Making It New: 1900–1945 507The Maltese Falcon (1930), Sam Spade. Raymond Chandler wrote of Hammett and
his followers that they were responsible for “taking murder out of the library and
putting it back on the streets where it belonged.” Of Hammett, in particular, he
observed that he “wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp,
aggressive attitude to life.” Such people, Chandler added, “were not afraid of the
seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right
down their street.” Hammett created heroes who were not merely cool, tough,
cynical; they confronted the conditions surrounding them with a full knowledge of
their latent violence and their pervasive, inherent corruption. Favoring a rapid
tempo and economy of expression, Hammett nevertheless wove elaborate patterns
of intrigue and deceit. His novels became narrative labyrinths, replicating the literal
labyrinths of the city streets and the social labyrinth of urban power, in which it
became just about impossible to know whom to trust – other than oneself. Pursuing
the fabulous jewel-encrusted black bird that supplies the title of The Maltese Falcon,
“the stuff that dreams are made of,” Sam Spade discovers what in a sense he has
always known: that there is little he can rely on, apart from his own nerve and work –
and the simple code that tells him “when a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to
do something about it,” even if he did not like him.
What fires the work of Hammett into life, above all, is what came to be known as
his “hardboiled style.” The style of all his fiction is hard, brittle, unadorned. The
emphasis is on dialogue, the vernacular, and basic colloquial rhythms. Hammett did
not invent the style, of course. In the short term, it was an offshoot of the styles
deployed by Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Ring Lardner. In the
longer term, its antecedents could be traced back to that concern for American
speech shown by Mark Twain or even Walt Whitman. What he did add to it, though,
was what another detective story writer, Ellery Queen (the pseudonym of Frederic
Dannay (1908–1982) and Manfred Lee (1905–1971)), called “romantic realism.”
Placing his stories against a stark backdrop, Hammett peopled them with protagonists
who combined cynicism with a strange kind of commitment to their own sense of
things – not a vision perhaps, but a stern sense of vocation. The longtime partner of
Hammett, Lillian Hellman, said that he was the kind of person who had a “reserve
so deep that we all know we cannot touch it with charm or jokes or favors. It comes
out as something more than dignity and shows on the face.” The poet Richard
Wilbur, she recalled, said that “as you came toward Hammett to shake his hand in
the first meeting, you wanted him to approve of you.” That is precisely the reaction
that, despite their toughness, even bitterness and occasional brutality, the detective
heroes of Hammett tend to inspire. The style underwrites this. Just as the hero is the
one true thing in a deeply duplicitous world, so the style – spare to the point of
verbal starvation – is a true coinage that defines more complex styles as counterfeit.
Surrounded by masks and metaphors, it is the man and the speech closest to silence
that we trust.
The fiction of Hammett brims with undisclosed romanticism. In the work of
Raymond Chandler, that romanticism is more or less disclosed. Many of the familiar
elements of the hardboiled detective story, as perfected by Hammett, are still there:GGray_c04.indd 507ray_c 04 .indd 507 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM