Corkscrew and Other Stories 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 Middle Years: 1924–1925

  The character of Black Mask and of Hammett’s fiction changed abruptly when Philip C. Cody, described by H. L. Mencken as “a mild and pleasant fellow who was almost stone deaf,” succeeded Sutton as editor. Cody was spread as thinly as his predecessor with regard to his editorial duties. He was vice-president and general manager of Warner Publications, a growing concern that included Field and Stream, Black Mask, and other pulps, as well as a short-lived book club started in 1925. Cody had doubled as circulation manager of Black Mask, and he brought to the editor’s chair a sense of marketing that Sutton lacked. Cody transformed Black Mask into a magazine that offered increased emphasis on action-packed crime fiction, enlivened by violence and punctuated with sexual titillation. He nurtured a small stable of favorite writers and encouraged them write stories of substantial length.

  The effect on Hammett was immediately clear. His stories more than doubled in length after “One Hour,” a story that the editors of this collection assume to have been accepted by Sutton though it was published in the 1 April 1924 Black Mask, the first that carried Cody’s name as editor. With two exceptions (“The Tenth Clew” at 11,419 words and “Zigzags of Treachery” at 14,521 words), Hammett’s Op stories for Sutton averaged just under 6,000 words apiece. The ten Op stories published by Cody between April 1924 and March 1926 averaged about 14,000 words each. And the Op got meaner. During the course of the nine Op stories written for Sutton, the Op usually didn’t carry a gun, and he was not directly involved in any lethal activity. Hammett’s first story for Cody features six murders, three of which are committed with cause by the Op. During the rest of Cody’s tenure, Hammett’s stories average some six dead bodies each. The Op was turning blood simple. The plots become more complicated; the women more seductive and dangerous; the crooks more professional. Dramatic confrontation rather than simple description increasingly served to advance the plot. Notably in “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (June 1924), the first of a handful of stories in which the Op struggles to overcome a dangerous attraction to a beautiful woman, Hammett’s Op begins to reveal his emotions. And Hammett’s settings began to exhibit an international flair, as in “The Golden Horseshoe” (November 1924), “The Gutting of Couffignal” (December 1925), and “The Creeping Siamese” (March 1926).

  Cody may have been the boss, but his vision was implemented by associate editor Harry C. North, who had served under Sutton, as well. North seems to have conducted an extensive editorial correspondence with his authors, and he minced no words in expressing his editorial opinion. Cody unleashed him. The communications with Hammett are lost, but North’s style can be gleaned from his letters to Erle Stanley Gardner, who published more than 100 stories in Black Mask between 1924 and 1943. That correspondence reveals North to be a man with a sharp editorial eye and firm opinions. His entire reply to an early submission by Gardner was “This stinks.” His editorial principle was also simply stated: he advised Gardner: “If you could once appreciate the fact that the publisher of Black Mask is printing the magazine to make money and nothing else, perhaps you would be more nearly able to guess our needs.”

  Cody wasted no time asserting his authority, but he let North do the dirty work of rejecting two of Hammett’s stories. The rejection must have taken place almost immediately after Cody took control, but the account of it did not appear until August 1924, four months after Cody’s ascension, when he published Hammett’s response to Harry North’s rejection letter under the headline “Our Own Short Story Course”:

  We recently were obliged to reject two of Mr. Hammett’s detective stories. We didn’t like to do it, for Mr. Hammett and his Continental Detective Agency had become more or less fixtures in BLACK MASK. But in our opinion, the stories were not up to the standard of Mr. Hammett’s own work—so they had to go back.

  In returning the manuscripts, we enclosed the “Tragedy in One Act,” referred to in the letter which follows. The “Tragedy” was simply a verbatim report of the discussion in this office, which led to the rejection of the stories.

  We are printing Mr. Hammett’s letter below; first, to show the difference between a good author and a poor one; and secondly, as a primary course in short story writing. We believe that authors—especially young authors, and also old authors who have fallen into the rut—can learn more about successful writing from the hundred or so words following, than they can possibly learn from several volumes of so-called short story instruction. Mr. Hammett has gone straight to the heart of the whole subject of writing—or of painting, singing, acting … or of just living for that matter. As the advertising gentry would say, here is the “Secret” of success.

  I don’t like that “tragedy in one act” at all; it’s too damned true-to-life. The theatre, to amuse me, must be a bit artificial.

  I don’t think I shall send “Women, Politics, and Murder” back to you—not in time for the July issue anyway. The trouble is that this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I have fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.

  There are men who can write like that, but I’m not one of them. If I stick to the stuff I want to write—the stuff I enjoy writing—I can make a go of it, but when I try to grind out a yarn because I think there’s a market for it, then I flop.

  Whenever, from now on, I get hold of a story that fits my sleuth, I shall put him to work, but I’m through with trying to run him on a schedule.

