The Lost Detective by Nathan Ward Read Free Book Online Page A

all its ugliness. She knew the violent history from her vantage point as the adopted daughter of “Captain” William Kelly, an executive at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Even if she didn’t present what she remembered in the style Hammett preferred, her memories would have made excellent atmosphere for a novelist to tease out and rearrange however he liked.
    According to his granddaughter Julie Rivett, Hammett’s daughter Jo remembered that he “got irritated with her mother when she talked about the strikes in Anaconda. Grandma, I’mtold, described in positive terms how the strikebreakers were given special privileges—extra food, chocolates, and such. To her, it seemed a wonder.” 7 Hammett, who had known strikebreaking more intimately, had not experienced it as wondrous or privileged work but as an ugly and dangerous assignment. Still, despite the gulf in their perspectives, it is hard to dispute he would have gleaned meaningful background from Jose when creating the world of Personville.
    “The Cleansing of Poisonville” began appearing serially in Black Mask in November 1927. The magazine’s editors hailed the debut of “the first, complete, episode in a series dealing with a city whose administrators have gone mad with power and lust of wealth. It is also, to our minds, the ideal detective story—the new type of detective fiction which Black Mask is seeking to develop … Poisonville is written by a master of his craft.”
    For all that, Hammett still had to send off his “Poisonville” novel unsolicited to East Coast publishing houses.

    * * *

    The package mailed to the Fifth Avenue “Editorial Department” offices of Alfred A. Knopf on February 11, 1928, began simply, “Gentlemen” and introduced “an action-detective novel for your consideration. If you don’t care to publish it, will you kindly return it by express, collect.” The writer went on to introduce himself: “I was a Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency operative for a number of years; and, more recently, have published fiction, book reviews, verse, sketches, and so on, in twenty or twenty-five magazines.”
    Hammett listed nearly five lines of magazine credits, while saying nothing further about his former career as a genuine sleuth, a distinction that would become so important.
    Although he was growing more accustomed to literary success, the answer Hammett received from Blanche Knopf must have been almost as exciting as his first small sale to The Smart Set almost six years earlier. Mrs. Knopf, in addition to publishing Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten with her husband, was a savvy young publisher of mysteries who knew something about the detective genre. Born the same year as Hammett, she had founded the Knopf house with Alfred, on a five-thousand-dollar loan from Alfred’s father, in 1915, the year Hammett became a detective. Blanche Knopf’s hand was in everything at the publishing house; in addition to editing many of its established writers, she had even designed the Knopf colophon of a leaping borzoi dog.
    Mrs. Knopf felt that, apart from its “hopeless” title, Poisonville was quite publishable and they were “keen” about the manuscript except for the middle of the book, where, she said, “the violence seems piled on too heavily; so many killings on a page I believe make the reader doubt the story.” Beyond publishing this book, she wondered hopefully if Hammett had further “ideas for detective stories” or even any others “under way.”
    In fact, he had at least one other under way and more ideas than he even could execute. In his answer, Hammett submitted a list of eight title possibilities for his “Poisonville” book, some of which were even worse: The Poisonville Murders , The Seventeenth Murder , Murder Plus , The Willsson Matter , The City of Death , The Cleansing of Poisonville , The Black City , and, finally , Red Harvest , upon which they agreed.
    Hammett had piled up bodies in