The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett
Nathan Ward
Bloomsbury
hardcover, $26, 214 p.
ebook $9.99

I’m a huge fan of Dashiell Hammett, particularly the Continental Op stories.  So when I saw The Lost Detective come across my recommendations on Amazon, I preordered it.

This isn’t the first biography of Dashiell Hammett, nor will it be the last.  He’s too fascinating a figure to be summed up in one biography.  What caught my attention about The Lost Detective is that the book doesn’t focus on his relationship with Lillian Hellman or his life after he became famous.

Rather the emphasis is on how Hammett’s aborted career as a detective for the Pinkerton detective agency informed his later fiction, fiction that he may have started writing while still doing occasional work for the Pinkertons.  Ward doesn’t think this is likely, and I’m willing to go along with him on this point, since he’s done the research and I haven’t.  What Ward does say is that Hammett developed his style while wriitng reports on the cases he worked.

Ward traces Hammett’s career as a Pinkeron, a career that was interupted by WWI.  When Hammett came out of the service, it was as a lunger, a name given to folks with tuberculosis.  This prevented him from returning to detective work full time.  The cold fog and the hills of San Francisco weren’t conducive to staying healthy.

Ward doesn’t try to connect all of Hammett’s fiction to known cases.  Much of what Hammett said about his time as a Pinkerton operative should be taken with a grain of salt.  He told Lillian Hellman we quit when he found a cache of stolen gold on a ship that was about to sail for Australia and cheated himself out of an ocean cruise.  His wife told a very different story:  he was simply too ill to continue detective work.  His lungs weren’t up to it.

Furthermore, a number of Hammett’s reports are either missing from the Pinkerton files or simply not attributed to him.  I tend to favor the former rather than the latter.

I had hoped we see more of how Hammett’s cases had influenced his fiction, and initially I was a bit disappointed when we didn’t.  However, after thinking about the constraints Ward had to deal with in regards to his source material, I think he did a good job.  Most people seem to be interested in Hammett the celebrity.  I’m interested in the man who wrote those great stories and what he drew on to create them.  The Lost Detective:  Becomiong Dashiell Hammett is a fine addition to the scholarly and popular bodies of work on the man who was arguably the most importatn practitioner of the private eye story.