***Out In The Film Noir Night- The Library Of America’s Dashiell Hammett

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Dashiell Hammett

Book Review  

Dashiell Hammett: The Crime Novels, Library Of America  

In a recent review of the Library of America’s volume of later crime novels of the other great developer of the modern detective story, Raymond Chandler, I noted that if you wanted to get one thing right in this wicked old world, or the literary segment of the beast, or better, the crime novel sub-segment (okay, okay genre) you know that every detective’s business was mopping up everybody’s trouble, trouble pure and simple. I also noted that while you were getting that right you best put it down that trouble, trouble with a capital T, was Raymond Chandler’s classic hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe’s business. And I would argue that our brother Dashiell Hammett with Sam Spade, Nick Charles and the ubiquitous Continental Op had the same professional problem as witness the collection of crime novels all places under one roof in this Library of America volume of Dashiell Hammett’s major works.     

Our intrepid Hammett private eyes, private dicks, shamuses, gumshoes or whatever you call guys that, privately, and for too little dough scraped off other peoples’ dirt, and did it not badly at that, in your neighborhood. And kept their code of honor intact, well mostly intact, as Sam Spade, for example, tried to do after coming up against a come hither femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon, Nick Charles tried to separate the wheat from the chaff in The Thin Man or as the Continental Op try to almost single-handedly clean up a town that needed some serious cleaning up in The Red Harvest.  And on it went.

Oh yah, about Dashiell Hammett, about the guy who wrote this selection of crime novels with memorable protagonists. Like I said in that review mentioned above he, along with Brother Raymond Chandler turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the pre-World War II day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys, thanks twice.

[Chandler the author of The Big Sleep and creator of Philip Marlowe, after Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Marlowe, who come to think of it like Sam, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, although in Marlowe’s case not some femme fatale working out of Frisco town but an assortment of Hollywood women with that same come hither look.]

In Hammett’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe his detectives’ environment much in the way a working detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. They were able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped them from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. They also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over their eyes.

The list of such descriptive language goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, femmes fatales wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap- jack offices in rundown buildings on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down on your fragile head. (That spill your guts thing, by the way a trait that our detectives seemed organically incapable of doing, except when it suited their purposes. No cop or gangster could force anything out of them, and they tried, believe me they tried. )

At the same time Hammett was a master of setting the details of the space his detectives had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). But where Hammett made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny- ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night (mainly) just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Hammett like Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in the mouths of his detectives (after all he was very close to various left-wing causes and the American Communist Party and when the red scare night descended in America he paid the price). Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War I in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The restless mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California sun and other points west while taking over the vast crime markets. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. Above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended our old-fashioned detectives’ code of honor.

And while Chandler built his reputation on Marlowe’s fortunes Hammett gives us several all under one roof here to feast on. Enough said.