The Hunter and Other Stories Part 26

Polhaus left the doorway and his cheerful voice came in from the other room. "All right, boys, pack it out."

AFTERWORD.

Dear Reader, It seems we've now seen the last of Dashiell Hammett's original Sam Spade stories (albeit unfinished) and almost certainly the last "new" collection to be pulled from his typewriter and rescued from his archives. Are you surprised? Are the stories what you expected? I hope in some ways they are surprising, that they suggest images of my grandfather that you wouldn't have antic.i.p.ated based on previous publications or biographies or popular conceptions of the father of hard-boiled detective fiction.

My grandfather was sixty-three when he told a Washington Daily News reporter that he'd stopped writing when he discovered he was repeating himself. "It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style," he claimed. But that was a throwaway line as much as a genuine reflection on his experience. As this collection-and his body of work as a whole-demonstrates, Hammett had both exploited and resisted stylistic expectations since his earliest days as a writer.

He is best remembered by way of his five crime novels, but even there his protagonists range widely. The Continental Op was a no-nonsense gumshoe who went blood simple in Montana and chased clues, cons, and ghosts in California; Sam Spade juggled love, l.u.s.t, pragmatics, and justice in his City by the Bay; Ned Beaumont tested the bounds of camaraderie and family in an ersatz Baltimore; and Nick Charles drank and partied and solved for problems in New York City and beyond. Hammett created all those characters, their supporting casts, and conflicts out his own pied life experience. It would be a mistake, however, to constrain my grandfather's story to the familiar. The Hunter's rare works offer fresh glimpses into Hammett and his shifting worldview-as a reflective, enigmatic man who toggled between poverty and wealth, west and east coasts, and pulp-, book-, and film-writing careers.

Both as Hammett scholar and granddaughter, I'm fascinated by the glimmers of biography that surface in this collection. "Faith" is set north of Baltimore, not too far from where Hammett spent his youth, in the kind of riverside terrain where he would have enjoyed fishing or hunting. The half-dozen or so San Francisco stories reflect his early married life, laced with familiar place names from the 1920s: Ellis Street, where John's Grill and my grandparents' first apartment was located; Larkin, the site of the all-important public library; Market Street, home to Samuels Jewelers and the Flood Building, with the Pinkerton's offices in suite 314; Polk, running between city hall and the Civic Center; the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building, both critical to San Francisco's waterfront mischief. "On the Make" and "On the Way" come later, with echoes from Hammett's experiences in the Los Angeles basin in the early 1930s, where he worked for Hollywood's studios and met Lillian h.e.l.lman. Life and relationships were complicated there. Places, then, evoke life history, tie fiction to fact, and provide an essential baseline.

"Monk and Johnny Fox" and "Action and the Quiz Kid" go on to suggest some of Hammett's lesser-known interests, as well as the more disreputable sections of New York that would have attracted Hammett during his Manhattan stays. My grandfather was a boxing enthusiast of long standing, who respected the kind of toughness required to train for and partic.i.p.ate in orchestrated slugfests. Years after he invented Monk and the Kid, he was thrilled to meet Joe Louis, who visited Anchorage as part of a USO program. "I like him," Hammett said. "He doesn't have a lot to say, but he is far from being anybody's dope." We know, too, that Hammett enjoyed baseball and listening to games on the radio-so perhaps he followed the career of young Joe DiMaggio, who'd played ball in San Francis...o...b..fore moving up to the Yankees in 1936. Certainly DiMaggio's honorable mention in "Action" was no accident. And, like Action, Hammett would have been tempted to put some money on the game. My grandfather liked to test his luck on sports, cards, and the ponies, to his occasional misfortune. In sum, he wrote what he knew, as an ex-detective and as an engaged and observant human adventurer.

It's a rare privilege and opportunity to look backward into Hammett's life by way of his unpublished and little-known works. He, who rarely saved anything, saved these, which survive as both fiction and artifact. The files at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin are a mother lode for Hammett scholar-detectives. They preserve the real deal-smudges and chips dating back to the mid-1920s, drafts on the backs of old letters or on both sides of cheap brown paper. Money was tight in those days. Chapter outlines and character descriptions. Penciled edits in Hammett's careful rounded script. Whole sections crossed out or reworked. Headings that list addresses, sometimes revised as he moved from apartment to apartment, the earliest ones earnest and complete as he tested the marketplace, the later ones just a t.i.tle-or not even that-with little concern for impressing future editors. Shifts in typewriters and formatting and from pulpy pages to good, hard stationery. h.e.l.lman's hand in places. And, if you look carefully, clues to Hammett's ambitions.

