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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
How Dashiell Hammett's first and most important novel eluded film adaptation and still managed to find its way onto the big -- and small -- screen.
Feb 28, 2005 | Dashiell Hammett is all around us. A quick perusal of serious crime writers in any bookstore reveals his illegitimate children -- James Ellroy, the Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, even the cyber-punk icon William Gibson. This month, Vintage Books is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the classic American detective novel "The Maltese Falcon." Vintage is also reprinting several other Hammett titles, including a collection of his best pulp stories, "Nightmare Town"; a short novel, "Woman in the Dark" (with an introduction by one of the most popular inheritors of the Hammett tradition, Robert B. Parker); and, for the beginner, "Vintage Hammett," an anthology of stories and selections from his major novels.
This past January, Turner Classic Movies jumped on the bandwagon with a designated Dashiell Hammett day. The retrospective featured seven films based on Hammett's books (including a 1936 version of "The Maltese Falcon," "Satan Met a Lady" with Bette Davis), derived from Hammett's characters (such as the surprisingly good "Another Thin Man," 1939) or scripted by Hammett itself ("Watch on the Rhine," 1943, with Bette Davis and Paul Lukas). Perhaps some day an ambitious programmer will put together a "Red Harvest" festival.
The 75th anniversary of Hammett's first novel and his most important contribution to American literature -- to American culture -- came and went last year without notice. Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest," one of the most influential American novels of the 20th century, was published in 1929. How contemporary has it remained? Check out the latest re-vision of "Red Harvest" on HBO. It's called "Deadwood."
Rereading Hammett after 20 years is a revelation, and also a minor shock, for any memory of his books has absorbed and been amended by all the Hammett-influenced work that came after he wrote them. Take "The Thin Man," for instance. I had recalled Nick and Nora Charles as a pair of sexy, wisecracking private detectives who were not only smarter but hipper than the criminals they nailed. What I was recalling was William Powell and Myrna Loy from the hugely entertaining "Thin Man" movies. I had forgotten (or was too young to understand when I first read the book) that Nick and Nora were really a pair of hard-drinking cynics.
"The Maltese Falcon's" Sam Spade, too, had softened in my memory, not so much because Bogart softened him -- Bogey gleefully played him as he was written -- but because commentary by two generations of critics had melded the images of Spade and Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Marlowe, as Chandler had described the ideal fictional detective, walked down "these mean streets neither tarnished nor afraid." Spade certainly wasn't afraid, but at times he seemed dangerously close to being as tarnished as the criminals. He does have his ethics; though his partner Miles Archer was a "son of a bitch," Spade is willing to throw over the woman he loves, his client Bridgid O'Shaughnessy, for killing Archer. "When a man's partner is killed, he is supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him." But he has no moral qualms about screwing his partner's wife and then dumping her. In real life, Spade was more likely to be someone Marlowe would have come up against, rather than his partner.
In Sam Spade and the unnamed detective known as "the Continental Op," from "Red Harvest," Hammett gave us the first American antiheroes, and in doing so severed forever the traditional relationship between the mystery story and the crime story. Hammett never really cared much for writing mystery stories; the mystery as to who killed who in "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" is pursued with no great urgency, and the murders that kick off the stories only seem to happen because the conventions of period detective fiction demanded them. The mystery story, by definition, must involve a clear delineation between good and evil: The criminal must be punished and the reader must have a clear sense that good has triumphed, or what would be the point of solving the mystery? In the crime story, solving a mystery can never entirely be the point; it's a genre far more unsettling than anything that could have been imagined in the world of Sherlock Holmes, because in the real world, as we all know, the responsibility for crime spreads so far into society that no one is ever entirely free of guilt. There is no neat ending to ever make us truly feel that good has triumphed over evil.
"Red Harvest" achieved something else, too. It plays off the conventions of the western and helped create a genre that was just emerging in 1929, when it was published: the gangster novel.
The plot is simplicity itself. A detective from a national agency is summoned to investigate a murder in a Western mining town named Personville, sardonically referred to by the locals as "Poisonville." Personville, or Poisonville, is "an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of smelters' stacks." (In 1927, Hammett, who would become a committed Marxist, had been what biographer William F. Nolan called a "politically involved strike breaker" for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Butte, Mont., so we can assume the novel was set there. In "Red Harvest" he would wreak fictional revenge on the anti-union goons.)
The murdered man was the town's leading reformer; his father hires the Op to stay on and clean up the town. So far, we're in a B western, and observing the conventions of that genre, the local robber barons hold all the power; there is practically no indication of a central authority to challenge them. Unbridled capitalism has led to a state of moral and, finally, social anarchy. The twist, which separates "Red Harvest" from the western tradition, is that the town has no good guys. Virtually everyone in Personville, from politicians to leading citizens to the police, is tapped into some form of corruption stemming from the two crooked factions fighting for control of the town (one of which is connected to the Op's employer, the majority stockholder of the mining corporation and the owner of both of the newspapers). The classic western hero wore a white hat and killed the guys in black hats; in "Red Harvest," everyone wears a shade of gray.
The Op, personifying his creator's moral outrage, is determined to use his resources for "opening Poisonville up from Adam's apple to ankles." This means hiring out to both sides and playing both ends against the middle. He touches off a chain reaction of violence that hits Personville like a purifying fire -- but in the end, who is purified? Sifting through the carnage, the Op finds "I've got hard skin over what's left of my soul," and "This berg's getting to me. If I don't get away soon, I'll be going blood-simple, like the natives."
