Nightmare Town Read online

  Acclaim for DASHIELL HAMMETT and

  NIGHTMARE TOWN

  “Essential reading for Hammett fans—or anyone interested in the flowering of American crime fiction.”

  —The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

  “Hammett…did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

  —Raymond Chandler

  “Your favorite Hammett characters are all here. If you want to spend a few hours with the man who, in the opinion of many, created noir fiction, here’s your chance.”

  —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “As a novelist of intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time.”

  —Ross Macdonald

  “Crisp dialogue, peppered with the street argot of the ’20s, keep the stories moving along at a good clip. Corruption, duplicity, and deception are rife.”

  —Book Page

  “Dashiell Hammett single-handedly created a genre…The words are economically chosen and thoughtfully placed in stories that unwind to a conclusion plotted for maximum impact…. A fine addition to any Hammett-lover’s collection.”

  —The Denver Post

  “[A] must-read, whether you enjoy reading the modern-day mysteries of Cornwell and Kellerman, Evanovich and Parker or else simply want to appreciate the stylings of a master.”

  —Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram

  “Anyone who doesn’t read Dashiell Hammett misses much of modern America.”

  —Dorothy Parker

  “Dashiell Hammett was a mystery writer who knew what he was talking about…. [A] genuine prose artist, a master of careful, angular description and, most importantly, well-timed and artfully deployed suspense.”

  —New City Chicago

  “Dashiell Hammett’s dialogues can be compared only with the best in Hemingway.”

  —André Gide

  “Nightmare Town offers a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of a writer…. [T]his opportunity to follow the career of a master is invaluable.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Hammett is one of the best contemporary American writers.”

  —Gertrude Stein

  DASHIELL HAMMETT

  NIGHTMARE TOWN

  Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter — messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore. He finally became an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

  World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health. When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. Subsequently, he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. He died in 1961.

  ALSO BY DASHIELL HAMMETT

  AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD

  The Big Knockover

  The Continental Op

  The Dain Curse

  The Glass Key

  The Maltese Falcon

  Red Harvest

  The Thin Man

  Woman in the Dark

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by the Literary Property Trustees under the Will of Lillian Hellman

  Introduction copyright © 1999 by William F. Nolan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime / Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Hammett, Dashiell, 1894–1961.

  Nightmare Town: stories / by Dashiell Hammett; edited by Kirby McCauley, Martin H. Greenberg, and Ed Gorman. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-375-40111-3

  I. Detective and mystery stories, American. I. McCauley, Kirby.

  II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. III. Gorman, Edward. IV. Title.

  PS3515.A4347A6 1999b

  813′ .52—dc21 99-37237 CIP

  Vintage ISBN 978-0-375-70102-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-76744-8

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Iris Weinstein

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Dashiell Hammett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION by William F. Nolan

  NIGHTMARE TOWN

  HOUSE DICK

  RUFFIAN’S WIFE

  THE MAN WHO KILLED DAN ODAMS

  NIGHT SHOTS

  ZIGZAGS OF TREACHERY

  THE ASSISTANT MURDERER

  HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER

  TWO SHARP KNIVES

  DEATH ON PINE STREET

  THE SECOND-STORY ANGEL

  AFRAID OF A GUN

  TOM, DICK, OR HARRY

  ONE HOUR

  WHO KILLED BOB TEAL?

  A MAN CALLED SPADE

  TOO MANY HAVE LIVED

  THEY CAN ONLY HANG YOU ONCE

  A MAN NAMED THIN

  THE FIRST THIN MAN

  Acknowledgments

  Publication History

  A Note About the Editors

  INTRODUCTION

  Although he lived into his sixties, Samuel Dashiell Hammett’s prose-writing career encompassed just twelve short years, from 1922 into early 1934. But they were richly productive years, during which he wrote more than a hundred stories. Twenty of them have been assembled here in Nightmare Town, displaying the full range of Dashiell Hammett’s remarkable talent.

  In his famous 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler openly acknowledged Hammett’s genius. He properly credited him as “the ace performer,” the one writer responsible for the creation and development of the hard-boiled school of literature, the genre’s revolutionary realist. “He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” Chandler declared. “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

  And crime novelist Ross Macdonald also granted Hammett the number one position in crime literature: “We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”

  Born in 1894 to a tobacco-farming Maryland family, young Samuel grew up in Baltimore and left school at fourteen to work for the railroad. An outspoken nonconformist, he moved restlessly from job to job: yardman, stevedore, nail-machine operator in a box factory, freight handler, cannery worker, stock brokerage clerk. He chafed under authority and was often fired, or else quit out of boredom. He was looking for “something extra” from life.

  In 1915 Hammett answered a blind ad which stated that applicants must have “wide work experience and be free to travel and respond to all situations.” The job itself was not specified.