For researchers, editors, biographer, and granddaughter, archival visits are irreplaceable, near-religious experiences, ripe with potential for new discoveries. "Faith" is a case in point. The typescript is twelve letter-sized pages, produced in Hammett's characteristic tidy manner, with only a smattering of autograph emendations. Page eight seems at first glance the same size as the others, though the text runs a little farther down the page than its mates. A second look reveals roughly an inch of the sheet folded back at the bottom. Closer examination turns up Hammett's paste job, so neatly worked that it's nearly imperceptible. He'd added exactly three lines to the middle of the page: "That's when I began to know for sure that it was G.o.d after me. I had sort of suspected it once or twice before-just from queer things I'd noticed-but I hadn't been certain. But now I knew what was what, and I wasn't wrong either!" Feach's declaration doesn't move the plot forward or change the trajectory of the narrative, but it illuminates a driving tension between truth and delusion, rationality and religion, a thematic point important enough to Hammett that he'd fit it precisely into the existing tale. It was a tell, an indicator, a clue.

Careful readers of Hammett's fiction can almost always find a line or two keyed to each story's central concern-a job or duty, a choice, or a question of human nature. Sometimes, perhaps, he himself pointed to them. Along the edges of his typescripts there are occasional markers, scratched in at critical points. In "The Cure" it runs alongside a line about courage not being a "d.a.m.ned thing but a habit of not dodging things because you're afraid of them." In "Nelson Redline" it accompanies a pa.s.sage about men who refuse to conduct themselves according to acceptable and predictable rules. Were these Hammett's marks? Was he consciously developing a grand literary or epistemological scheme? There is no proof, of course, but the idea makes sense in the light of Hammett's biography and bibliography.

My grandfather may have started his writing career as a means to keep food on the family table, but he was too smart and too ambitious to stop at a paycheck or to be satisfied with whodunits, no matter how well-crafted they might be. His best work succeeds in the ultimate literary twinship: entertaining stories that explore important aspects of the human experience. Walter Huston called him as a genius: "Someone who sees things in a way that illuminates them and enables you to see things in a different way." My grandfather was more modest about his creative capacities, but they were clearly substantial. He was in many ways an everyman's philosopher whose intellect and life experiences synthesized in a talent to transform important, even complex, issues into storylines that were both digestible and insightful.

Hammett once confessed to his daughter Jo that he never knew what to say to people who asked what his next book was about. "What the h.e.l.l else is there to say except maybe that it's about people?" he wrote. And that's true enough. Whether crime stories, mystical extravaganzas, cynical romances, or hard-boiled dramas, the stories are always more about the characters-their conundrums and choices-than about plots or puzzles. Hammett's narratives serve up no simple tonics. As he said, "I only write 'em. . . . It's up to the readers to try to figure out what in the name of G.o.d they're about, if anything."

The stories in The Hunter come to the marketplace some fifty-two years after Hammett's death and, while they are published without his consent, the collection has been closely considered by the Hammett family and trustees. We believe The Hunter's stories deserve to be published, read, and included in the greater Hammett canon. We believe that they complement Hammett's better-known fiction and complicate and extend the legend and life story of their author. They're stories about people, as Hammett said, and it's up to today's readers to discover for themselves the tales' significance as artifacts and their meanings as entertainment or art. Maybe, as Huston suggests, they'll help you see the world in a different way. What more could any writer ask?

J.M.R.

EBOOK BONUS.

MATERIALS: FRAGMENTS.

Dashiell Hammett's unfinished works provided here to electronic readers of The Hunter and Other Stories offer tantalizing samples from forays into one of his most enduring unfulfilled ambitions. He wanted to write a political novel. "The Secret Emperor" and the Felix stories are evidence of Hammett's designs to that end.

"The Secret Emperor" was Hammett's first attempt at a novel, dating to 1925, when he was one of Black Mask magazine's most popular writers. He set aside the project-and his writing career-the following year, in the face of conflicts with thenBlack Mask editor Phil Cody and the financial pressures of a growing family. In the fall of 1926 he returned to writing with vigor and high hopes. Though planning for "The Secret Emperor" was begun some three years before the writing of The Maltese Falcon, the two works demonstrate similar literary aspirations. They were to be serious novels. In a letter to Harry Block, Hammett's editor at Knopf, dated June 16, 1929, Hammett said: "I started The Maltese Falcon on its way to you by express last Friday, the fourteenth. I'm fairly confident that it is by far the best thing I've done so far and I hope you'll think so, too." His letter went on to suggest ideas for publishing collections of existing stories and to introduce novels he had in the works, including, he wrote, "a political murder mystery, The Secret Emperor."

