Dashiell Hammett’s “Return of the Thin Man”

Noir detective fiction reigned supreme in America in the 1920s and 1930s, and remained popular through most of the 1950s. And the author who was the acknowledged master of this genre was Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961).

The former Pinkerton detective turned to writing detective stories when he was afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease that would plague him most of his adult life. He wrote stories for “the pulps” – popular detective magazines and a series of novels that set the standard for noir fiction, and in fact likely still set the standard.

He published Red Harvest in 1929, followed by The Dain Curse that same year. Then came The Maltese Falcon in 1930, The Glass Key in 1931, and The Thin Man in 1934. The novels are written tightly and concisely, and are full of action, unexpected turns, and a fair amount of violence. (One of Hammett’s fellow noir writers, Philip Marlowe, gave this writing advice to authors facing writing blocks: “When in doubt, have to men come in the door with guns.”) A group of his stories was published as The Continental Op.

Hammett posed for the cover of The Thin Man.

Hammett’s influence on writers – and on the movies – extended far beyond noir fiction. He’s considered so influential, in fact, that Library of America has published a volume of his novels and a volume of his short stories.

My first awareness of Dashiell Hammett was watching The Thing Man movies of the 1930s and early 1940s on television. Starring William Powell as detective Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as his wife Nora, the movies were widely popular when they were first released. If you’re familiar with the movies at all, it’s almost impossible to see anyone but William Powell when you read the Hammett novel.

I discovered Hammeett as a writer in the 1970s, during a resurgence of the novels of the glory days of noir fiction. I also discovered the Dashiell Hammett who was in love with playwright Lillian Hellman and the Hammett who went to prison rather than divulge names to a congressional committee during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In the last few years, additional writings have turned up in archives and various closets, including two “movie books” written for the scripts of “After the Thin Man” and “Another Thin Man,” both commissioned by MGM Studios. Movie books were essentially novellas written to help the scriptwriters develop and finalize a script. Both of these movie books, and related materials, never previously made public, were published in 2012 as Return of the Thin Man.

Dashiell Hammett

The stories are less novellas than they are movie and Dashiell Hammett artifacts. They even contain periodic filming instructions and parenthetical statements instructing the scriptwriters how to develop particular scenes. Accompanying the stories are headnotes and afterwords by the editors, Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.

The stories reflect the public tastes in movies in the time period they were released. They often seem formulaic, with “thugs and dames” getting themselves mixed up with the wealthy (and, in one of the stories, even with Nora’s very proper family). The genius of the stories lies not so much in the stories themselves as it does in how Hammett developed the interaction between and relationship of Nick and Nora Charles, which steal the story and also stole the movies. The dialogue involving their back-and-forth is still fascinating today, underscoring how much Hammett could communicate by what wasn’t said as much as by what was.

For fans of noir fiction, it’s a must-read. For those interested in how a master writer developed dialogue, it’s also a must-read. For those of us fascinated with the genre and the period, not to mention what Hammett achieved, it’s a significant contribution to understanding.

Photograph: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man.

Dashiell Hammett’s “The Hunter and Other Stories”

I first met Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) at the movies, specifically, the movies that were later run on television. I don’t know how old I was when I first watched William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, but I do know I loved the movie. And then I saw Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

I probably saw Hammett’s name in the movies’ credits (“based on the novel by”), but it likely didn’t mean anything. My understanding of who Dashiell Hammett was and his writing had to wad until the mid-1970s, when a number of his books were republished. I read The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Red Harvest (the Library of America has assembled all of them in one volume). I learned that all of his novels except The thin Man had been first published in serial form in various magazines of the hardboiled mystery and suspense genre that were common well into the 1950s (about the only survivors of the genre are Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine). I learned that he wrote numerous stories and several screenplays.

And I learned about the man and his life – his work as a Pinkerton detective, his battle with tuberculosis, how he started writing, his family his relationship with writer Lillian Hellman (part of the story in the movie Julia; Jason Robards played a credible Hammett); and how he was caught up in the communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was sent to prison for that refusal, and was blacklisted by both publishers and movie studios.

I still enjoy reading his stories and novels His prose is lean, spare and power-packed. He was the best of the hardboiled detective school writers, and even today he’s recognized for being among the finest of American writers.

I have another reason for enjoying his writing. My father was a fan. He read Hammett in the 1930s and 1940s, in all those mystery magazines. In fact, my father was the “target demographic” of many of those magazines, although the term wasn’t used back then. Reading Hammett is a connection to my father, and a connection to a very different time in American history and culture.

