CHENNAI: When you see Gabriel Byrne’s character in Miller’s Crossing (1990) carefully plotting the local ganglords to battle, there is the hand of a long-dead writer of hardboiled detective stories at play. The Coen brothers have always been fans of Dashiell Hammett. In fact their first movie was Blood Simple (1984), that memorable turn of phrase in Hammett’s Red Harvest to describe the panicked, jittery, excitable mindset of people who are exposed to continuous, senseless violence.
Who was Dashiell Hammett? What did Dashiell Hammett do? Perhaps the best way to describe Hammett and his revolution was to quote the other great writer of hardboiled mysteries, Raymond Chandler: Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.
He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.... He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.
Hammett’s cynical, world-weary, rough-around-the-edges detectives had an inspiration — Hammett himself. He had been a detective at the famous Pinkerton’s agency before he got into writing. He quit Pinkerton’s because of their involvement in breaking up union strikes, which Hammett couldn’t support — he was left-leaning all of his life. The 1940s and 50s were bad days for the creative American. Those were the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Communist fearmongering. Hammett was imprisoned for six months after he refused to testify against four fellow Communists in a conspiracy trial.
Hammett enlisted for both the World Wars, and they left him with tuberculosis and a very fragile health, something that would eventually take his life. He wrote short stories and novels, and his entire writing career spanned only 12 years — 1922 to 1934. In the last 32 years of his life, he produced only one short story. But what a career it was! Hammett wrote the hardest, cleanest, most sparse literature that you will ever find in detective fiction.
He created some of the most memorable characters in all of the canon of detective / mystery literature — Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Nick and Nora Charles. He was a literary writer, whose writing occupies a respected position in America’s literary pantheon. But he wrote in pulp fiction magazines, most notably in the Black Mask, about which we discussed in the previous column. It was the arrival and extreme popularity of Dashiell Hammett that led to Mickey Spillane, James M Cain, and that other great, Raymond Chandler, to write for the magazine and change detective fiction forever.
(The writer is a business development executive in Hyderabad)