Although Hammett never completed his political intrigue, he never abandoned it, either. His nineteen-page draft, as well as two sets of notes on chapter development and character descriptions, are preserved in his archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. It was a good start, in many ways reminiscent of the Falcon. The story is told in the third person, with close attention to physical detail and a marked absence of speculation on the un.o.bservable. The reader learns only what a witness-detective would learn by way of canny surveillance. The truth is layered in lies, the romance is hot and hardboiled, and the crime, while it plays locally, is globally entangled.

Hammett's personal history is a recurring influence, as well, since "The Secret Emperor" is set in Baltimore, where he spent much of his youth, and in Washington, D.C., where he'd worked on a.s.signment for Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. The Sheth Gutman character (who preceded the more exaggerated villain Caspar Gutman in the Falcon) was likely derived from his work for Pinkerton's. According to Hammett, the model for Gutman of The Maltese Falcon "was suspected-foolishly as most people were-of being a secret agent in Washington D.C., in the early days of the war, and I never remember shadowing a man who bored me as much." That would have been between 1915, Hammett's first year at Pinkerton's, and 1918, when he quit to join the U.S. Army. While he clearly was following current political affairs, there is no evidence in "The Secret Emperor" of the radical activism that marked Hammett's later years.

By the mid-1930s, with the deprivations of the Great Depression, fear-provoking militarism among German-Italian-j.a.panese axis forces, and the rise of Popular Front and leftist movements in the U.S. and abroad, Hammett and world were in different circ.u.mstances. The "Felix stories" spring from this later period.

"Time to Die" and "September 20, 1938" feature the same enigmatic scarred and sunburned adventurer, recently returned from abroad, interacting with various members of his large and complicated family. "Time to Die" was apparently begun first, with a central character named Guy, changed to Felix in emendations to the typescript. Its Brooklyn backdrop is infused with exotic overtones-a smattering of French phrases and Spanish names, and, importantly, political innuendo tied to Chilean leftist movements of the era. Reference to the Milicia Republicana locates the action during the second term of Chilean president Arturo Allessandri, 19321938, who used the paramilitary group to maintain control over both military and leftist challengers. Told in the third person, the tale reads now as an experiment-as though Hammett had a protagonist and the basis for a conflict, but wasn't yet sure where they would lead. The draft ends abruptly.

Hammett, it seems, shifted to a new approach. In November of 1936 he gave an interview to a student reporter at the Daily Princetonian. "Yes, I'm working on a book here, but it's not a mystery, and it's not about Princeton," explained Hammett. "This one is just about a family of a dozen children out on an island. You see, all I do in a story is just get some characters together, and let them get in each other's way. And let me tell you, twelve kids can sure get in each other's way!" The setting is evidently modeled on Tavern Island, a half mile off the coast of Connecticut, where Hammett and Lillian h.e.l.lman spent the summers of 1936 and 1938. Hammett's description of his book is flip, but accurate, so far as it goes. He ignores the work's more serious political implications. Hammett had joined the Communist Party as early as 1936, the same year General Francisco Franco and other Nationalist leaders set out to quash Spain's fledgling democracy. The conflict there was emblematic of the left's struggle to preserve and expand civil rights and democratic rule worldwide. Felix was a warrior in their international antifascist battleground.

On June 25, 1938, Hammett wrote from Tavern Island to Nat Deverich, a junior agent at Leland Hayward's literary agency. "I've dug out the partly finished book, My Brother Felix, and hope to get it done here this summer. I think it's going to be pretty good for both magazines and movies," he said. In March of 1939 he told his daughter Mary, "I haven't done any work on the book in days. I hope what I've done hasn't been shrinking while my back's turned. I still haven't found a t.i.tle for the d.a.m.ned thing." Six years later he wrote again: "What happened to 'My Brother Felix' is that it was pushed around into another book to be called 'There Was a Young Man,' which, about half finished, now rests in a trunk at Pleasantville, N.Y., from which it will one day be exhumed to be pushed around again and called something else."

The unfinished typescript that Lillian h.e.l.lman deposited in Hammett's archive in Texas is t.i.tled, at least tentatively, "September 20, 1938." The newspaper headlines embedded in the narrative are accurate reflections of the news of that day-Europe's faltering resistance to Hitler's rising n.a.z.i regime. Felix's remarks on "Ibanez," "von Marees," and "Aguirre" signal counterpoint troubles in South America. Carlos Ibanez del Campo headed a military dictatorship in Chile between 1927 and 1931. Jorge Gonzalez von Marees, called "El Jefe," was leader of Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile, a fascist group that staged a failed comeback coup attempt on Ibanez's behalf on September 5, 1938, in which most of the insurgent fighters were brutally slain by police. Radical Pedro Aguirre Cerda was at that time Chile's Popular Front candidate for president. He narrowly defeated Ibanez in the October 1938 election and held office until his death in 1941.

