Two Shots of Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, and an earlier series called, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” published in the pulp magazine Black Mask, are the same story.

Both tell how the Continental Op – Hammett’s unnamed operative for the fictional Continental Detective Agency – comes to a small Western city called Personville (nicknamed “Poisonville”) to help rid it of gangsters, crooked cops and corrupt politicians.

In Poisonville, the young publisher of the city’s local paper is waging a campaign to clean up the town. The publisher’s father owns the paper, the mine, and several other prominent businesses. The father also has the leading citizens and top officials in his pocket. But the father is old and losing his grip. Racketeers have moved in and divided up the city.

Unwilling to side with any one group the Op sets about turning the gangs against one another so they will destroy themselves.

It is a complicated story filled with violence and double crosses.

The four Black Mask stories – “The Cleansing of Poisonville” (November 1927); “Crime Wanted – Male or Female” (December 1927); “Dynamite” (January 1928); and “The 19th Murder” (February 1928) – are included in their original form in The Big Book of the Continental Op (2017) compiled by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.

When the stories appeared in Black Mask, they caught the attention of a book editor who approached Hammett with the idea of publishing them as a novel. But first the editor wanted Hammett to make some changes. He suggested cutting some of the violence to make the story more believable, according to Layman and Rivett.

The book, called Red Harvest after Hammett submitted a page of alternate titles, was published in February, 1929, by Alfred A. Knopf.

Reading the stories and the book at the same time shows interesting changes made by Hammett in his transition from pulp writer to novelist.

Key cuts were the dynamiting of police headquarters and the bomb killing of one of the three gang leaders. The Op’s escape over the rooftops from an ambush was also cut. And the shootout at the Silver Arrow Club was streamlined and in the book.

There are small changes on almost every page of the novel. Often they are as simple as a word choice or a rewritten sentence. Most of these changes tightened the writing, eliminating repetitions in dialogue, but they also took away some of the flavor.

Hammett was always good at creating realistic dialogue. In his pulp stories, he used a good deal of the underworld slang of his era. The amount of slang was reduced in the book, or altered to clarify a point. The book editor may have felt that readers of the novel would be less familiar with the slang than the readers of Black Mask.

The changes made the writing a little less colorful and took some of the rough edge off the tale, but did not damage the storytelling. Hammett was still Hammett, and the tough, lean writing style was still there. Even Hammett’s earliest stories showed this talent.

For the slang that remained, Layman and Rivett, the editors of The Big Book..., found some of the words and phrases needed footnotes for current readers to understand them.

Future readers of Hammett may need even more annotations. The time may come when a Hammett story will require as many footnotes as a Shakespeare play.

But with our without the explanations, Hammett’s work is always a pleasure to read.

Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op

There is a massive paperback called The Big Book of the Continental Op with all (or most of) Dashiell Hammett’s short stories featuring his investigator for the fictional Continental Detective Agency. Hammett never tells the reader the Op's name.

Editors Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett collected all the Op stories Hammett published from October 1923 to November 1930 in the pulp magazine Black Mask. The book includes the original, serialized stories Hammett later rewrote, edited, and published as the novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Aside from correcting typos and adding footnotes to explain the slang Hammett used, the editors presented each story as it first appeared nearly a century ago.

The first yarns I read (reread, actually) in the collection were two early linked stories published in 1924, “The House in Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.” Unlike the ones that became the novels, these two do not have to be read in order. I know, because I read them out of order decades ago, and again this summer.

Chronologically, “The House in Turk Street” comes first. In it, the Op, a 35-year-old, heavy set (he called himself fat in his first person narration of the stories), detective is doing the legwork for a case by going door to door, asking residents of Turk Street if they have seen a certain man reported to be in the neighborhood.

At one door, an old couple invite him into their house and fritter away his time in a scene that is almost comic until a man with a gun enters. It is not the man the Op is searching for, but is the leader of a small band of thieves who are hiding out in the house. The man, along with an ugly thug, a beautiful young woman, and the old couple, have pulled a heist of bonds.

The bonds are in a bag and each of the gang members wants the bag for himself. Each is willing to deceive, double cross, and even kill the others to get it. While their greed occupies them, the Op is able to free himself and get away, but not before guns go off, people get shot, and the bonds go from hand to hand.

