The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett

by Nathan Ward

Overview

A 2016 Edgar Award Nominee

Before he became a household name in America as perhaps our greatest hard-boiled crime writer, before his attachment to Lillian Hellman and blacklisting during the McCarthy era, and his subsequent downward spiral, Dashiell Hammett led a life of action. Born in 1894 into a poor Maryland family, Hammett left school at fourteen and held several jobs before joining the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as an operative in 1915 and, with time off in 1918 to serve at the end of World War I, he remained with the agency until 1922, participating alike in the banal and dramatic action of an operative. The tuberculosis he contracted during the war forced him to leave the Pinkertons--but it may well have prompted one of America's most acclaimed writing careers.

While Hammett's life on center stage has been well-documented, the question of how he got there has not. That largely overlooked phase is the subject of Nathan Ward's enthralling The Lost Detective. Hammett's childhood, his life in San Francisco, and especially his experience as a detective deeply informed his writing and his characters, from the nameless Continental Op, hero of his stories and early novels, to Sam Spade and Nick Charles. The success of his many stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask following his departure from the Pinkertons led him to novels; he would write five between 1929 and 1934, two of them (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) now American classics. Though he inspired generations of writers, from Chandler to Connelly and all in between, after The Thin Man he never finished another book, a painful silence for his devoted readers; and his popular image has long been shaped by the remembrance of Hellman, who knew him after his literary reputation had been made. Based on original research across the country, The Lost Detective is the first book to illuminate Hammett's transformation from real detective to great American detective writer, throwing brilliant new light on one of America's most celebrated and remembered novelists and his world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632862778
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	862,574
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Nathan Ward is the author of Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront. He was an editor at American Heritage, and he has written for the New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Prelude: Scars xi

Part I The Cheaper the Crook

Chapter I The Devilish Art 3

Chapter II A Company Man 19

Chapter III $5,000 Blood Money 31

Chapter IV Out of Uniform 39

Chapter V Dearest Woman 47

Chapter VI The Last Case 55

Part II The Ex-Detective

Chapter VII A Little Man Going Forward 73

Chapter VIII The Old Man 89

Chapter IX Blackmasking 97

Chapter X The Price of Peggy O'Toole 109

Chapter XI The Big Ship 121

Chapter XII Among the Ghosts 133

Chapter XIII Babylon and Back 147

Afterword: A Hundred Bucks 163

Acknowledgments 169

Notes 175

Selected Bibliography 193

Index 205

Editorial Reviews

05/11/2015
The early life of Dashiell Hammett—from his background with the Pinkerton Detective Agency to his bout with tuberculosis while serving in the Army during WWI—fills this entertaining and informative biography by Ward (Dark Harbor). Growing up in Baltimore, Samuel Dashiell Hammett dropped out of high school to help support his family, but found few jobs appealing to him. A vaguely worded newspaper ad—Pinkerton’s preferred method of recruiting then—led to his main pre-writing employment, as well as fertile material for his later stories and novels. While many have written about Hammett’s life before, Ward dives deep into primary sources, including the Pinkerton Archives and Hammett’s VA hospitalization record. But it’s his choice to also wade into Hammett’s stories (including more obscure works, like the unfinished “Tulip”), using their autobiographical elements to flesh out details of the detective life, that help set this work apart. Examples range from The Maltese Falcon’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy, inspired by an old girlfriend of Hammett’s, to the Continental Op’s boss, the Old Man, likely based on legendary Pinkerton agent James McParland. Ward ends somewhat abruptly with Hammett’s early days in Hollywood, but given the vast volumes already written about Hammett’s life on the blacklist and with Lillian Hellman, the limits to this book’s scope hardly detract from the fascinating tale it tells. Agent: Ed Breslin, Ed Breslin Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Funny thing about books, some of them are a delight and a pleasure. Thus Nathan Ward's The Lost Detective—yes it's very well-written, yes the history is carefully done, but it has that glow. So, this you will like.” —Alan Furst, author of MIDNIGHT IN EUROPE

“The Lost Detective humanizes my grandfather, while at the same time illuminating the context of his life and times. Links between Hammett’s fiction and Pinkertons and his early (pre-Hellman) family life are particularly satisfying.” —Julie M. Rivett, co-editor of SELECTED LETTERS OF DASHIELL HAMMETT and THE HUNTER AND OTHER STORIES

“As a devoted Hammett aficionado, I’ve read most books about him and published his daughter’s memoir, but learned so much in this captivating examination of the great author’s life that I feel compelled to reread his complete works with far deeper understanding than ever before.” —Otto Penzler, Editor, THE BEST AMERICAN NOIR OF THE CENTURY

