Today, May 27, marks the birth of Dashiell Hammett (1896-1961).
As far as I’m concerned, he was the greatest writer of detective fiction we’ve seen. Of his competitors and those who came after him, only Raymond Chandler comes close. I realize some of you might disagree with me, and that’s all right. It’s a free cocuntry. You can be wrong if you want to. 🙂
Hammett didn’t invented the private detective genre, but he perfected it. Probably because he worked as a detecitve himself for the Pinkerton Agency and was able to bring a level of realism to his work that no one else at the time could.
Hammett brought a terse, no nonsense writing style to his fiction. The genre was still in its early stages when he began writing Carrol John Daly had introduced Race Williams. Hammett introduced us to the Continental Op.
The Op was an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency. You can probably guess which real agency Hammett modeled it on. The Op didn’t fit the mold of the traditional PI. He wasn’t tall and handsome. Rather, he was short and overweight and a bit on the homelly side.
Most of the stories starring the Continental Op were short fiction. He only appeared at novel length in Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. The Continental Op stories are my favorites. They are centainly relics of their era since they were written in the 1920s and 1930s.
That isn’t a bad thing.
I rather like the references to the way things were back then. It’s like watching an old black and white movie, where ice is delivered by an ice wagon, women hang clothes on a line, and the mail wa sdelivered twice a day.
When people think of private eyes these days, the sterotype that comes to mind is the single operative, often but not always with a secretary (who may or may not be a romantic/sexual partner). Hammett did a lot to establish this sterotype with Sam Spade. And while Spade had a partner, he didn’t survive the events of The Maltese Falcon.
Raymond Chandler’s Phillp Marlow also went a long way towards establishing this stereotype, but I would argue there is a man equally responsible for establishing the image of the private eye as a lone knight, perhaps a bit tarnished, walking the mean streets.
That man is Humphrey Bogart. Bogie played both Sam Spade in the third fiim version of The Maltese Falcon as well as Phillip Marlow in The Big Sleep. Those movies are rightfully considered classics. Bogart’s portrayals in both films cemented the trope of the lone knight on the mean streets in the public imagination.
I personally don’t have a problem with that image. It has been refined by many other writers such as Ross MacDonald (Lew Archer), Bill Pronzini (The Nameless Detective), and Loren D. Estleman (Amos Walker), to name just two.
Traditional private eye stories are one of my comfort reads. When some people are reaching for the nachos with extra jalapenos after a long day, I’m reaching for private eye stories, at whatever length is handy.
But I digress.
If influence on other writers is a measure of a writer’s greatness, then Dashiell Hammett is the greatest writer of private eye stories we’ve seen. The number of books written in imitation of Hammett was well as in reaction to him probably couldn’t be counted. He could be considered the Tolkien of detective fiction for that reason.
Hammett wrote very little after 1934, instead devoting himself to activism. He even said at one point that (and I”m paraphrasing) this hard-boiled stuff is a menace.
Ironic, coming from one of the wirters who established the hard-boiled style.
I’ll raise a glass to his memory tonight.
“ I rather like the references to the way things were back then. It’s like watching an old black and white movie, where ice is delivered by an ice wagon, women hang clothes on a line, and the mail wa sdelivered twice a day.”
I do, too, which is why I enjoy reading Sayers and Christie.
And I believe you meant Ross Macdonald, not Phillip, as the author of Lew Archer.
Yes, I did mean Ross. Fixed it. Thanks.
Note to self: Don’t post after two full days outside in one hundred degree heat and high humidity.
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) deserves a place as the third member of the holy trinity of hard-boiled with Hammett and Chandler, although his works, written later, show more of a vaguely psychoanalytic influence (this was fashionable at the time, see Bester’s The Demolished Man for a more overt example). And Macdonald’s plots all came to resemble each other, since the basic story was the sins of the older generation being visited on their offspring. I recommend The Galton Case, The Far Side of the Dollar, and The Goodbye Look as essential Lew Archer stories that encapsulate all that Macdonald was trying to do, but you can go beyond those three if the stories appeal to you. Archer starts off as a bit of a heel, but becomes a more sensitive and sympathetic guy over the course of the series.
Thanks for the suggestions, Paul. I read the Galton Case years ago but remember little about it. I’ve wanted to dive into the Archer series and read them in order.