venereal disease, and the case seems to have given him a cynical dislike for authority generally (and also a fascination for fat villains, who figure largely in his fiction).

When he met Hellman he had published four novels and was in the process of becoming famous through The Maltese Falcon, his best. Hammett was a very serious case of alcoholism. The success the book enjoyed was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to him; it brought him money and credit and meant he had little need to work. He was not a natural writer and seems to have found the creative act extraordinarily daunting.

He did, after many efforts, finish The Thin Man which brought him even more money and fame, but after that he wrote nothing at all. He would hole up in a hotel with a crate of Johnnie Walker Red Label and drink himself into sickness. Alcohol brought about moral collapse in a man who seems to have had, at times, strong principles. He had a wife, Josephine Dolan, and two children, but his payments to them were haphazard and arbitrary; sometimes he was generous, usually he just forgot them.

Pathetic letters to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, survive:

Tor the past seven months Mr Hammett has sent me only one hundred dollars and has failed to write and explain his troubles - right now I am desperate - the children need clothing and are not getting the right food - and I am unable to find work - living with my parents who are growing old and can't offer us any more help.

Hammett, with a script contract, was to be found in Bel Air, drinking. The studio secretary assigned to him, Mildred Lewis, had nothing to do as he would not write but lay in bed; she described how she heard prostitutes, summoned by phone from Madame Lee Francis' - they were usually black or oriental women - creeping up and down the stairs; she would turn her back so she could not see them. He probably made over two million dollars from his books but often contrived to be penniless and in debt, and would sneak out of hotels in which he had run up large bills (the Pierre in New York, for instance, where he owed $1000) wearing his clothes in layers.

Alcohol also made Hammett abusive and violent, not least to women. In 1932 he was sued for assault by the actress Elise de Viane. She claimed he got drunk at his hotel and when she resisted his attempts to make love to her, beat her up. Hammett made no effort to contest the suit and $2500 damages were awarded against him. Shortly after he met Hellman, he hit her on the jaw at a party and knocked her down. Their relationship can never have been easy. In 1931 and again in 1936 he contracted gonorrhea from prostitutes, and the second time had great difficulty in getting cured.

There were constant rows over his women. Indeed it is not clear whether, and if so for how long, they ever actually lived together, though both eventually divorced their respective spouses. Years later, when her lying about many other things had been thoroughly exposed, Gore Vidal asked cynically: 'Did anybody ever see them together?' Clearly Hellman exaggerated their relationship for her own purposes of self-publicity. Yet there was substance to it. In 1938, by which time she had moved to New York, where she had a town house and a farm at Pleasantville, Hammett was reported to be lying hopelessly drunk in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he had run up a bill of $8000. Hellman had him brought by air to New York; he was met by an ambulance and taken to hospital. Later he lived for some time at her house.

But he made a habit of visiting Harlem brothels, which were much to his taste. So there were more rows. In 1941, while drunk, he demanded sex with her and she refused; after that he never made or attempted to make love with her again. But their relationship continued, if in tenuous form, and for the last three years of his life (he died in 1958) he led a zombie-like existence in her New York home. This was an unselfish act on her part for it meant sacrificing the work-room she adored. She would say to guests: "Please keep it down. There's a dying man upstairs." What is clear about their friendship is that Hellman, as a writer, owed a great deal to Hammett. In fact there is a curious, and some would say suspicious, asymmetry about their writing careers. Not long after he met Hellman, Hammett's writing dwindled to a trickle, then dried up altogether. She, by contrast, began to write with great fluency and success. It was as though the creative spirit moved from one into the other, remaining in her until his death; once he had gone, she never wrote another successful play.

She had always been avaricious, and the propensity increased with age. Most of her lawsuits had had a financial object. After Hammett died, she formed a liaison with a rich Philadelphian, Arthur Cowan. He advised her on investments. He also put her up to a dodge to acquire Hammett's copyrights, held by the US government in lieu of his tax debts. As very little was coming in royalties, Cowan persuaded the government to put the rights up to auction, setting a minimum bid of $5000. Hellman persuaded Hammett's daughters to agree to the sale, telling them, falsely, that otherwise they would themselves be liable for Hammett's debts. Cowan and Hellman were the only bidders, at $2500 each, and got the rights. Hellman then began to work this literary property vigorously and it was soon bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars - $250,000 for one television adaptation of a Hammett story alone.

When Cowan died in turn, he left no will, according to Hellman's account in Pentimento. Sam McCracken established that he did leave a will, and Hellman got nothing, suggesting they had a quarrel before he died. But Hellman evidently persuaded Cowan's sister that it had been his intention she should get his share of the Hammett rights, as the sister wrote a letter relinquishing them to her. Thus Hellman enjoyed the increasingly valuable Hammett copyrights in toto until her death, and it was only then that she left something, in her will, to the impoverished Hammett daughters.

Paul Johnson is the world's greatest living historian. He is the author of Intellectuals, from which this selection has been excerpted. You can buy it here.

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