  Possibly I could patch up “The Question’s One Answer” and “Women, Politics, and Murder” enough to get by with them, but my frank opinion of them is that neither is worth the trouble. I have a liking for honest work, and honest work as I see it is work that is done for the worker’s enjoyment as much as for the profit it will bring him. And henceforth that’s my work.

  I want to thank both you and Mr. Cody for jolting me into wakefulness. There’s no telling how much good this will do me. And you may be sure that whenever you get a story from me hereafter,—frequently, I hope,—it will be one that I enjoyed writing.

  DASHIELL HAMMETT

  San Francisco, Cal.

  Meanwhile, Cody published “The House on Turk Street” (15 April 1924) and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (June 1924), Hammett’s first set of linked stories and the strongest fiction he had written to that point. Together these stories form a 25,000 word novelette and begin to treat the characters and themes Hammett perfected five years later in The Maltese Falcon.

  Hammett didn’t like Cody and North, but he needed the money they paid him. Two months after Cody became editor, Hammett’s disability payment from the U.S. Veterans Bureau was discontinued due to his improving health. It is not know
n how much he was paid for his Black Mask stories, but the base rate is believed to have been a penny a word, though Mencken claimed to have paid a bit less. Other pulps were paying their star writers two cents a word by the mid 1920s and as much as three cents a word by the end of the decade. Because of his popularity Hammett presumably commanded the top rate, but his income was limited by a schedule imposed by Cody, and generally observed, of no more than a story every other month. During Cody’s tenure, from 1 April 1924 until Hammett quit writing for him in March 1926, Hammett published 15 stories in Black Mask of which ten featured the Op. If he made two cents a word under Cody, he earned about $4500 in the two years he wrote for him, or an average of about $300 a story. During that time he also published four stories (one of which was narrated by the Op) in other pulps, as well as a smattering of non fiction and poems; those publications would have earned him no more than another $1000. In September 1925, Hammett learned that his wife was pregnant with their second child. With another mouth to feed, Hammett asked Cody for more money, threatening to quit the magazine if he were denied. Gardner, an attorney, claimed he offered to take a cut in his own pay rate for Hammett’s sake, but Cody refused Hammett on the grounds that it would be unfair to other Black Mask authors. The circumstances are unclear, but Hammett claimed Cody owed him $300, which Cody refused to pay. Hammett quit the magazine in anger early in 1926. His last story for Cody was “The Creeping Siamese” published in March.

  R.L.

  CORKSCREW

  Black Mask, September 1925

  I

  Boiling like a coffee pot before we were five miles out of Filmer, the automobile stage carried me south into the shimmering heat, blinding sunlight, and bitter white dust of the Arizona desert.

  I was the only passenger. The driver felt as little like talking as I. All morning we rode through cactus-spiked, sage-studded oven-country, without conversation, except when the driver cursed the necessity of stopping to feed his clattering machine more water. The car crept through soft sifting sand; wound between steep-walled red mesas; dipped into dry arroyas where clumps of dusty mesquite were like white lace in the glare; and skirted sharp-edged barrancos.

  All these things were hot. All of them tried to get rid of their heat by throwing it on the car. My fat melted in the heat. The heat dried my perspiration before I could feel its moisture. The dazzling light scorched my eyeballs; puckered my lids; cooked my mouth. Alkali stung my nose; was gritty between my teeth.

  It was a nice ride! I understood why the natives were a hard lot. A morning like this would put any man in a mood to kill his brother, and would fry his brother into not caring whether he was killed.

  The sun climbed up in the brazen sky. The higher it got, the larger and hotter it got. I wondered how much hotter it would have to get to explode the cartridges in the gun under my arm. Not that it mattered—if it got any hotter, we would all blow up anyway. Car, desert, chauffeur and I would all bang out of existence in one explosive flash. I didn’t care if we did!

  That was my frame of mind as we pushed up a long slope, topped a sharp ridge, and slid down into Corkscrew.

  Corkscrew wouldn’t have been impressive at any time. It especially wasn’t this white-hot Sunday afternoon. One sandy street following the crooked edge of the Tirabuzon Cañon, from which, by translation, the town took its name. A town, it was called, but village would have been flattery: fifteen or eighteen shabby buildings slumped along the irregular street, with tumble-down shacks leaning against them, squatting close to them, and trying to sneak away from them.

  That was Corkscrew. One look at it, and I believed all I had heard about it!

  In the street, four dusty automobiles cooked. Between two buildings I could see a corral where half a dozen horses bunched their dejection under a shed. No person was in sight. Even the stage driver, carrying a limp and apparently empty mail sack, had vanished into a building labelled “Adderly’s Emporium.”

  Gathering up my two grey-powdered bags, I climbed out and crossed the road to where a weather-washed sign, on which Cañon House was barely visible, hung over the door of a two-story, iron-roofed, adobe house.

  I crossed the wide, unpainted and unpeopled porch, and pushed a door open with my foot, going into a dining-room, where a dozen men and a woman sat eating at oilcloth-covered tables. In one corner of the room, was a cashier’s desk; and, on the wall behind it, a key-rack. Between rack and desk, a pudgy man whose few remaining hairs were the exact shade of his sallow skin, sat on a stool, and pretended he didn’t see me.