Once again, Hammett used a genuine socio-political situation to ground his crime-literary fiction. In Red Harvest, most notably, he had tapped copper-mining troubles and political corruption in western Montana, circa 1920. The problem with Chile's situation, however, was that it was entirely too contemporary and too fluid. Chile's politics echoed concurrent global tensions-with democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism in livid contest. But within weeks of September 20, 1938, Chile's circ.u.mstances changed. Aguirre came to power and engaged both left and right with promises of moderation. The Popular Front movement he spearheaded in Chile was part of an international coalition-building strategy, fostered by the Comintern, and paralleled in the United States under the Communist Party USA's general secretary Earl Browder, who led efforts to integrate left-of-center social, political, and labor groups. Their work suggested a pragmatic rather than idealistic approach to political transformation. How would Hammett's story have continued under these more temperate circ.u.mstances? If he was attempting to use Chile's particulars to ill.u.s.trate Marxist-materialist struggles, the allegory lost its dramatic tension. The story was stymied.

What remains is available here to readers for the first time in "Time to Die" and "September 20, 1938." The iteration Hammett referred to as the "book to be called 'There Was a Young Man,'" which he left in a trunk in Pleasantville, is unlocated. Perhaps Hammett was overly optimistic in calling it half-finished, and these two fragments are all that ever existed. It is worth noting, however, that the story for Lillian h.e.l.lman's Watch on the Rhine bears striking similarities to Hammett's aborted narrative, and it is possible that Hammett gifted h.e.l.lman with the seeds of his political tale, just as he had in 1934 with The Children's Hour, and gave up for himself its undeveloped promise.

J.M.R.

THE SECRET EMPEROR.

When General Dolliard found the brown packet gone from the safety deposit box he rented in the name of Owen Sedley, his face blanched putty-white, and he went straight to the telegraph office. There his fumbling fingers spoiled four blanks before they made legible a summons to Elfinstone.

The tall man was in a northwestern city at the time, reorganizing the police detective bureau. Hastily arranging a leave of absence, on the fifth succeeding day he reached the retired officer's home in the city of Washington.

A negro girl in black and white took his hat and overcoat-powdered with snow in his brief pa.s.sage from taxicab to house-and led him upstairs, into a small oak-paneled room where General Dolliard welcomed him with eager outstretched hands.

The man who had called Elfinstone three thousand miles was of medium height, square, heavy, and florid with flesh just losing its middle-aged solidity. He still carried himself stiffly erect, and wore black cutaway coat and striped trousers with as impeccably martial an air as he had ever worn khaki tunic and breeches.

"I knew I could count on you!" he said with a heartiness suggesting he had been doubtful, holding the tall man's right hand in both of his. "I knew you wouldn't forget-"

"No, I wouldn't forget." Elfinstone took his lean hand out of the general's plump ones, removed it with a strength so easily superior to the strength of the two grasping hands that there was no rudeness in the withdrawal. "What's the matter?"

General Dolliard cleared his throat and wet his lips. He lifted himself on tiptoe and his tight collar cut into his red throat as he thrust his face up toward the tall man's.

"It's ruin!" he whispered harshly.

"Yes." Voice and frown were impatient. "But how? What?"

Not until he had opened the door to peer into the hall, had closed it again, had led his visitor to the other end of the room, had sat beside him on a rush settle by the diamond-paned window, did the elder man answer the question, and then his words were inarticulate.

Elfinstone shook his head impatiently.

"I don't understand a word of it," he said.

" . . . rented it five years ago and began to put the-the things in it," the soldier's mumble became intelligible. "Last week was the first time I had gone there for nearly six months, and they were gone. Gone, I tell you! The box was empty! Everything was in a brown envelope, sealed. It's gone! And it's ruin, absolute ruin!"

"What were they?"

General Dolliard rolled frightened eyes at the tall man and shook his head in panicky stubbornness.

"Don't ask me that!"

"Nonsense, Dolliard! I must know what to look for. If you don't trust me you had no business sending for me."