While the plotting and the amount of violence in the story may have been what Black Mask required, Hammett through his life experience and his ear for natural sounding dialogue, elevates the story.

“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” is a much longer and less confined story which Black Mask promoted as a novelette.

In it, the son of a rich man wants the Op to find his girlfriend who has disappeared. The Op gets to work and soon learns the beautiful woman skipped out with $20,000 the young man gave her. The guy does not care about the money – which was not all his – he just wants the woman he loves to come back.

The Op does his job, and Hammett lets the reader in on some of the techniques detectives used to track people. For instance, the Op walks over a newspaper office, looks up the weather reports for the last month, notes the days it rained, goes to the taxicab companies and asks them to look for any record of fares on those days going to or from the woman’s apartment building.

“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” is a story with a lot of local color as the Op works his way around town winding up at a night club and gambling joint. Hammett’s observations of the gamblers, the club owner, the cheats, snitches and other assorted creeps, is great fun to read.

My only complaint with it was the use of a corny device to allow the baddies to escape and plunge the Op into a rip-roaring car chase near the end.

The realism of Hammett’s Continental Op stories comes out of the author’s experience working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. While the stories stand up pretty well, they were the training ground for one of the best detective novels ever written, Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

Film Noir “I Wake Up Screaming” from a novel by Steve Fisher

In the debate over identifying film noir and its beginnings, John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” from the Dashiell Hammett novel is just about the first. But so is “I Wake Up Screaming.” Both pictures opened in October 1941.

“Falcon,” is the far better film. But, despite problems with its screenplay and its presentation, “Screaming” has a lot going for it.

Based on a crime novel by Steve Fisher (my post about the book can be found here), the film version of “I Wake Up Screaming” changes the locale from Los Angeles to New York City, and the main character from a screenwriter to a sports promoter. I have read that Darryl Zanuck, boss of 20th Century Fox in those days, would not make movies about the movie business.

In the film, as well as in the book, a beautiful young woman is murdered and the man she has been seeing is the prime suspect. While the man tries to clear his name, one police detective is obsessed with the idea of sending the him to the electric chair.

Victor Mature plays the man and in an excellent casting decision, Laird Cregar plays the detective. Mature was a big guy who looked like a body builder and not the type who would be intimidated. But Cregar was a huge, heavy-set actor who looked like he could squash Mature. Cregar bravely played the role without a hint of begging the audience to like him. The detective is malevolent and scary.

In the book, the detective is emaciated and dying and like a ghost he haunts the man. One of the movie’s creepiest moments is when the man wakes in the middle of the night to find the detective sitting in a chair next to his bed, watching him.

Another oddity about the movie is the casting of rising musical-comedy star Betty Grable as the leading lady. She plays the sister of the murdered girl.

But the strangest thing in “Screaming” is its music. It uses – make that overuses – an instrumental version of “Over the Rainbow.” I cannot guess why the producers used such a recognizable tune associated with another movie.

“I Wake Up Screaming” was directed by Bruce Humberstone with too many light, even comedic moments. Humberstone is not known for film noir. Today he may not be known at all. But, he was a craftsman of the old school who directed a wide variety of productions including Westerns, comedies, and a lot of television later in his career. In the 1930s, he directed four of the Charlie Chan pictures. Those little films, if my memory is correct, usually had some dark, noir-like photography.

“Screaming” has some excellent high-contrast, black and white cinematography thanks to cameraman Edward Cronjager.

As for the debate over what constitutes film noir, I will just adopt Potter Stewart’s test for pornography and simply say, I know it when I see it.

(In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, wrote that phrase in an opinion on whether or not French director Louis Malle’s film, “The Lovers,” was obscene. Stewart said it was not.)

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett in print and on television

Last week, Evan Lewis posted a link to a 1949 TV broadcast of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key.

(Check it out here.)

As I commented on his site, if the 1950s were considered the Golden Age of television, then the 1940s were the Stone Age of TV.

That said, the play is surprisingly good.

Sure, the sets are cardboard and some of the acting is more suited to the stage than the screen, but overall, it was a very smart production.

The Hammett novel, which I posted about (here), is a complicated yarn of murder and political corruption.