  “A room and a lot of water,” I said, dropping my bags, and reaching for the glass that sat on top of a cooler in the corner.

  “You can have your room,” the sallow man growled, “but water won’t do you no good. You won’t no sooner drink and wash, than you’ll be thirsty and dirty all over again. Where in hell is that register?”

  He couldn’t find it, so he pushed an old envelope across the desk at me.

  “Register on the back of that. Be with us a spell?”

  “Most likely.”

  A chair upset behind me.

  I turned around as a lanky man with enormous red ears reared himself upright with the help of his hands on the table—one of them flat in the plate of ham and eggs he had been eating.

  “Ladiesh an’ gentsh,” he solemnly declaimed, “th’ time hash came for yuh t’ give up y’r evil waysh an’ git out y’r knittin’. Th’ law hash came to Orilla County!”

  The drunk bowed to me, upset his ham and eggs, and sat down again. The other diners applauded with thump of knives and forks on tables and dishes.

  I looked them over while they looked me over. A miscellaneous assortment: weather-beaten horsemen, clumsily muscled laborers, men with the pasty complexions of night workers. The one woman in the room didn’t belong to Arizona. She was a thin girl of maybe twenty-five, with too-bright dark eyes, dark, short hair, and a sharp prettiness that was the mark of a larger settlement than this. You’ve seen her, or her sisters, in the larger cities, in the places that get going after the theatres let out.

  The man with her was range country—a slim lad in the early twenties, not very tall, with pale blue eyes that were startling in so dark-tanned a face. His features were a bit too perfect in their clean-cut regularity.

  “So you’re the new deputy sheriff?” the sallow man questioned the back of my head.

  Somebody had kept my secret right out in the open! There was no use trying to cover up.

  “Yes.” I hid my annoyance under a grin that took in him and the diners. “But I’ll trade my star right now for that room and water we were talking about.”

  He took me through the dining-room and upstairs to a board-walled room in the rear second floor, said, “This is it,” and left me.

  I did what I could with the water in a pitcher on the washstand to free myself from the white grime I had accumulated. Then I dug a grey shirt and a suit of whipcords out of my bags, and holstered my gun under my left shoulder, where it wouldn’t be a secret.

  In each side pocket of my coat I stowed a new .32 automatic—small, snub-nosed affairs that weren’t much better than toys. Their smallness let me carry them where they’d be close to my hands without advertising the fact that the gun under my shoulder wasn’t all my arsenal.

  The dining-room was empty when I went downstairs again. The sallow pessimist who ran the place stuck his head out of a door.

  “Any chance of getting something to eat?” I asked.

  “Hardly any,” jerking his head toward a sign that said:

  “Meals 6 to 8 A. M., 12 to 2 and 5 to 7 P. M.”

  “You can grub up at the Jew’s—if you ain’t particular,” he added sourly.

  I went out, across the porch that was too hot for idlers, and into the street that was empty for the same reason. Huddled against the wall of a large one-story adobe building, which had Border
Palace painted all across its front, I found the Jew’s.

  It was a small shack—three wooden walls stuck against the adobe wall of the Border Palace—jammed with a lunch counter, eight stools, a stove, a handful of cooking implements, half the flies in the world, an iron cot behind a half-drawn burlap curtain, and the proprietor. The interior had once been painted white. It was a smoky grease-color now, except where home-made signs said:

  “Meals At All Hours. No Credit” and gave the prices of various foods. These signs were a fly-specked yellow-grey.

  The proprietor wasn’t a Jew—an Armenian or something of the sort, I thought. He was a small man, old, scrawny, dark-skinned, wrinkled and cheerful.

  “You the new sheriff?” he asked, and when he grinned I saw he had no teeth.

  “Deputy,” I admitted, “and hungry. I’ll eat anything you’ve got that won’t bite back, and that won’t take long to get ready.”

  “Sure!” He turned to his stove and began banging pans around. “We need sheriffs,” he said over his shoulder. “Sure, we need them!”

  “Somebody been picking on you?”

  He showed his empty gums in another grin.

  “Nobody pick on me—I tell you that!” He flourished a stringy hand at a sugar barrel under the shelves behind his counter. “I fix them decidedly!”

  A shotgun butt stuck out of the barrel. I pulled it out: a double-barrel shotgun with the barrels sawed off short: a mean weapon close up.

  I slid it back into its resting place as the old man began thumping dishes down in front of me.

  II

  The food inside me and a cigarette burning, I went out into the crooked street again. From the Border Palace came the clicking of pool balls. I followed the sound through the door.

  In a large room, four men were leaning over a couple of pool tables, while five or six more watched them from chairs along the wall. On one side of the room was an oak bar, with nobody behind it. Through an open door in the rear came the sound of shuffling cards.