"It's not that. I trust you. You are the only man I'd trust in this." Plump hands wheedled the tall man's sleeve. "But it's-I can't! They are papers-letters, clippings, affidavits, two photographs. You-you'll know them if you see them, I think. But I want-you'll have to swear you'll not look at them-not read them-if you can help it, not examine them unless you have to. You'll swear you won't?"

Elfinstone said, "No."

General Dolliard squirmed uneasily on the rush seat.

"I shouldn't have asked that," he apologized, "but I will ask you not to look at them unless you must. And I don't want you to-to take anybody else in to help you. I can't- A thing is hanging over me, Elfinstone, a thing that'll ruin me completely if it becomes known. Not financial ruin, not merely disgrace, punishment, but utter, absolute ruin. It's a thing I'm innocent of. For five years I've been trying to prove my innocence, have been collecting evidence bit by bit. But what I've got so far proves nothing, Elfinstone, read as the world would read it, except my guilt. And that's what has been stolen."

"I don't like it," Elfinstone said irritably. "You're multiplying mystery. What did the safety deposit people say?"

"They-I didn't tell them. I couldn't, Elfinstone. If I had rented the box in my own name-but I used a fict.i.tious name-Owen Seeley. In case anything happened, if I died, I didn't want those things found in my box. So I went over to Baltimore and rented that box under a fict.i.tious name. So I couldn't say anything without stirring up G.o.d knows what! I didn't say anything. I locked the empty box and wired you."

The tall man scowled, grunted, his face cleared, and his personal interest in his host's affairs seemed to have gone, leaving only an aloof, professional attentiveness.

"What is the name of the safety-deposit company?"

"Chesapeake Trust Company."

"Know anyone there?"

"No, except, of course, as I came in contact with them when I visited my box."

"If someone should demand money from you on threat of publishing the stolen stuff, you would pay?"

"Yes. To the last cent I've got."

"But no one has?"

"No."

"Who outside of the trust company knew you had rented the box?"

"n.o.body, n.o.body at all."

"Not your wife?"

"n.o.body."

"Servants?"

"Positively no."

"Anybody else involved in your affairs, in the part of them the stolen papers cover?"

General Dolliard hesitated, but his "No," when it came, was emphatic.

"Any enemies?"

"I suppose so, but I cannot think of one who would or could have done this to me."

"Politics?"

"Hardly. I've had several political appointments since I was retired from active duty, but I can't think that it would be to anyone's advantage to have a hold on me, if that is what you are getting at?"

"Who do you suspect?"

The old-soldier eyes were miserably blank.

"n.o.body," he said. "That is the h.e.l.l of it. I've turned it over and over in my mind without stopping once since it happened, and I can think of n.o.body who would or could do this to me."

Elfinstone stood up-six and a half feet tall, a bit too thin-bodied, thin-armed, thin-legged at first glance. Closer examination would show this gauntness sprang from the deceptively compact flatness of the long muscles with which he was adequately supplied. His hair, thick, was the red brown of polished copper, as were his eyes, deep-set eyes, long and narrow, with lower lids straight-edged as if ruled by a draftsman. Straight too were high-bridged nose and clean hard mouth. Cheeks and jaws were lean, flat, angular.

"You can- You will-" General Dolliard, rising beside the gaunt man, stammered. "You-"

"I will do what I can. If anything new develops you can get me at"-he named a Pennsylvania Avenue hotel-"but I'll probably be in Baltimore tomorrow."

"I'll send for your bags," the soldier protested. "You will stay with us."

"I can move freer if I'm living at a hotel, and there won't be the obvious connection between us."

"Well, of course, if you prefer it, but you must come to us for a while after you're through with this thing."

Elfinstone said nothing, turning toward the door. General Dolliard linked arms with his visitor.

"You can't go without meeting Helene," he said, guiding the other down the hall toward a doorway from which came the tinkling accordances of china and feminine chatter.

The room in which Elfinstone was introduced to Helene Dolliard was a large, somewhat over-furnished room, rich with the colors of old gold and wine, against whose warmth the gray light of the outer snowstorm was powerless. Mrs. Dolliard was a small woman of less than half her husband's age. She had tawny hair, dark blue eyes, a small, high-held face, and an air of confidence based on the triple consciousness of beauty, intelligence, and position. She welcomed Elfinstone warmly, as if he were someone for whom she had waited, while his copperish eyes questioned her face as he bent over her hand.

There were others in the room: a Mrs. Racliff, a Mrs. Matheson, a Miss Gutman whom someone called Tamar, a Miss York, a Mr. Trengrove, and a slender sleek South American with a Portuguese name not easily caught. To each of these the tall man bowed stiffly, and then, it may have been by her management, found himself a little apart with Mrs. Dolliard.