Quote of the Day (Dashiell Hammett, in at the Creation of the Hard-Boiled Detective)

“Jim Tarr picked up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end, and reached for a match. ‘Three for a buck,’ he said. ‘You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time.’”—American crime novelist and former Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), “Arson Plus,” in Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings (Library of America anthology, 2001)

Two lines into this detective story—first published in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1923—and you know already it’s going to be different from the private-detective fiction pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Their investigators, Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, are almost inhumanly rational—“thinking machines,” like the detective created by Jacques Futrelle only about a dozen years before Hammett came on the scene. 

No, the unnamed “Continental Op” in Hammett’s story comes from a different time, a different experience, a different state of mind. Most of all, he comes from a different country—a country that, unlike its transatlantic allies in the recently concluded Great War, was rough, with many citizens ready to grasp for what they desired—and others ready to slap them down for it. Look at those sentences again.

Notice the fast pace—verbs followed by object, without adjectives or adverbs cluttering the sentences.

Listen to the line of dialogue, which tells you instantly an entire universe of information about the two detectives here, none of it complimentary. 

Hammett’s story wasn’t the first “hard-boiled” detective fiction—aficionados of the genre generally credit that to Carroll John Daly’s “Three-Gun Terry,” also published in Black Mask. But Hammett’s impact was felt more deeply. 

Listen again to the voice of this story. Hammett has essentially done for the detective story what Ernest Hemingway was about to do with more mainstream fiction—give it a leaner, tougher, more athletic American cast. 

And, in his own way, Hammett wrote from experience just as much as Hemingway did. He had worked for the Pinkerton detective agency, and he had the scars to prove it, from tangling with criminals of all types. 

The Pinkertons, of course, were strike-breakers, and it might have been Hammett’s involvement with one incident of labor unrest that compelled him into a literary career and a political radicalism that lasted the rest of his life. The Pinkertons not only helped crush a miners’ strike in Butte, Montana, but, it has been alleged, might help figured in the death of its leader, Frank Little. 

Hammett was there at the time, and if he knew of the agency’s involvement, his guilt might account for why he left the famous detective agency. 

The fiction that Hammett would produce over the next decade—before alcohol got the better of him—is unrelentingly wised-up. 

The Continental Op is not out to right a wrong, or mend the social order torn apart by a murder—he has a job to do, and he’s going to do it, come what may. The squat, middle-aged detective is, even physically, a deeply anti-romantic figure. 

Indeed, Hammett would remain unattached to any real beliefs except the biggest illusion of all in the 20th century—that Communism would inaugurate a better world.)