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Fiction, Reviews

‘Red Harvest,’ by Dashiell Hammet

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He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.

Dashiell Hammet wrote a number of stories about “the Continental Op,” a fat, nameless private detective working for a company based on the Pinkertons, as well as two Op novels. I reviewed the second Op book, The Dain Curse, not long ago, so I thought I might as well do Red Harvest (1929) too. I’d read it before, but way back in the 1970s.

We find the Continental Op in the western mining town of Personville, which seems to be in Utah. The town bears the nickname of “Poisonville,” and well deserves it. It used to be controlled by old Elihu Wilsson, the mine owner, but he’s allowed it to fall into the hands of various groups of criminals (these are Prohibition days, after all). Elihu’s son, Daniel, who has taken over the local newspaper, has decided to be a reformer. He’s requested a detective to come and help him ferret out corruption.

But Daniel is dead before the Op can even meet with him. The Op manages to get in to see Elihu, the old man, and eventually gets his permission to investigate his son’s murder.

Poisonville is in every way worthy of its name. The police are just as corrupt as the various criminal organizations, and as the Op stirs the waters, he finds that poison entering his own soul: “This d**ned burg’s getting to me,” he says. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” (This is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie, “Blood Simple.”)

There is no subtlety in Red Harvest. This is a story about killing, and lots of it. As in Hamlet, the stage is nearly empty at the end, most of the main characters dead, our very unromantic hero still standing, but shakily.

There is a pervasive rumor (denied by director Akira Kurosawa himself) that his classic samurai movie, “Yojimbo,” was inspired by Red Harvest. If so, it would be the grandfather of “A Fistful of Dollars” and a score of other imitators. However, Red Harvest is more complex than those movies. Instead of a scenario with two warring gangs, this novel features a complex situation. There are multiple factions, and the Op busies himself with inciting each of them against the others in various combinations, just stirring things up to see what reactions he can get, increasingly callous to the sanguine results.

When one has grown accustomed to Raymond Chandler’s prose (I can never resist the comparison), Dashiell Hammett comes off as something of a blunt instrument. But Hammett came first, and was breaking new ground, so to speak. Critics consider Red Harvest a classic and a groundbreaking literary work.

But it’s pretty grim.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dain Curse,’ by Dashiell Hammett

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“Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously.”

Recently, in the course of my explorations of old mysteries on YouTube, I watched once again the 1978 CBS TV miniseries adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn. The dramatization kept to the plot in broad terms, but made a lot of cuts, most of which, it must be admitted, improved the story. For some reason they moved the setting from California to New York state (contrary to the usual custom of that California-based industry). The plot was streamlined in various ways. The casting of Coburn, a famously lean man, as the “Continental Op” (a fat character who is never named in any of his stories), a case of literal streamlining, was justified through turning him into a fictional version of the author himself (who had indeed been a Pinkerton detective), calling him “Hamilton Nash.”

I had watched the original broadcast on TV, and having watched it again now I was curious to re-read the book. It’s not Hammet’s best work, in my opinion.

The story begins with the Continental Op visiting the San Francisco home of Dr. Edgar Leggett, who is involved in chemical experiments involving diamonds. Some of the diamonds he keeps in his laboratory have apparently been stolen in a break-in. The Op finds Leggett’s story fishy, and before long breaks it down into a messy scheme involving false identities and blackmail. At the end of this episode of the story, the Leggetts’ daughter, Gabrielle (who is a morphine addict) has been orphaned, and is left with the conviction that she is a victim of “the Dain Curse” (Dain is her mother’s name) and doomed to cause the death of any person who gets close to her.

But there are two further sections in the book. In the second, the Op is hired to locate Gabrielle and finds her in the temple of a fashionable San Francisco cult, where he barely manages to save her from murder, after which her fiancé whisks her off to a quick wedding and honeymoon in a southern California seaside town. In the third, there is yet another murder, and Gabrielle once again comes under suspicion. After clearing her, the Op takes it on himself to wean her off her drug addiction.