Nick Beaumont is an advisor and right-hand man to Paul Madvig, a political power broker. In the book, Hammett showed the strong ties between the men who were long-time friends.

A lot of that was lost in the 1942 movie starring Alan Ladd as Nick and Brian Donlevy as Paul because the story needed to be trimmed down to fit a movie’s normal running time. (There is also a 1935 version starring George Raft and Edward Arnold, but I have not seen it.)

Even more of the flavor of the book was cut to fit the story into a one-hour television play. But Worthington Miner, a big producer in early television, did a good job adapting it. Enough of the plot is retained and it moves along nicely.

Donald Briggs was a pretty good Nick. He was believable as a sharp guy, but not as a tough guy, which Nick was in the book. In that respect, he reminded me of Robert Montgomery in “Ride the Pink Horse.”

The production was broadcast live but preserved on film by a crude method of pointing a movie camera at a monitor. Compared to today’s productions, the quality of a Kinescope is horrible. But, it is better than not having it.

So, if you are at home (and I hope you are staying safe) and looking for something to watch. Give this one a try.

FFB: The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are Dashiell Hammett books I’ve read and re-read over the years. But I don’t think I’ve opened his 1931 novel, The Glass Key, since college. It was time for another look.

Between the covers is a good murder mystery and great character study.

Main character Ned Beaumont is a part-time gambler and a full-time political operative working for Paul Madvig, a power broker who runs a small American city.

Madvig also owns a club that offers illegal gambling and booze (the story is set at the end of the Prohibition era). Since Madvig has control of everything in town, the police leave him alone. But he has a problem. The son of a U.S. senator is found dead, murdered, just down the street from Madvig’s club. All of Madvig’s people are up for re-election, including the senator. Madvig cannot have this unsolved murder hanging over them. The opposition will eat them all alive.

Ned Beaumont, who found the body, sets out to clear things up. But the harder he works, the more complicated things get and higher the stakes grow.

A bigger mystery than finding the killer is trying to understand Beaumont’s actions. He will walk right into dangerous situations, and at one point takes a hell of a beating from the guys working for the gangster who is trying to oust Madvig.

Beaumont keeps his cards close to his vest, also keeping his plans and reasons for them a secret from the reader until he springs into action.

Madvig himself throws Beaumont several curves that lead to their splitting up professionally and ending their long-time friendship.

Ned continues to work on the murder case, because more is at stake than Madvig and his political pals.

As always, Hammett’s lean, tight prose style and cooler-than-cool main character make The Glass Key a pleasure to read – and re-read.

(For more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog.)

FFB: A Man Called Spade by Dashiell Hammett

A Man Called Spade is a collection of five short stories by Dashiell Hammett, three of which feature his private detective Sam Spade – or as Hammett always calls him – Samuel Spade. (Interesting that Hammett’s first name was Samuel. His middle name was Dashiell.) Hammett introduced Spade in his 1929 novel, The Maltese Falcon.

In “A Man Called Spade,” the first story, Spade gets a call from a man who says he is being threatened and wants Spade to come to his home right away. When Spade arrives the man is dead and the police are there, including Detectives Polhaus and Dundy, who were also featured in The Maltese Falcon.

Spade behaves as an equal and a professional around the cops. He is friendly with Polhaus, but at odds with the older detective, Dundy, who outwardly shows his dislike of Spade. Spade maintains a quiet, professionalism. Hammett lets the reader know how good he is under pressure, at a murder scene or facing a potential killer, by briefly noting how Spade rolls his own cigarets. When things heat up, Spade will spring into action, moving very fast.

In short order, a series of characters, any of whom could be the killer, are introduced and questioned by Spade and the cops. In about 50 pages, Spade figures out whodunit.

Hammett’s trademark style of lean, hard prose and clipped, realistic dialog are there on every page of the three Spade stories. Like Ernest Hemingway, Hammett found that what he left out was as important as what put into a story. A nice example is the opening of “They Can Only Hang You Once,” the second story in the collection:

Samuel Spade said, “My name is Ronald Ames. I want to see Mr. Binnett – Mr. Timothy Binnett.”

“Mr. Binnett is resting now, sir,” the butler replied hesitantly.

With those two spare lines, Hammett paints a vivid picture. Spade is at the front door of the mansion of a wealthy, probably elderly man, and he is pulling some kind of ruse to gain entry to the house. Hammett says all that without saying it.

