The Lost Detective by Nathan Ward Read Free Book Online

this woman who seems to have already fleeced many of the town’s men, except for the passive lunger she keeps around to abuse, Dan Rolff. When the Op uncharacteristically confesses to Dinah that he fears he is “going blood-simple like the natives,” she comforts him with laudanum, and he has two gumshoeing hallucinations, as dogged as they are poetic. In one, he trails after a woman whose face is hidden by a veil, following her voice through “half the streets in the United States”; in the second dream, he chases around a strange city “a small brown man who wore an immense sombrero”:

    Keeping one hand on the open knife in my pocket, I ran toward the little brown man, running on the heads and shoulders of the people in the plaza. The heads and shoulders were of unequal heights and unevenly spaced. I slipped and floundered over them. 6

    The Op wakes to a worse nightmare: he is gripping a fatal ice pick. Thinking he was solving one crime, he also must clearhimself of Dinah’s murder. He has gone “native” to the point that even one of his steadiest fellow operatives, the terse Canadian Dick Foley, becomes unsure of his innocence; enough so that the Op sends him back to San Francisco. The book ends with the Op fretting over the language of his agency reports to the Old Man but still catching “merry hell” for his tactics.
    One mystery at the center of this book is how Hammett wrote something so convincingly realistic. The traditional account suggests that his first novel grew out of the nightmarish things he saw during his brief time spent in Butte as a Pinkerton, when dozens of agents roamed undercover on behalf of the mining companies. It seems quite a leap of faith to accept Hammett’s story about being in Butte in 1917, when he was a relatively new operative in Baltimore, and being offered a bribe to kill Frank Little. But it is not impossible he was there in 1920, the year of a second round of strikes, riots, shootings, and federal troops, when he worked out of the Spokane office. This hews more closely to how the Pinkerton Agency functioned, assigning from the Denver office and drawing operatives primarily from other northwest branches. More easily dispatched from Spokane than from Baltimore, Hammett may have done some service working undercover, if he was healthy enough, between his move west to Spokane in May 1920 and his collapse that November, after which he went off to the Cushman hospital to meet the young nurse who became his wife.
    Like so much with Hammett in the early twenties, even if on paper he should have been immobilized, it does not mean he obeyed. If he came to Butte that spring, he would have arrived just weeks after the Anaconda Road Massacre of April 21, 1920, an event in which sixteen striking miners were shot frombehind during a protest outside the Neversweat Mine, and another, Tom Manning, died later from his wounds. Troops returned to Butte, but calm had not been entirely restored when Hammett would have walked its streets.
    There is another, more literary reason to believe he was there in 1920: he describes the town too well not to have seen it. Another possibility, that he visited his wife and daughters there in 1926, when his TB became contagious and when Jose brought the girls home to Anaconda, is not likely and is not how the family remembered it: he was far too sick in 1926 for such a long train trip. Being such a gifted observer, Hammett only needed to visit Butte for a week or so to be able to describe things he saw and, especially, heard in billiard halls, hotel lobbies, and the precinct house; or at the fights; or in the room of an appealingly disheveled young woman. He also had another source for background, though she rarely gets credit.
    His authenticity, the “skin of realism” of his writing, springs from Hammett’s own detecting experiences. However, his wife, Jose, had grown up in the dingy model town for Poisonville, and would have known her way around it in