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

“Poisonville” to please the readers of Black Mask . But when he went back to prepare it as anovel for Mrs. Knopf, he found that she (and her editor Harry Block) wanted him to remove a number of extra corpses and at least two dynamitings, and to begin to learn to do some of his killing offstage for a book audience. Dramatically, it didn’t much matter how corrupt the real Butte had been, or how graphic its violence, if the truth seemed unbelievable on the page.
    As he reworked his first book he was finishing his second, The Dain Curse , and he told Mrs. Knopf that he even had plans for a stream-of-consciousness detective novel, in which the reader learned all the clues just as the investigator did. He considered himself “one of the few—if there are any more—moderately literate people who take the detective story seriously.” Mrs. Knopf was another.
    Hammett still had “a flock” of book ideas even as he began to turn his attention toward Hollywood. In April 1928 he received an inquiry from Fox Films about the rights to some of his original material, which included half a dozen stories and his first novel (still in manuscript). He cabled Mrs. Knopf for advice about his “motion picture dickering” and to keep her apprised of his climbing career. 8
    By April, he wrote her that “If … I make a more transient connection with Fox I’ll probably let the stream-of-consciousness experiment wait awhile, sticking to the more objective and filmable forms.” Wait a while it did. In June, he traveled to Los Angeles to make his pitch, staying downtown at the Alexandria, an elegant eight-story hotel with the popular Palm Court ballroom, and felt like an emerging big shot. There was even hope that Fox would commission original screenplays from him. Even though no money followed from his firstmeeting in Hollywood, it does not seem to have shaken his belief that movie studios would ultimately want what he had to sell. Despite the lack of a deal, he followed through on his resolution, from then on, to write books that were more “objective and filmable.”
    When Red Harvest was published in February 1929, Herbert Asbury in The Bookman called it “the liveliest detective story that has been published in a decade,” and doubted “if even Ernest Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue.” The book was hailed by a number of reviewers for its portrait of corruption and for its starkly savvy prose. Others had a more contemplative picture of how a detective should behave, and did not wish to slog about in the underworld, even with as charismatic a guide as Hammett’s Op. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, the first edition of Red Harvest had sold out and was optioned by a film company—not Fox, but Paramount Studios.
    Six months after publication of his first novel, Knopf brought out The Dain Curse , in July 1929, a mystery that expands on the sinister California theme of cults built around sex and drugs that Hammett had sketched out in “The Scorched Face,” only this time the Op was not searching for a rebellious “wandering daughter” but trying to save one who had been convinced she was evil, the inheritor of a false family curse. (As such a wide-ranging reader, Hammett may even have been inspired by an old Wilkie Collins story about inherited mental illness, “Mad Monkton.”)
    The book, which had also been serialized in Black Mask , was Hammett’s last starring his Op. It featured a lean, “sorrel-haired” writer as a villain, drew a little on the knowledge of jewels Hammett had gained during his brief advertising career,and contained some other inside jokes about the office. It was dedicated to Albert Samuels. † Few reviewers thought it as good as Red Harvest , including Hammett, who later found the story “silly,” but The Dain Curse did sell out its first three printings and was full of memorable lines from his wisecracking detective. It also gained Hammett his first review mention in the New