In this story, Spade gets involved with the murder of a relative of the old man and one of the house servants. They die due to a secret the old fellow is hiding and which Spade discovers.

In the third story, “Too Many Have Lived,” Spade gets in the middle of a blackmail scheme and butts heads with some other baddies looking to cut themselves in on the payoff.

All three of the Spade stories are – I hate to say it – a little thin and give the impression that Hammett was resting on his laurels and dashing off puzzles for quick money. The stories appeared in magazines in the early 1930s, before being collected in this book.

The fourth story, “The Assistant Murderer,” does not feature Sam Spade and is a long, fairly dull procedural featuring an uninteresting detective.

The book is saved by the last story, “His Brother’s Keeper,” which was quite good and written in a different style. Through first-person narration, the story is told by a very young boxer at a crucial point in his budding career. His older brother is acting as his manager, even though the brother does not seem to know much about training or arranging bouts. But the boy trusts him to the point of being blind to the deals the brother is making. The tragic ending is touching, and that is unusual for the usually cool Hammett.

All in all, this 1944 Dell paperback was a treat to read. Even if the tales were not as good as his earlier work, just being in the world of Hammett was well worth the time spent.

(For more posts on forgotten books, please visit Patti Abbott’s blog and Todd Mason's blog.)

FFB: The Snatchers by Lionel White

Lionel White’s crime novels of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were the next generation of lean, tight stories told in the hardboiled style of Dashiell Hammett. He was a master at devising well-planned heists that sound great, but when executed go wrong.

The Snatchers is one of those stories, only this time the caper is the kidnapping of a little girl, the child of a wealthy Connecticut family.

Cal Dent, a hard, 33-year-old ex con, works out every detail of the kidnapping. His problems come when the team he assembles, Red, a dim ex-boxer, Pearl, a boozy tough cookie, Gino, a violent gangster, and Fats, a conniving trigger man, do not follow Dent’s plans to the letter. Their petty jealousies, hates and lusts lead them astray and put the plan in jeopardy.

Much of the book takes place in a beach cottage where the gang hides out while waiting for ransom money to be delivered. The close living gets on everyone’s nerves. To make matters worse, a small town cop seeing people come and go from the cottage begins to snoop around, heightening the tension. White keeps the whole thing moving at a terrific clip with twits and dangers in every chapter.

Lionel White was a newspaper reporter in the 1920s and 30s, became and editor and went on to edit detective magazines in the 1940s and 50s. He published his first novel in 1952, when he was pushing 50 years old. He went on to write 38 novels. His most well known book is probably Clean Break, later re-titled The Killing. The Snatchers, from 1953, is his second novel.

In his book about director Stanley Kubrick, The Wolf at the Door, Geoffrey Cocks said Kubrick, in the mid-1950s, tried to make a film of The Snatchers, but the Hollywood production code rejected the script he prepared with Jim Thompson. In 1956, Kubrick released one of his best films, “The Killing,” based on Clean Break, from a script written by Thompson. The Snatchers was later filmed in 1968 as “The Night of the Following Day,” starring Marlon Brando.

Now, a few notes on my copy of The Snatchers. Last month, in a little shop of used books I get to a couple times a year, there was a thin, tattered edition of this book squeezed onto a shelf of far newer books. The spine was broken, the pages, and even whole sections were falling out. The lady at the counter looked it over and said she could only charge me 25 cents for an old book in such bad shape.

The cover of this copy is the one pictured and was probably done in the late 1950s, judging by the fins and tail lights on that car. Reading the text, I came to believe the book was edited for British readers. The clues were spellings like programme when describing a radio broadcast, and colour for color, and a word like windscreen during a tense scene involving a windshield wiper that would not function in a rainstorm.

And for the critics who jump on errors in new novels and digital texts, I will just point that this decades-old Avon edition of The Snatchers had several goofs. One of them was a doozy. The name of a character not in a scene was assigned to a line of dialogue.

But The Snatchers is such a tight, well paced novel that a few glitches in its roughly 60,000 words can be forgiven.

This book is a must read for fans of hard boiled crime stories.

(For more forgotten books, please see Patti Abbott’s blog.)