  Intrigued, Hammett found himself at the Baltimore offices of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. For the next seven years, except during periods of army service or illness, Sam Hammett functioned as an agency operative. Unlike most agency detectives, who worked within a single locale, the Pinkerton detectives, based in a variety of cities,
ranged the states from east to west, operating across a wide terrain. Thus, Hammett found himself involved in a varied series of cross-country cases, many of them quite dangerous. Along the way, he was clubbed, shot at, and knifed; but, as he summed it up, “I was never bored.”

  In 1917 his life changed forever. Working for Pinkerton as a strikebreaker against the Industrial Workers of the World in Butte, Montana, Hammett was offered five thousand dollars to kill union agitator Frank Little. After Hammett bitterly refused, Little was lynched in a crime ascribed to vigilantes. As Lillian Hellman later observed: “This must have been, for Hammett, an abiding horror. I can date [his] belief that he was living in a corrupt society from Little’s murder.” Hammett’s political conscience was formed in Butte. From this point forward, it would permeate his life and work.

  In 1918 he left the agency for the first time to enlist in the army, where he was later diagnosed with tuberculosis. (“Guess it runs in the family. My mother had t.b.”) Discharged a year later, he was strong enough to rejoin Pinkerton. Unfortunately, the pernicious disease plagued him for many years and took a fearsome toll on his health.

  In 1921, with “bad lungs,” Hammett was sent to a hospital in Tacoma, Washington, where he was attended by Josephine Dolan, an attractive young ward nurse. This unworldly orphan girl found her new patient “handsome and mature.” She admired his military neatness and laughed at all his jokes. Soon they were intimate. Jose (pronounced “Joe’s”) was very serious about their relationship, but to Hammett it was little more than a casual diversion. At this point in his life he was incapable of love and, in fact, mistrusted the word.

  He declared in an unpublished sketch: “Our love seemed dependent on not being phrased. It seemed that if [I] said ‘I love you,’ the next instant it would have been a lie.” Hammett maintained this attitude throughout his life. He could write “with love” in a letter, but he was incapable of verbally declaring it.

  Finally, with his illness in remission, Hammett moved to San Francisco, where he received a letter from Jose telling him that she was pregnant. Would Sam marry her? He would.

  They became husband and wife in the summer of 1921, with Hammett once again employed by Pinkerton. But by the time daughter Mary Jane was born that October, Hammett was experiencing health problems caused by the cold San Francisco fog, which was affecting his weakened lungs.

  In February 1922, at age twenty-seven, he left the agency for the last time. A course at Munson’s Business College, a secretarial school, seemed to offer the chance to learn about professional writing. As a Pinkerton agent, Hammett had often been cited for his concise, neatly fashioned case reports. Now it was time to see if he could utilize this latent ability.

  By the close of that year he’d made small sales to The Smart Set and to a new detective pulp called The Black Mask. In December 1922 this magazine printed Hammett’s “The Road Home,” about a detective named Hagedorn who has been hired to chase down a criminal. After leading Hagedorn halfway around the globe, the fugitive offers the detective a share of “one of the richest gem beds in Asia” if he’ll throw in with him. At the story’s climax, heading into the jungle in pursuit of his prey, Hagedorn is thinking about the treasure. The reader is led to believe that the detective is tempted by the offer of riches, and that he will be corrupted when he sees the jewels. Thus, Hammett’s career-long theme of man’s basic corruptibility is prefigured here, in his first crime tale.

  In 1923 Hammett created the Continental Op for The Black Mask and was selling his fiction at a steady rate. In later years, a reporter asked him for his secret. Hammett shrugged. “I was a detective, so I wrote about detectives.” He added: “All of my characters were based on people I’ve known personally, or known about.”

  A second daughter, Josephine Rebecca, was born in May 1926, and Hammett realized that he could not continue to support his family on Black Mask sales. He quit prose writing to take a job as advertising manager for a local jeweler at $350 a month. He quickly learned to appreciate the distinctive features of watches and jeweled rings, and was soon writing the store’s weekly newspaper ads. Al Samuels was greatly pleased by his new employee’s ability to generate sales with expertly worded advertising copy. Hammett was “a natural.”

  But his tuberculosis surfaced again, and Hammett was forced to leave his job after just five months. He was now receiving 100 percent disability from the Veterans Bureau. During this flare-up he was nearly bedridden, so weak he had to lean on a line of chairs in order to walk between bed and bathroom. Because his tuberculosis was highly contagious, his wife and daughters had to live apart from him.

  As Hammett’s health improved, Joseph T. Shaw, the new editor of Black Mask, was able to lure him back to the magazine by promising higher rates (up to six cents a word) and offering him “a free creative hand” in developing novel-length material. “Hammett was the leader in what finally brought the magazine its distinctive form,” Shaw declared. “He told his stories with a new kind of compulsion and authenticity. And he was one of the most careful and painstaking workmen I have ever known.”

