Call this volume Hammett Unplugged. It includes seventeen short stories and three screen stories, none previously collected and most previously unpublished, that stand in significant contrast to the work for which he is best known while exhibiting the best qualities of his literary genius. The earliest of the stories in this collection seem to date from near the beginning of Hammett's writing career, and the latest might well mark the end of it. In the stories included in this volume Hammett was breaking boundaries. This collection includes no stories from Black Mask magazine, the detective pulp where Hammett made his reputation as a short-story writer; it includes no stories featuring the Continental Op, Hammett's signature short-story character; and it includes only one story narrated by the main character, which was Hammett's preferred approach in most of his best-known short fiction. Here he addresses subjects, expresses sentiments, and explores ideas that would have fit uneasily in the pages of Black Mask. In these stories Hammett displays his fine-tuned sense of irony and explores the complexities of romantic encounters. He confronts basic human fears and moral dilemmas. He is sometimes sensitive and more often stonily objective. He caricatures prideful men, draws sympathetic portraits of strong women, and parodies pulp-fiction plots. And violence takes a back seat to character development.
The story of Hammett's career as a writer is well-known. He published his first story in October 1922 at the age of twenty-eight, after his career as a Pinkerton's detective had been cut short by tuberculosis. He wrote to survive. Severely disabled during most of the 1920s, he was unable to provide for his wife and family in any other way. After a brief attempt to break into the slick-paper (which is to say middle-class) short-story market, he found his home as a writer in the pages of the detective pulps, aimed at blue-collar, primarily male readers. He drew on his five years as a Pinkerton operative to write stories that had the authority of experience, and soon he became the most popular writer for the most popular of the detective-fiction pulps. He came to regard that distinction as a mixed blessing; he had broader interests. Of forty-nine stories Hammett published before June 1927, half neither feature a detective nor are about crime. Of the eleven new stories that appeared after The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930, five are about noncrime subjects.
With the April 1, 1924, issue, which carried Hammett's fourteenth Black Mask story, the sixth featuring the Continental Op, a new editor took over at the magazine. Phil Cody had been circulation manager for Black Mask, and though he described himself as primarily a businessman, he took an aggressive stance as an editor. Cody insisted that the quality of the writing in his pages be elevated, championing Hammett as a model for his other writers and imposing what might be called the Black Mask editorial formula on his authors. Cody encouraged longer, more violent stories, and he insisted on action and adventure in the fiction he published rather than simply what the previous editor called "unusual subject matter." The main characters of the stories Cody published were masters of their world, offering readers vicarious triumph over the threats and frustrations of modern urban life. Cody the businessman set about cultivating a dedicated readership who knew what to expect issue after issue. From Hammett, Black Mask readers expected the Continental Op.
Hammett flourished under Cody's editorship. But as he began to take his editor's compliments to heart, as he developed a surer confidence in his writing ability, and as his financial situation became more stressed when his wife became pregnant with their second daughter, he asked for more money and was denied. Hammett didn't take "no" well. By the end of 1925, he decided that he had had enough of Cody and his magazine, and he said so before quitting. In November of that year he wrote a letter to Black Mask, apparently a response to Cody's solicitation of his opinion about the most recent issue. Hammett warned him, "Remember, I'm hard to get along with where fiction's concerned." He then offered perceptive criticism of each story in the issue, concluding with the comment that three of the stories "simply… didn't mean anything. People moved around doing things, but neither the people nor the things they did were interesting enough to work up a sweat over." Hammett was busy by that time writing stories for other markets in which interesting people from various walks of life do interesting things. Those stories are in this volume.
In fall 1926, Cody became circulation manager and vice president of Black Mask parent company Pro-Distributors, and Joseph T. Shaw was named the new editor of the magazine. Shaw's first move was to attempt to lure Hammett back into the fold. He offered more money and promised to support Hammett's literary ambitions. Hammett, who needed the money to help support his growing family, capitulated. Over the next two years he focused on Black Mask with stories that were longer and more violent than ever before. When the editors at Knopf, Hammett's hardback publisher, read his first two novels, Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929), both of which had first appeared serially in Black Mask, they responded in both instances that "the violence is piled on a bit thick." With that, Hammett turned to tough-minded dramatic confrontation rather than violence as a means of advancing his plots. As he famously told Blanche Knopf in 1928, he was trying "to make literature" of his work. These stories document his efforts to that end.
He was also trying to make more money from his work. Perhaps because his health was improving a bit, clearly because of his pressing financial needs, Hammett began promoting his writing career with renewed energy in 1928. He sent his first novel to Knopf, unagented, and they accepted it for publication. The same year, he traveled south to Hollywood to try to sell his stories for adaption as movies. By that time the new sound movies were clearly about to transform the movie industry, and Hammett wanted in on the action. He began writing fiction in a form that could be easily filmed-paying attention to restrictions of time, place, and action. It is fair to say that by the end of 1929, Hammett's fiction was shaped by an intent to make not just literature, but movies of his work. By 1930, he had sold Red Harvest (the unrecognizable basis for Roadhouse Nights [1930] featuring Helen Morgan, Charles Ruggles, and Jimmy Durante in his first movie role) and "The Kiss-Off," which was the original story for City Streets (1931, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney), to Paramount. Warner Bros. released the first of what would be three film versions of The Maltese Falcon in 1931. During the early 1930s he worked for Howard Hughes's Caddo Productions, Universal Studios, and MGM, among others. "The Kiss-Off" and two other of Hammett's original screen stories-"Devil's Playground," which was not produced, and "On the Make," which became Mr. Dynamite (1935, starring Edmund Lowe)-are included in this volume.
