The Assistant Murderer and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Read online

  He was kidding, of course.

  Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today’s e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It’s a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.

  J.M.R.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Early Years: 1923–1924

  Dashiell Hammett may have been born with the urge to write, we can’t know, but it was happenstance that set the course for his literary fame. His first choice of careers was private investigation. When he turned twenty-one, he joined Pinkerton’s National Detective Service as an operative, a job he enjoyed for three years, from 1915 to 1918, before joining the army. He served in a medical unit at Fort Bragg, Maryland, an intake center for soldiers infected with Spanish Influenza returning from the war in Europe. Hammett contracted the flu himself, and that activated a latent strain of tuberculosis probably spread from his mother. He left the army after just less than a year with a sergeant’s rating, an honorable discharge, and a disability rating that fluctuated over the next ten years between 20% and 100%, usually hovering midway in between.

  After a period of convalescence, Hammett returned to detective work sporadically, until he was hospitalized with tuberculosis for some six months from November 1920 to the following May. Upon his release from the hospital, he moved to San Francisco and married his nurse, Josephine Dolan, in July 1921. Their daughter Mary was born in October. Hammett tried to support his new family as a detective, but he was unable. He retired permanently from the agency in either December 1921 or February 1922, depending on which evidence you choose to accept, due to disability. He was twenty-six, often a virtual invalid, and he needed money.

  In February 1922 he commenced a year and a half of study at Munson’s School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper reporting objective,” as he wrote in his disability log for the Veterans Bureau. The training shows. His early fiction has a journalistic quality about it—in the best sense. It is clearly written, detail oriented, and plainly narrated, without the strained and sensationalistic flourishes that mark the fiction of other early pulp writers. In October 1922 he began submitting humorous and ironic sketches to The Smart Set, the high-brow magazine edited and partially owned by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At their suggestion, after publishing three of his sketches, he lowered his sights to pulp magazines, which offered him steady, if not hefty, paychecks but required that he alter his subject matter. He made his living during most of the twenties on the back of what soon became his series character, the Continental Op, a professional detective.

  Hammett’s Continental Op is inseparable from the pulp magazine Black Mask, which was barely three years old and under new ownership when the Continental Op was introduced. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight published Op stories first appeared there between October 1923 and November 1930, as well as two four-part serial novels featuring the Op. Founded in 1920 by Mencken and Nathan to publish what Mencken called in My Life as Author and Editor “hacks of experience,” writing for “murder fans.” Black Mask had no literary pretensions in the beginning. Its sole purpose was to make money. Mencken claimed in a 1933 letter to his friend Philip Goodman that he and Nathan could “get out a 128-page magazine at a cash outlay of no more than $500” and did so in the case of Black Mask. With “no desire to go on with the Black Mask.” Mencken and Nathan sold it in summer 1921 to Eugene Crowe and Eltinge Warner (just before Crowe’s death), having earned about $25,000 each for their efforts. From the beginning the magazine was aimed at a blue-collar audience who wanted entertaining stories. Though it is known now as the publication that pioneered hard-boiled detective fiction, in the 10 October 1923 issue, the editor bragged that Black Mask published “Rugged adventure and real man and woman romance; rare Western yarns, swift-acting logical detective stories, weird, creepy mystery tales, and the only thrilling, convincing ghost stories to be found anywhere.” In that mix, Hammett found no models, and his sure-footed stories stood out—initially because of their confident, plausible prose and notable absence of gratuitous violence.

  Hammett used pseudonyms for his earliest Black Mask stories, usually Peter Collinson (from theatre slang for a phantom person). One might guess, and it is only a guess, that he was embarrassed to appear in the cheap pulps—certainly he spoke disparagingly of them later in his life. But he dropped his guard when he was asked for a comment about “the Vicious Circle,” a story about a politician reacting to blackmail published in the15 June 1923 Black Mask as by Collinson. Hammett replied that the story, which does not feature the Op, was based on cases he experienced as a private detective. He signed the response “S. D. Hammett” and soon afterward abandoned the Collinson pseudonym altogether. Sutton missed the reference. Even though Hammett took particular care in those early stories to describe accurately how a private detective went about his job and in “Zigzags of Treachery” (1 March 1924) provided specific how-to advice, it wasn’t until later that Sutton’s successor recognized the real-life experience that shaped the Op’s workman-like approaches to his cases.