The origins of The Dain Curse as a serial story in Black Mask Magazine are very evident, and don’t always help with readability in a consolidated narrative. Each episode (it was originally a four-parter) involves its own dramatic arc, and each ends with a “solution,” though the actual culprit is kept secret until the very end of the book. Hammett was never in Raymond Chandler’s class as a prose stylist, and the writing here is rarely memorable. The plot of The Dain Curse involves a lot of repetition, and doesn’t reach the levels Hammett achieved in The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, or even in Red Harvest (which is believed, by the way, to have inspired the Samurai film Yojimbo, and by extension A Fistful of Dollars and a score of other copycats).

But it’s worth reading. I must say though that (in my opinion) the cuts the writers made in the TV version were well taken and effective.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Maltese Falcon,’ by Dashiell Hammet

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He went out, walked half the distance to the elevators, and retraced his steps. Effie Perine was sitting at her desk when he opened the door. He said: “You ought to know better than to pay any attention to me when I talk like that.”

“If you think I pay any attention to you you’re crazy,” she replied, “only”—she crossed her arms and felt her shoulders, and her mouth twitched uncertainly—“I won’t be able to wear an evening gown for two weeks, you big brute.”

He grinned humbly and said, “I’m no damned good, darling,” made an exaggerated bow, and went out again.

Working my way through books I’ve read and remember fondly, I picked The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet off my shelf. It’s a fascinating book, and I have much to say about it.

Of course, it’s impossible to contemplate this work without considering the looming image of the classic 1941 movie directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. After I finished reading, I immediately took out my DVD and watched the flick. I also watched a few clips from the original 1931 version, starring Ricardo Cortez, available on YouTube. It’s a much inferior movie, far more loosely paced, and Cortez (physically a better casting choice) plays the role with a constant leer, as if it’s all a joke, even when he’s giving up the girl he “loves.”

The first thing you learn when you read the book is that Sam Spade looks nothing like Humphrey Bogart. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. His face is “made up of v’s,” so that he looks “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

In case you’ve never read the book or seen the movie, Sam is a San Francisco private eye, in partnership with a guy named Miles Archer (with whose wife he’s carrying on an affair). When beautiful, young Brigid O’Shaughnessy walks in and asks them to put a tail on a man who’s holding her sister against her will, they lick their lips (both at the fee and at Brigid) and Miles takes the job. The next morning Sam learns that Miles has been shot to death.

What follows is a complicated dance that goes on for some time before Sam even learns that Brigid is in competition with some other sinister types to get ahold of a figurine of a black falcon, believed to be worth a fortune.

The Maltese Falcon is a seminal book in the history of mystery literature, an archetypal hard-boiled tale. And hard-boiled it is. Sam is a shockingly tough character – he appears utterly insensitive, not only to the woman he’s committing adultery with, but to his starry-eyed young secretary (far more vulnerable in the book than the tough cookie played by Lee Patrick in the 1941 film); with men he’s just brutal. He’s big and strong, and it does no good to pull a gun on him, because he’ll just take it away from you. He appears to have no principles, either – he deals and double-deals on equal terms with the Fat Man and Joel Cairo.

It’s only at the end that you begin to see something deeper. This is a man with a list of certain principles – probably not a long list, but the ones he has he sticks to. At the end of the story, he stands left with nothing, and it’s by his own choice. Which makes Humphrey Bogart, in the end, a better Sam Spade than Ricardo Cortez. Bogart expresses the foundation of the character; Cortez portrays its façade.

There’s a running theme of sacrifice (of a cynical kind) in The Maltese Falcon. The famous scene at the end (spoiler here) where Sam tells Brigid he won’t “play the sap” for her is paralleled earlier by the scene where Gutman decides to sacrifice Wilmer, his catamite, as the “fall guy” for the murders. Author Hammet had it on his mind that there are things more important than being in love. Since Hammet was a Communist, I couldn’t help thinking of Stalin’s callous murder of millions “for the greater good.” But a Christian can also appreciate this, as our Lord told us that whoever loves father or mother, son or daughter more than Him is not worthy of Him. (Communism is, after all, only the most successful Christian heresy.)