Hammett’s stories have been collected and published over the years, and now comes The Hunter and Other Stories, published by The Mysterious Press and edited with very helpful commentary by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett. It includes 18 stories and three “screen stories,” or plot summaries for movies. Most of the stories, including the title story, have never been previously published.

Not all of the stories are crime or detective stories; Hammett often reached beyond the mystery and suspense magazines to reach a broader audience. But they are all recognizably Hammeett, with their tough, lean prose, action-filled scenes and often surprising twists and turns.

In “The Hunter,” a detective investigates a fraudulent check, and it’s all in a day’s work. “The Diamond Wager” concerns a bet – whether a valuable necklace could be stolen from a jewelry store in Paris. “Magic” has a magician delivering what will cause himself personal pain. “Faith” is about the tragedy that dogs a man’s life, and what he does to avoid something worse. “The Cure” is also about a bet – that one man’s fear of swimming can be cured by another man (and the consequences are completely unexpected).

The three screen stories – “The Kiss-Off,” “Devil’s Playground,” and “On the Make” – are recognizably noir.”The Kiss-Off” eventually became the 1931 movie City Streets, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney. “On the Make” was filmed and released as “Mr. Dynamite” in 1935. “The Devil’s Playground” was created, the editors say in their commentary, as part of the deep interest in all-things-China in the 1920s and 1930s (remember Charlie Chan?) but was never filmed.

It’s a fascinating volume. The stories are generally all period – they wouldn’t quite fit, or fit very well, with contemporary sensibilities. But they are stories by Dashiell Hammett, they bear his trademark and imprint. And that means they are and will continue to be entertaining.

My father would have enjoyed them.

Reading "Chicago Lightning"

I’m reading a book of private detective stories, Chicago Lightning by Max Allan Collins, and I’m hooked by the second age of the author’s introduction. Collins and I grew up on the same kind of television fare – and the same love for detective and mystery stories.

I watched westerns as a child – programs like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and Bonanza – but it was the detective and mystery shows that I loved. Peter Gunn. Dragnet. Perry Mason (my Southern Baptist grandmother adored Perry Mason novels). 77 Sunset Strip. Hawaiian Eye (remember Connie Stevens as Cricket?). Mike Hammer.

My reading followed similar lines. From Trixie Beldon and the Hardy Boys I moved on to mysteries with real murders by writers like Agatha Christie. In the 1970s, there was something of a renaissance for the hardboiled detective novels, with new editions of books from the 1930s and 1940s. I read all of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, like Red Harvest, The Continental Op, The Maltese falcon and The Thin Man. I read Raymond Chandler’s novels, too, but preferred the almost literary prose of Hammett. Than I discovered S.S. Van Dine and the Philo Vance mysteries.

I moved away for reading almost solely mysteries but never abandoned the genre. After an extended romance with science fiction, I went literary and read the Latin Americans – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and others. For about 10 years I was the Latin American and Spanish fiction reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I still read some today, and have a novel by Carlos Fuentes waiting on the shelf.

The Latins, interestingly enough, led me to a popular Spanish writer named Arturo Perez-Reverte, who has written a number of semi-literary mysteries that are wonderful stories. Lately he’s been producing the Captain Alatriste novels, set in the declining Spain of the 17^th century.

But I still enjoy mysteries. I’m tending to stick more in the Christian mystery category, more because few mainstream mystery novelists seem to have to get too graphic with sex and violence. And despite my love of mysteries, I do not like violence. I don’t like it in movies or on television (which tells you how many movies I see and how much television I watch).

I like a number of British mystery writers, like Colin Dexter of Inspector Morse fame and Ian Rankin, who’s written the Inspector Rebus novels. But these days most contemporary mysteries are police procedurals or something similar, which are fine but don’t have the flare of those old private detectives, the guys who are tough as nails, pack heat and aren’t afraid to use it.

I enjoyed the stories in Chicago Lightning. They contain a few graphic scenes, but the scens seem to fit the stories. The hero, Nate Heller, is cut from that same cloth that produced Sam Spade, Nick Charles and Philip Marlowe. These aren’t the “solve the puzzle guys” so much as the “get the truth even if you have to beat it out of them” guys.

As odd as this might sound, reading these stories reminds me of my father. He grew up in that period when Hammett and Chandler and all the rest were at the height of their powers. He read a lot of them, too. And the stories he told of his experiences in working in the East Texas oil fields and the Depression-era newspaper business had that same kind of flavor to them. Although I can’t recall any murders or serious crimes in his stories, except for one he told about his grandmother that became part of the family legend. Did she or didn’t she?

I think I hold that story in reserve. It might make an interesting historical short story.