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"Horse Heaven" by Jane Smiley
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[04/14/00]

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[04/14/00]

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These two recent literary helpings of Hammett serve as notice to some and a reminder to others that there was a time when he was more famous for his fiction than for being Lillian Hellman's sparring partner and literary guru. They also suggest that his creative flow seems to have stemmed at the tail end of 1930. Earlier that year, he had completed the novel "The Glass Key." He also had begun a new manuscript, "The Thin Man," that he would eventually discard in favor of a very different sort of mystery with that same title. As he wrote to a friend, "My publisher and I agreed that it might be wise to postpone the publication of 'The Glass Key' ... So -- having plenty of time -- I put [the] 65 ["Thin Man"] pages aside and went to Hollywood for a year. One thing and/or another intervening after that, I didn't return to work on the story until a couple of years had passed -- and then I found it easier ... to start anew."

The "one thing and/or another" included the sale of "The Maltese Falcon" to Warner Bros., the signing of a contract with Paramount and, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel ballroom on Nov. 22, 1930, a chance encounter with a script reader named Lillian Hellman that would radically change the remaining three decades of his life.

The short stories and novels written prior to 1931 are the works of an inventive, disciplined, dedicated author. The relatively little creative writing that he managed between 1931 and 1934, while certainly publishable and in most cases entertaining, didn't quite compare with what had come before.

Take the novels. The first four, the ones that set the pattern for the hard-boiled mystery, that intrigued (and probably influenced) such disparate writers as André Gide, Ernest Hemingway and William Gibson, that led an imprisoned Chester Himes from a life of crime into a life of crime fiction, seem pretty much undamaged by time. Six decades of other writers and filmmakers pecking at the bones of their plots have robbed them of some of their originality. But the tough, unsentimental, realistic style that prompted Raymond Chandler to label Hammett "the ace performer" is still very much alive and well on their pages.

"The Maltese Falcon," with its famous protagonist, Sam Spade, and a cast of unforgettable rogues and liars, remains the author's masterwork, one of this country's few genuine classic detective novels. (Not long ago, members of the Mystery Writers of America voted it the greatest crime book written by an American.) But its fame should not be allowed to cast too large a shadow over the other books.

Hammett's first two novels, "Red Harvest" and "The Dain Curse," are remarkable in their own right -- smartly plotted, visceral entertainments, moved along at a feverish pace by the lean and dramatic first-person narrative of their hero. That would be the fat and 40 Continental Op, an otherwise nameless troubleshooter for the Continental Detective Agency of San Francisco (said by Hammett to be based on Jimmy Wright, his mentor during his formative years as a Pinkerton investigator).

In "Harvest," the Op tries to restore order in a corrupt mining town in the Northwest that has been taken over by racketeers brought in to keep the mineworkers in line. It's a fictionalized account of the battles in Butte and Anaconda, Mont., between striking miners and the detectives and thugs hired by the mine owners to force the men back to work. The book has been the basis, uncredited, for three motion pictures, Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" and the largely ignored 1996 Bruce Willis film "Last Man Standing," which was set in approximately the same period as the novel.

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci tried for decades to translate the book into film without success. Perhaps this was because, as was told to me by his co-screenwriter, Marilyn Golden, they had changed the novel's warring gangsters into strikebreaking Pinkertons and union organizers. They were convinced Hammett would have approved, even though he'd chosen to disguise the opponents in the novel.

Next page | "The Thin Man" was Hammett's weakest book