He Was His Own Best Whodunit

By Paul Gray

SHADOW MAN: THE LIFE OF DASHIELL HAMMETT by Richard Layman Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 285 pages; $14.95

Everyone knows about private detectives. Few realize that these tough-talking loners, made familiar through countless novels, films and television serials, were mostly cloned from a prototype invented during the 1920s by Samuel Dashiell Hammett. He is not a familiar figure, and in fact never was. His trade was writing mysteries; he kept the plot of his own life story largely to himself. He confided little to his lovers and less to his friends. Legal authorities, interested in his political activities with leftists and Communists, got nothing at all. Hammett's life began and ended in obscurity. For about a decade in between, he somehow managed to be both famous and utterly enigmatic.

Biographer Richard Layman has gathered most of the clues to this puzzling case. He got no help from Playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett's friend and frequent companion during the last 30 years of his life, but this handicap is not crippling. Hammett had done his best work by the time he met Hellman. The crucial years, when he raised pulp writing to the level of art, were already behind him.

Born in 1894, Hammett grew up in Baltimore and quit high school after one semester to help bolster his family's income. He held some odd jobs and then joined Pinkerton's National Detective Agency in 1915 at a salary of $21 a week. Pinkerton's kept detective reports anonymous, so exactly what Hammett did in the line of duty cannot be checked. He later claimed that he was once sent out to find the thief who had stolen a Ferris wheel. He left Pinkerton's after three years to enlist in the Army, but less than a year later he was discharged, severely disabled with tuberculosis. He went West, married a nurse he met during one of his hospitalizations and did part-time work for Pinkerton's offices in Spokane and San Francisco. But his poor health made a regular job impossible. Pinched for money, he began making up detective reports and sending them off to magazines.

He succeeded quickly.

His fiction filled a gap between the elegant puzzles of the Conan Doyle school and the dumb gore and violence of the pulp magazines. Typical Hammett detectives, like the Continental op and Sam Spade, got their hands dirty but kept their minds alert. They often found that those who had hired them were criminal or corrupt; they prowled, lonely paladins of justice, through stark landscapes of betrayal and greed. Hammett's stories paid the rent. His novels, especially The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931), brought him an international reputation.

Even while critics hailed him as Hemingway's equal, Hammett was losing his drive and his touch. He discovered that he could live handsomely off subsidiary rights. The Thin Man (1934) was his last and most careless novel; it ultimately brought him almost $1 million from film and radio serializations. Hollywood kept recycling his material; the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet, was the third film based on that book in ten years. Hammett had always shown a streak of to-hell-with-it independence, and success made him increasingly reckless. He partied and drank too much, offended studio heads and publishers with his disregard for deadlines. He ran up huge bills that he declined to pay.

If Hammett had any political convictions before he became friends with Hellman, he apparently kept them to himself.

Layman argues that "Hellman's influence" chiefly led Hammett into liberal, antifascist crusades in the late 1930s. This may explain his initiation but not the zealousness that followed. In 1937, like many writers at the time, he became a champion of the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. By 1940 he had moved far to the left and was working to get the Communist Party slate on state ballots in time for the upcoming election. His conversion was swift and complete. Writes Layman: "It seems likely from the responsibilities Hammett was given for Communist activities that he joined the party in 1937 or 1938."

He served his country during World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48 and ultimately running a camp newspaper on the island of Adak in the Aleutians. The postwar climate grew chilly to Hammett's politics. Ordered to testify before a federal judge in 1951, he appeared but refused to cooperate and was sentenced to six months in jail for contempt. When he got out, his income had dried up, and he faced claims for more than $110,000 in back taxes.

He died even more deeply in debt in 1961.

Layman avoids speculation and sticks to the facts.

This approach inspires both trust and a question: What kind of man, finally, was Hammett? A satisfactory answer may be impossible Shadow Man tells a fascinating and tantalizing story. It also suggests just how cleverly the old detective covered his tracks. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

-- "By 1947, he had all but given up attempts to regenerate his writing career, and he complained to an acquaintance that most days he saw no reason to get up in the morning. Though he enjoyed solitude, at other times Hammett craved the sense of camaraderie that alcohol gives. Just after he returned to New York, he learned that a woman who had served in the U.S.O. on Adak was living in Manhattan. He asked her out for dinner and nightclubbing. They began the evening in midtown and drank their way to Harlem. As Hammett got drunker, he became louder, ruder, and more talkative. Finally, at nearly five in the morning, his date had had enough, and she asked him to call her a cab so she could go home. When he refused, she hailed a cab herself. As she was entering the -- car, Hammett begged her 'Please don't leave me alone.' -- --

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