  Writers rarely develop in a vacuum. In Hammett’s case, the course of his literary development seems clearly enough to have been molded by his editors. He came to write detective fiction because Mencken saw no future for him among the smart set, and at Black Mask he clearly was guided in the beginning by his editors’ ideas about what would sell in their market, ideas that changed with the man in charge. George W. Sutton, the Black Mask editor who agreed after three months on the job to publish “Arson Plus,” had no literary qualifications. He, described himself this way in a farewell message to readers in the 15 March 1924 issue, the last for which he had responsibility:

  The Editor is primarily a writer of automobile and motorboat articles, and all during the wonderful period that he has been at the helm of BLACK MASK, he has continued his automobile departments in various publications; using the afternoons and most of every night, every Sunday and holiday, to read the thousands of stories which come in to BLACK MASK—editing them, consulting with authors and artists, writing to readers, and attending to the thousands of details that make up the work necessary to getting out a “peppy” fiction magazine.

  Sutton’s “various publications” included Vanity Fair, Collier’s, Town & Country, Popular Mechanics, and newspaper syndication.

  In 1923 Sutton wrote a memo to prospective writers called “The Present needs of Black Mask,” in which he lamented that “BLACK MASK finds it very difficult to get exactly the kind of stories it wants. We can print stories of horror, supernatural but explainable phenomena and gruesome tales which no other magazine in the country would print, but they must be about human beings, convincing, entertaining, and interest impelling.” Sutton warned in his memo: “We do not care for purely scientific detective stories which lack action; and we are prejudiced by experience against the psychological story which is not very rugged and intense.”

  Though Black Mask is regarded, appropriately, as the birthplace of hard-boiled fiction, the hard-boiled story was still in gestation under Sutton. While crime was a staple of his Black Mask, it was but one ingredient of the editorial
mix, and only the earliest stories of Carroll John Daly, featuring cartoonishly violent protagonists acting out what seem to be the author’s homicidal, tough-guy fantasies, could properly be called hard boiled. Hammett set out to fulfill Black Mask’s needs with stories about a short, portly, tough, nameless detective for the Continental Detective Agency, based obviously on Pinkerton’s, who described his cases in procedural detail.

  Hammett was known to Sutton and his associate editor Harry North only through correspondence and his fiction. Hammett lived in San Francisco; the editorial offices were in New York. Sutton made an effort to stay in touch with his writers and his readers, though. He solicited letters from his writers about the genesis of their stories, and he encouraged readers to write in with their reactions, which he published, criticisms and all. Hammett responded to Sutton’s requests regularly, and his letters are included here after the stories on which they comment.

  By the time his fourth Op story was published, Hammett was advertised by Sutton as having “suddenly become one of the most popular of Black Mask writers, because his stories are always entertaining, full of action and very unusual situations.” They were also notably restrained by Black Mask standards. In those first four stories the Op does not carry a gun. In the first two there are no deaths; in the third there is one offstage murder and one murder before the story begins; and in the fourth there is one off- stage murder and one shooting. In the next five stories, Hammett’s last under Sutton’s editorship, there are a total of five murders during the action. Though the Op had an occasional fistfight, under Sutton he never killed a person; the crooks are the murderous ones. But Sutton went back to motorsports at the end of March 1924—his Camping by the Highway: Autocamper’s Handbook and Directory of Camp Sites was published by Field and Stream Publishing Company in 1925—and though Hammett was among the core writers on whose talents Sutton’s successors planned to build, the new editor had different ideas about what makes an entertaining story.

  The reputations of Hammett and the magazine that nurtured his talent rose together, and by 1930 each had altered the course of English-language literature. Black Mask had grown in circulation to 100,000 copies a month, and it was grudgingly respected as the unquestioned king of the pulps, beginning to show its influence in the mainstream development of tough-guy literature. Hammett, already regarded as the master of the hard-boiled detective story, was being recognized as a major force in what arguably can be called America’s most talented literary generation, the generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. Hammett did not regard the Op stories, early or late, as his best work—he reserved that distinction for The Maltese Falcon (serialized in Black Mask from September 1928–January 1929) and The Glass Key (serialized in Black Mask from March to June 1930)—but there is no question that he used these stories to test characters, plots, and dialogue he used in his novels, and his genius shines through in every one.

  R.L.

  IT

  Black Mask, 1 November 1923

  Calling a detective to solve a crime that turns out to be something quite different from the first diagnosis makes a very unusual story of this. You’ll be surprised!

  “Now listen, Mr. Zumwalt, you’re holding out on me; and it won’t do! If I’m going to work on this for you I’ve got to have the whole story.”

  He looked thoughtfully at me for a moment through screwed-up blue eyes. Then he got up and went to the door of the outer office, opening it. Past him I could see the bookkeeper and the stenographer sitting at their desks. Zumwalt closed the door and returned to his desk, leaning across it to speak in a husky undertone.

  “You are right, I suppose. But what I am going to tell you must be held in the strictest confidence.”

  I nodded, and he went on:

  “About two months ago one of our clients, Stanley Gorham, turned $100,000 worth of Liberty bonds over to us. He had to go to the Orient on business, and he had an idea that the bonds might go to par during his absence; so he left them with us to be sold if they did. Yesterday I had occasion to go to the safe deposit box where the bonds had been put—in the Golden Gate Trust Company’s vault—and they were gone!”