  A two-part novella, “The Big Knockover,” was followed by the Black Mask stories that led to his first four published books: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. They established Hammett as the nation’s premier writer of detective fiction.

  By 1930 he had separated from his family and moved to New York, where he reviewed books for the Evening Post. Later that year, at the age of thirty-six, he journeyed back to the West Coast after The Maltese Falcon sold to Hollywood, to develop screen material for Paramount. Hammett cut a dapper figure in the film capital. A sharp, immaculate dresser, he was dubbed “a Hollywood Dream Prince” by one local columnist. Tall, with a trim mustache and a regal bearing, he was also known as a charmer, exuding an air of mature masculinity that made him extremely attractive to women.

  It was in Hollywood, late that year, that he met aspiring writer Lillian Hellman and began an intense, volatile, often mutually destructive relationship that lasted, on and off, for the rest of his life. To Hellman, then in her mid-twenties, Hammett was nothing short of spectacular. Hugely successful, he was handsome, mature, well-read, and witty—a combination she found irresistible.

  Hammett eventually worked with Hellman on nearly all of her original plays (the exception being The Searching Wind). He painstakingly supervised structure, scenes, dialogue, and character, guiding Hellman through several productions. His contributions were enormous, and after Hammett’s death, Hellman never wrote another original play.

  In 1934, the period following the publication of The Thin Man, Hammett was at the height of his career. On the surface, his novel featuring Nick and Nora Charles was brisk and humorous, and it inspired a host of imitations. At heart, however, the book was about a disillusioned man who had rejected the detective business and no longer saw value in the pursuit of an investigative career.

  The parallel between Nick Charles and Hammett was clear; he was about to reject the genre that had made him famous. He had never been comfortable as a mystery writer. Detective stories no longer held appeal for him. (“This hard-boiled stuff is a menace.”)

  He wanted to write an original play, followed by what he termed “socially significant novels,” but he never indicated exactly what he had in mind. However, after 1934, no new Hammett fiction was printed during his lifetime. He attempted mainstream novels under several titles: “There Was a Young Man” (1938); “My Brother Felix” (1939); “The Valley Sheep Are Fatter” (1944); “The Hunting Boy” (1949); and “December 1” (1950). In each case the work was aborted after a brief start. His only sizable piece of fiction, “Tulip” (1952)—unfinished at 17,000 words—was printed after his death. It was about a man who could no longer write.

  Hammett’s problems were twofold. Having abandoned detective fiction, he had nothing to put in its place. Even more crippling, he had shut himself down emotionally, erecting an inner wall between himself and his public. He
had lost the ability to communicate, to share his emotions. As the years slipped past him, he drank, gambled, womanized, and buried himself in Marxist doctrines. His only creative outlet was his work on Hellman’s plays. There is no question that his input was of tremendous value to her, but it did not satisfy his desire to prove himself as a major novelist.

  The abiding irony of Hammett’s career is that he had already produced at least three major novels: Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key—all classic works respected around the world.

  But here, in this collection, we deal with his shorter tales, many of them novella length. They span a wide range, and some are better than others, but each is pure Hammett, and the least of them is marvelously entertaining.

  What makes Dashiell Hammett’s work unique in the genre of mystery writing? The answer is: authenticity.

  Hammett was able to bring the gritty’ argot of the streets into print, to realistically portray thugs, hobos, molls, stoolies, gunmen, political bosses, and crooked clients, allowing them to talk and behave on paper as they had talked and behaved during Hammett’s manhunting years. His stint as a working operative with Pinkerton provided a rock-solid base for his fiction. He had pursued murderers, investigated bank swindlers, gathered evidence for criminal trials, shadowed jewel thieves, tangled with safecrackers and holdup men, tracked counterfeiters, been involved in street shoot-outs, exposed forgers and blackmailers, uncovered a missing gold shipment, located a stolen Ferris wheel, and performed as guard, hotel detective, and strikebreaker.

  When Hammett sent his characters out to work the mean streets of San Francisco, readers responded to his hard-edged depiction of crime as it actually existed. No other detective-fiction writer of the period could match his kind of reality.

  Nightmare Town takes us back to those early years when Hammett’s talent burned flame-bright, the years when he was writing with force and vigor in a spare, stripped style that matched the intensity of his material. Working mainly in the pages of Black Mask (where ten of these present stories were first printed), Hammett launched a new style of detective fiction in America: bitter, tough, and unsentimental, reflecting the violence of the time. The staid English tradition of the tweedy gentleman detective was shattered, and murder bounced from the tea garden to the back alley. The polite British sleuth gave way to a hard-boiled man of action who didn’t mind bending some rules to get the job done, who could hand out punishment and take it, and who often played both sides of the law.