Quote of the Day (Dashiell Hammett, on a Curious Episode in His Time as a Pinkerton Detective)

“The chief of police of a Southern city once gave me a description of a man, complete even to the mole on his neck, but neglected to mention that he had only one arm.”—American crime novelist and former Pinkerton operative Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” originally published in The Smart Set, March 1923, reprinted in Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings (Library of America anthology, 2001)

This Day in Literary History (The Uneasy Afterlife of Dorothy Parker)

June 7, 1967—Dorothy Parker—critic, poet, fiction and screenwriter, and Algonquin Roundtable wit—died at age 73 of a heart attack in the New York residential hotel from which she had seldom ventured in her last years of mental and physical decline.

During decades of unhappy love affairs, drinking and despair (including suicide attempts), Parker had known little ease. But she would not be at rest even in death. With her friend, playwright Lillian Hellman, named as executor of her will, Parker’s wishes for the disposition of her income and even her physical remains entered a period of limbo.

A passionate advocate of civil rights, Parker had designated the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to receive proceeds from any copyrights and royalties arising from her estate. If he died, this money would go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Additionally, Parker stipulated that there be "no funeral services, formal or informal." The first sign that Hellman would disregard the wishes of her friend of three and a half decades occurred when she arranged services at Frank Campbell's funeral home on Madison Avenue—an event with a conspicuous starring role for the caftan-clad playwright.

The financially struggling Parker may have figured that Hellman, well-versed in financial matters, would know how to maximize her estate. The playwright had certainly become familiar with the process in the last decade when she was named the executor of her longtime lover, Dashiell Hammett, upon his death in 1961.

“We won’t fight about money, will we,” Hellman had said to Hammett’s daughter Jo in describing how she would handle the estate of her longtime lover. And so it proved to be: even though Hammett had willed Jo half of his estate, his daughter Mary a quarter, and Hellman the last quarter, Jo was lucky to get a $50 check at Christmastime, even though the copyrights to the crime novelist’s works were starting to reap considerable royalties.

Parker’s bequest, minus unpaid bills and burial expenses, came to $20,000. Publicly, Hellman praised her friend’s gift as a testament to her high-minded spirit. Privately, she fumed to friends that, after all she had done for her, Parker had given the money to a man she had never met. When King was assassinated within the year, Hellman became even angrier at the prospect of the money going to the NAACP.

"It's one thing to have real feeling for black people,” Hellman said in an interview with The New York Times Book Review, “but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don't have any respect for it, is something else. She [Parker] must have been drunk when she did it."

Amazingly, Hellman continued to contest the will until a court ruled in favor of the NAACP in 1972.

In the early period after Parker’s death, Hellman confessed to having "absolutely no knowledge of what you do with cremated remains." Sorting out Parker’s publishing rights also consumed much of her attention.

But by the early 1970s, no longer involved as Parker’s executor, Hellman did not feel the obligation to pay for a spot set aside in the urn garden of Ferncliff Cemetery, in Hartsdale, NY. At the same time, she did not want news to get out that, because of her neglect, the cemetery’s crematory had simply discarded Parker’s ashes. So she told Ferncliff to ship the ashes to her attorneys, Oscar Bernstien and his partner, Paul O’Dwyer, who were to await her instructions on how to dispose of them. Those instructions still hadn’t arrived when she died in 1984.

For several years thereafter, Parker’s ashes remained in a file cabinet in the Wall Street office of O’Dwyer, a longtime crusading lawyer and New York politician, as he sought a viable solution. At last, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, proposed that the NAACP would construct a memorial garden on the grounds of its national headquarters in Baltimore. That is where her ashes lie today, even though she did not have any real ties with the city in her lifetime. 

Nevertheless, the inscription at the memorial contains considerable dignity belying the rather confused and even tawdry path by which it came to the NAACP:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested "Excuse My Dust". This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.

Hellman’s slowness in administering Parker’s estate had another important effect, according to Parker biographer Marion Meade: it gave the playwright a head start in getting out her own, often untrue, narrative about her own life: “Hellman feared that… any intrepid biographer—digging through Parker's life might expose her own deceptions, and that was something she could not risk.” 

More particularly, Parker, who had accompanied Hellman on a trip to Spain in 1937, would have been in an immediate position to dispute Hellman’s self-serving “Julia” chapter in her memoir Pentimento. Only in the last years of Hellman’s life—after the book had shot up the bestseller list and been made into a movie—did the sham begin to be exposed. It might not even have been perpetrated if Parker had been alive.

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.)