In style, Hammet was, I think, a little inferior to Raymond Chandler. You look in vain here for Chandler’s lyrical, epigrammatic descriptive passages. The Maltese Falcon is heavy on description, but it’s punctilious description. Hammet tells you what everyone wears, down to details of style and color. He likes to set a scene, to leave nothing to the imagination. The dialogue, however, is sharp and tight. Read the book and watch the film, and you’ll see that the script writers’ main job was cutting. What you hear the actors saying in the film is almost always straight out of the book.

The Maltese Falcon is a tremendous hard-boiled mystery. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Return of the Thin Man,’ by Dashiell Hammett

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If you’re one of those underprivileged citizens who’s never enjoyed the Thin Man movie series, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, you really owe it to yourself to watch them. The first two, at least, are almost perfect of their kind – a hybrid of hard-boiled crime story and screwball comedy, centering on a sophisticated, charming couple who adore each other and excel at repartee.

The Thin Man was Dashiell Hammet’s last and most successful novel, and was adapted (mostly by lightening its darker elements and cutting some stuff the censors wouldn’t approve) into a classic movie by film writers Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, themselves a married couple. It was so successful that the studio wanted a sequel, and offered Hammett a nice payday to come up with a story. Though delayed by drinking and blackouts, he delivered on time. The “story” he produced – basically a paragraph outline – became the movie After the Thin Man. Hammett’s story, combined with Hackett’s and Goodrich’s initial adjustments, constitute the first half of Return of the Thin Man. The second half is a similar story for the third film, Another Thin Man. At the end, Hammett’s proposal for a third sequel is included – it’s incoherent, inconsistent with the previous stories, and appears to show signs of Hammett’s advancing alcoholism.

The original Thin Man movie ends with our heroes, Nick and Nora Charles, in a Pullman car headed home from New York to San Francisco. After the Thin Man opens with them getting off the train (fans have chuckled for years over the fact that the trip took two years, so that clothing and car styles have changed). Arriving at their home, they find the place packed with Nick’s low-life friends from his days as a private eye – it’s a welcome home party, but nobody even notices their arrival for a while. The party is dampened by the appearance of a dead man on the doorstep, but Nick and Nora are summoned away to her grandmother’s grand mansion on Nob Hill. Her cousin’s dubious husband has disappeared, and she’s suspected of murdering him. Nora’s family strongly disapproves of Nick, but since he’s around, he must make himself useful by locating the errant husband and keeping the police off the premises. There is a murder, and the mystery that follows will involve a shady night club owner and multiple confidence games, before Nick can gather the suspects for the “payoff” scene, revealing the true culprit.

In Another Thin Man, Nick and Nora head back to New York state at the request of Nora’s father’s old business associate. He’s been threatened, and demands that Nick chase off the disgruntled former employee behind the threats. Nick also takes this opportunity to try to learn more about Nora’s family business – something he soon regrets (just out of boredom). Again, murder happens in spite of Nick’s efforts, but he will beat the police to the true solution.

I had looked forward to reading a couple of Thin Man novellas – which is what the publisher’s description calls these works. But that’s not what they are. “Stories” for movies are meant to be brief and spare and devoid of sparkle. Just the facts, ma’am. As such, these stories make rather dull reading.

I was surprised that I have no memory of Another Thin Man. It’s possible I’ve never seen it – or that it’s been so long I’ve forgotten it. Must remedy that.

I didn’t waste any money on Return of the Thin Man, since I got it free from Amazon Prime. But I can’t really recommend it, except to the hard-core Nick and Nora fan, who’ll be interested in the minor ways in which the narratives changed in the transition from story to screen.