After publication of his most successful novels, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, when Black Mask couldn't afford him any longer, Hammett turned again to the slick-paper market during his breaks from movie work. He published stories in Collier's, Redbook, and Liberty-"On the Way," which appeared in the March 1932 Harper's Bazaar, is included here because it has not been collected previously-and he wrote others that were not placed, but his primary interest was the movies by that time. He was under contract to MGM, writing the original stories for their Thin Man series published in our Return of the Thin Man (2012).
To our minds, this volume includes some of Hammett's finest short fiction, and there is strong evidence that he valued these stories. Hammett was not a hoarder. He disposed of books, magazines, and manuscripts as soon as he was done with them. But he saved the typescripts and working drafts of stories in this book for more than thirty years, moving from coast to coast, hotel to hotel, and among several apartments. They were important to him. While many of these stories were clearly prepared for submission, with a heading on the typescript giving Hammett's address, the word count, and the rights offered, there are only two pieces of evidence that he actually sent any of them out. A sheet is attached to "Fragments of Justice" with a note in Hammett's hand, "Sold to the Forum, but probably never published." Forum magazine published three book reviews by Hammett between 1924 and 1927, but not "Fragments of Justice." In a letter to his wife, Jose, Hammett remarks that one story sent to Blue Book in 1927 "came sailing back"; the story he referred to is unidentified, but a good guess is "The Diamond Wager," published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1929 under the pseudonym Samuel Dashiell. Blue Book, distinguished at the time for their publication of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories, was among the highest-paying detective-fiction pulps, the kind of market Hammett would have been trying in 1927, and "The Diamond Wager" seems tailor-made for them.
After publication of The Maltese Falcon established Hammett as one of the finest writers in America, he could easily place his fiction in most any market he chose, but before that he was typed as a genre writer, a hard tag to overcome. His primary readership was mystery fans interested in realistic fiction about crime. Before publication of The Maltese Falcon, a story submission to the slicks by Dashiell Hammett would have gone into the slush pile with hundreds-more likely thousands-of other submissions. It would have been a hard sell. With two exceptions, "The Hunter" and the light satire "The Sign of the Potent Pills," the stories in this volume are not detective stories. They are Hammett's attempts to resist and then to break out of the mold that came to define him as a writer.
After 1934, when The Thin Man was published and Hammett began devoting his full energies as a writer to screen stories, he stopped publishing his work. For the next twenty-seven years remaining in his life he published no new fiction. For the first sixteen years of the period, until 1950, he didn't need the money and had other interests; for the last ten he seemed to lack the energy and the spirit to write. After Hammett died, in January 1961, his literary properties fell under the complete control of Lillian Hellman, who set about carefully and expertly reviving his literary reputation-as a detective-fiction writer. There is evidence that she began editing some of the stories in this volume for publication-her light edits appear on a couple of typescripts-but she restricted her efforts to republishing what she regarded as his best detective fiction, because that was where the market lay. Hellman sold Hammett's literary remains-or most of them, one assumes-to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, from 1967 to 1975, and guarded access to the archive carefully. These stories were first discovered in the Ransom Center archive in the late 1970s, but publication was restricted. Over the last thirty-five years, Hammett's unpublished stories have been regularly "rediscovered," but for practical reasons, having to do primarily with licenses to publish and the indifference of the trustees who held sway until they were replaced at the end of the last century, these stories remained unpublished. Make no mistake: the stories in this book are not newly discovered; they are made newly available to a wide readership.
This book is arranged into four broadly defined sections-with a special appendix. Within each section stories are arranged into roughly chronological order, sometimes on the basis of guess and instinct, though the headings, paper, and typographical arrangement offer reliable clues in most cases. The texts are essentially as Hammett left them. We have resisted editing and modernizing his style: compound words, for example, are hyphenated as Hammett wrote them, and his old style of forming possessives is retained. In some cases punctuation has been judiciously standardized. In one instance an untitled story, which we call "The Cure," has its title supplied, with the advice and consent of the people best positioned to judge what title Hammett might have chosen-his daughter and granddaughter.
The appendix deserves special attention. Provided courtesy of a generous private collector, it is the elegant beginning of a Sam Spade story or novel, perhaps. It alone among the several fragments Hammett left behind was chosen for inclusion in this print edition of The Hunter and Other Stories. Interesting though they may be, literary fragments are of primary interest to a limited audience. A selection of Hammett's unfinished starts is included as a feature of the e-book edition of this collection.
R. L.
