Murder Most Droll

...They include some unlikely turns: a Western, with an outlaw and a marshall and a jailbreak ("The Man Who Killed Dan Odams...

...The title of another story, "Bodies Piled Up," compactly expresses a basic principle of Hammett's art...

...Take the following exchange in "$160,000 Blood Money": '"Exit Arlie,' he said...

...Early on his stories came out at the rate of one every six weeks, and more than a hundred eventually appeared...

...In truth, he had begun with an insight about the nature of urban crime in America that for him turned out to be a dead end...

...Actually Hammett did not stop writing fiction, as his friends seem to have known...

...Most often it is San Francisco, but it could be any modern city in the United States...

...There is a dismissiveness toward the characters, too...

...Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, the hair ends showing under her black-green-and-silver turban were brown, and she had a nose...

...All of this went to create the singular style, and the style—in its attitude toward Hammett's subject matter—was a form of judgment, absolute and removed from debate...

...The editors also present a preliminary version of The Thin Man that is long on plot but as yet devoid of its eventual protagonists, Nick Charles and his wife Nora, who would confer upon the novel the weariness, the boozy sophistication, the fundamental bleakness that define it...

...Likewise, Gutman, in The Maltese Falcon, is fat "with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs...

...A young poet in "A Man Named Thin' points out the superiority, for the practicing poet, of the Shakespearean over the Petrarchan sonnet...

...It is the beginning of tire end when you discoveryou have style...

...it had no shape at all...

...In several of her memoirs Hellman suggested that Hammett found in her a superior talent, and that to the end of his life he devoted his creative energies to abetting her career rather than furthering his own...

...He didn't write whodunits...

...All bonds have been sundered, corruption of the governing institutions is thorough, and murder is the most likely metaphor for civil life...

...Nick Charles of The Thin Man, a 41 -year-old premature retiree living on his wife's money, wanted a drink every paragraph and was alternately "tight" or hung over...

...Hammett's fictions do not have much in the way of plot...

...He especially liked Red Harvest, he said, for its "implacable cynicism," for its being "the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror...

...Sixteen murders take place in Red Harvest, which is not a long novel...

...Hammett wrote pulp fiction, an entertainment, and the attitude is one of detached, faintly insouciant amusement, often self-consciously indulged...

...In The Maltese Falcon Gutman explains the provenance of the falcon by referring to obscure texts—and, amazingly, they not only exist but Hammett did know every one of them, including J. Delaville Le Roulx' Les Archives, La Bibliothèque et le Trésor de l'Ordre de Saint Jean de Jérusalem à Malte...

...In "Nightmare Town," the title story of the present collection, a whole town is organized for a criminal endeavor until the organization breaks down and all of the citizens kill one another...

...As has been observed, Hammett did for murder what the Restoration playwright William Congreve did for adultery, presenting it as the rule of society and a drollery...

...Reviewed by Marcus Klein Professor emeritus of English, SUNY/Buffalo...

...In 1938, in Hollywood, when someone asked Dorothy Parker where Hammett was, she said he was "In his apartment at the Beverly Wilshire contemplating his novel...

...Each of his protagonists was contrary to expected type...

...Nightmare Town brings us 20 more of the stories...

...R.I.P.?' 'Yep.' 'How?' 'Lead.' Our lad's?' 'Yep.' 'Keep till morning?' 'Yep.' 'See you at the office,' and I went back to sleep...

...the other is The Continental Op, edited by Steven Marcus in 1974...

...The Continental Op and Sam Spade are characters in a continuing folklore...

...There can be no knowing why, after The Thin Man, Hammett stopped publishing fiction...

...In "The First Thin Man" the seductress has "narrow lanceolate eyes...

...As a literal matter it typically was so understated as to be uninformative, yet it was heavily freighted...

...Or it could have been Hollywood —the end of many a literary career— where he went in 1931...

...And it is pleasant to have more of it...

...Or, from "The Big Knockover:" "She was probably 20...

...Autodidact that he was, Hammett told others of his being influenced by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and a couple of characters named Conrad and James show up in "Too Many Have Lived...

...In "Too Many Have Lived" Sam Spade remarks, "Somebody ought to write a book about people some time—they're peculiar...

...Throughout the tales there are donnish asides...

...Another, The Thin Man, was issued in 1934...

...He contemplated the "mean streets"—in Raymond Chandler's lovely phrase—and chuckled...

...a moonshiner tale that moralizes on the subject of courage ("Afraid of a Gun...

...Much of his work has disappeared into disintegrating pulp magazines and anthologies, but two principal collections of the short fiction remain in print...

...The Girl with the Silver Eyes" nods in the direction of Balzac's "The Girl with the Golden Eyes...

...Gide was mistaken, the attitude is not "horror," it is something beyond that...

...He conceded that he might have missed some subtleties of the dialogue (he did, and not only of the dialogue), but he clearly heard or sensed something in Hammett's fiction deeper than the already well established toughguy conventions of American detective stories...

...And a substantial fragment of a longer work...

...Tulip, was published posthumously in The Big Knockover...

...Before Sam Spade there was the Continental Op—five-foot-six, 190 pounds and sometimes referred to as Fat Shorty, who more than anything else wanted to sleep...

...There he met Lillian Hellman, who on and off was to be his lifetime companion, and also may have been the culprit...

...Consider this from "The Assistant Murderer": "One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked...

...and a 1934 story about a young boxer and his sadly corrupted brothermanagerthat is baldly derivative of Hemingway as well as peculiarly slack ("His Brother's Keeper...

...The thin man of The Thin Man is the corpse, and he is thin because he has been buried in lime so that there is not much flesh left on him...

...Priorto Nick Charles there had been Sam Spade, the utterly cynical "blond Satan" of The Maltese Falcon and some of the stories in the present volume...

...Veins had broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings...

...In addition, the characters are as likely as not grotesques...

...Between 1929 and 1931 he also published four novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key...

...I said so...

...Another way, you said it could not be crooked...

...All have been anthologized before, but have long been out of print...

...That there was some truth in what he had to say is indicated by the fact that Hammett goes on going on...

...Almost two decades later—after having been a victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunting of the early '50s and having spent six months in a Federal penitentiary for contempt of Congress— Hammett told a newspaper interviewer: "I stopped writing because I found I was repeating myself...

...On the other hand, many of the stories here are not only as deft and taut and sly as anything Hammett ever wrote, but are entirely typical in tone and rhetoric...

...Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color...

...Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice...

...With only an occasional exception, the setting is a city...

...It could have been the booze...

...author...

...In "House Dick," the opening of a closet reveals one, then two, then three bodies, pancaked together...

...Nor is there a great deal of what Gide termed "atrocity," but there is excess...

...He generally did his perceiving through a Private Eye hired to solve a crime of one sort or another, who in a single motion registered the fact of crime while remaining fundamentally dismissive of any notion that it was "criminal...

...Its assertions tend to also be acts of dismissal...

...That is true, moreover, regardless of when they were done...

...André Gide was one of Hammett's admirers...

...Whether dead or alive, they more often than not are perceived in terms of body parts...

...Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eves" Dashiell Hammett's career as a publishing fiction writer only lasted from 1922 to 1934, but during those 12 years he was very productive...

...It appears that what Hammett knew, he pretty much knew from the outset...

...One is entitled The Big Knockover and was put together by Lillian Hellman in 1966, five years after Hammett's death...

...Hammett's dialogue was not authentic thieves' cant, whatever that might be...

...Unexpected, somewhat condescending elegances often mark this prose whose subject is homicide...