  “Anybody except you and your partner have access to the box?”

  “No.”

  “When did you see the bonds last?”

  “They were in the box the Saturday before Dan left. And one of the men on duty in the vault told me that Dan was there the following Monday.”

  “All right! Now let me see if I’ve got it all straight. Your partner, Daniel Rathbone, was supposed to leave for New York on the twenty-seventh of last month, Monday, to meet an R. W. DePuy. But Rathbone came into the office that day with his baggage and said that important personal affairs made it necessary for him to postpone his departure, that he had to be in San Francisco the following morning. But he didn’t tell you what that personal business was.

  “You and he had some words over the delay, as you thought it important that he keep the New York engagement on time. You weren’t on the best of terms at the time, having quarreled a couple of days before that over a shady deal Rathbone had put over. And so you—”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” Zumwalt interrupted. “Dan had done nothing dishonest. It was simply that he had engineered several transactions that—well, I thought he had sacrificed ethics to profits.”

  “I see. Anyhow, starting with your argument over his not leaving for New York that day, you and he wound up by dragging in all of your differences, and practically decided to dissolve partnership as soon as it could be done. The argument was concluded in your house out on Fourteenth Avenue; and, as it was rather late by then and he had checked out of his hotel before he had changed his mind about going to New York, he stayed there with you that night.”

  “That’s right,” Zumwalt explained. “I have been living at a hotel since Mrs. Zumwalt has been away, but Dan and I went out to the house because it gave us the utmost privacy for our talk; and when we finished it was so late that we remained there.”

  “Then the next morning you and Rathbone came down to the office and—”

  “No,” he corrected me. “That is, we didn’t come down here together. I came here while Dan went to transact whatever it was that had held him in town. He came into the office a little after noon, and said he was going East on the evening train. He sent Quimby, the bookkeeper, down to get his reservations and to check his baggage, which he had left in the office here overnight. Then Dan and I went to lunch together, came back to the office for a few minutes—he had some mail to sign—and then he left.”

  “I see. After that, you didn’t hear from or of him until about ten days later, when DePuy wired to find out why Rathbone hadn’t been to see him?”

  “That’s right! As soon as I got DePuy’s wire I sent one to Dan’s brother in Chicago, thinking perhaps Dan had stopped over with him, but Tom wired back that he hadn’t seen his brother. Since then I’ve had two more wires from DePuy. I was sore with Dan for keeping DePuy waiting, but still I didn’t worry a lot.

  “Dan isn’t a very reliable person, and if he suddenly took a notion to stop off somewhere between here and New York for a few days he’d do it. But yesterday, when I found that the bonds were gone from the safe deposit box and learned that Dan had been to the box the day before he left, I decided that I’d have to do something. But I don’t want the police brought into it if it can be avoided.

  “I feel sure that if I can find Dan and talk to him we can straighten the mess out somehow without scandal. We had our differences, but Dan’s too decent a man, and I like him too well, for all his occasional wildness, to want to see him in jail. So I want him found with as much speed and as little noise as possible.”

  “Has he got a car?”

  “Not now. He had one but he sold it five or six months ago.”

  “Where’d he bank? I mean
his personal account?”

  “At the Golden Gate Trust Company.”

  “Got any photos of him?”

  “Yes.”

  He brought out two from a desk drawer—one full-face, and the other a three-quarter view. They showed a man in the middle of his life, with shrewd eyes set close together in a hatchet face, under dark, thin hair. But the face was rather pleasant for all its craftiness.

  “How about his relatives, friends, and so on—particularly his feminine friends?”

  “His only relative is the brother in Chicago. As to his friends: he probably has as many as any man in San Francisco. He was a wonderful mixer.

  “Recently he has been on very good terms with a Mrs. Earnshaw, the wife of a real estate agent. She lives on Pacific Street, I think. I don’t know just how intimate they were, but he used to call her up on the phone frequently, and she called him here nearly every day. Then there is a girl named Eva Duthie, a cabaret entertainer, who lives in the 1100 block of Bush Street. There were probably others, too, but I know of only those two.”

  “Have you looked through his stuff, here?”

  “Yes, but perhaps you’d like to look for yourself.”

  He led me into Rathbone’s private office: a small box of a room, just large enough for a desk, a filing cabinet, and two chairs, with doors leading into the corridor, the outer office, and Zumwalt’s.

  “While I’m looking around you might get me a list of the serial numbers of the missing bonds,” I said. “They probably won’t help us right away, but we can get the Treasury Department to let us know when the coupons come in, and from where.”

  I didn’t expect to find anything in Rathbone’s office and I didn’t.

  Before I left I questioned the stenographer and the bookkeeper. They already knew that Rathbone was missing, but they didn’t know that the bonds were gone too.