“The Lost Detective is full of stimulating insight into how the novice writer shaped real-life experience into vital fiction.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Ward's focus on the origins of Hammett's writing style and his connecting the events of the author's background to the fiction are the highlights of this brief, accessible biography . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“As brisk and conversational as a magazine feature, The Lost Detective invites readers not just to explore Hammett's early years in more detail and consider how those formative experiences helped shape his writing career, but also . . . to look at how the Hammett persona was created. And as we Hammett fans know, there are few personas, few writers in 20th-century literature period, more interesting to read about.” —The Washington Post

“A gritty portrait of the 20th century's great pulp poet Dashiell Hammett, who turned his days gumshoeing for the Pinkerton Detective Agency into bawdy and muscular American classics.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“[H]ighly entertaining . . . captures what it feels like to read Hammett's early work and, as Ward says, 'watch a sickly ex-detective in his late twenties, with an eighth-grade education, gradually, improbably, teach himself to write.'” —The Boston Globe

“Nathan Ward shows that Hammett's innovative style did not, as it may have seemed, spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus . . . With deft investigative work, Ward shows how much of Hammett's fiction owed to Pinkerton reports . . . a lively, witty account of how Hammett came to be Hammett—a portrait of the artist, if you will, as a cynical man.” —Chicago Tribune

“[A] splendid biography of this keystone figure of American letters. Fittingly, there have been numerous biographies of Hammett . . . but none have explored as deeply his life before he became a writer. There can be little doubt that Hammett’s work with the Pinkertons was the greatest influence on who he became, both as a person and as an author . . . Ward wisely chose to focus on Hammett’s formative years.” —Otto Penzler in THE NATIONAL REVIEW

“Nathan Ward’s book shines a detective's flashlight on Hammett's early development.” —Buffalo News

“Hardboiled crime novel fans will find Ward's research into what it meant to Hammett to be an actual detective before he wrote about them quite fascinating.” —ShelfAwareness

"With its sharp focus and strong hook, The Lost Detective is a fascinating read [that] casts Hammett in a new and intriguing light." —Herald Scotland

"Investigative biographer Nathan Ward brings those offstage influences alive in The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett . . . Ward’s own narrative pace and procedure are not unlike his subject’s—smart, terse and entertaining. The story has been told before but never with such rigor, verve and thoughtful attention to the formative years of the man who provided The Maltese Falcon (1929) and The Thin Man (1933)." —The Virginian-Pilot

"Beguiling . . . The Lost Detective is a dazzling display of literary detection." —Sydney Morning Herald

From the Publisher

06/15/2015
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) began writing short fiction in 1922, and in a maniacally fertile period between 1929 and 1934 penned five hard-boiled novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man among them, that would become standards in American crime fiction. Inspired by Hammett's experiences over nearly a decade as a detective, the stories exposed the raw nerve of America's growing criminal enterprise and whetted the reading public's appetite for crime novels, introducing such iconic characters as the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles, and devising an unfamiliar crime lexicon that would be imitated (but never surpassed) in following decades. Biographer Ward (Dark Harbor) asserts, "If anything taught Hammett to write pithily and with appreciation for the language of street characters it was…his scores of operative reports for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency." However, Hammett's life was far from the romantic ideal of a best-selling author. Tubercular and alcoholic, Hammett—alongside his longtime partner, the dramatist Lillian Hellman—struggled to reignite the spark of creativity that characterized his early career. A sixth novel would never come to fruition. VERDICT Ward's focus on the origins of Hammett's writing style and his connecting the events of the author's background to the fiction are the highlights of this brief, accessible biography. Endnotes and a selected bibliography are useful for researchers and those wishing to dig deeper into the historical and cultural contexts underpinning Hammett's achievements. Highly recommended for readers of literary biography, mystery, and crime fiction.—Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge State Coll., GA

Library Journal

2015-04-21
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), private eye. Journalist and former American Heritage editor Ward (Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront, 2011, etc.) began this lively, but ultimately slight, book with a single question: how did Hammett transform himself "from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story"? The many biographies of Hammett (Ward cites a few in his bibliography) failed to answer his question, so he set out on his own investigation. Unfortunately, finding little evidence of Hammett's years working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Ward often guesses what Hammett might have felt, done, or thought. Although he speculates, for example, that "doing his scores of operative reports" honed Hammett's ability to write pithy narratives, none of those reports are in the Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress. Ward can only deduce what they might have contained from other operatives' work. Other information about the Pinkerton years came from Hammett researcher and journalist David Fechheimer, who tracked down operatives who had known Hammett. Ward also closely reads Hammett's detective stories for clues. Since none of his early writing has survived, however, even Hammett's motivation to become a writer is shrouded in mystery. What is clear was his inability to continue to work for Pinkerton because he was weak, and often bedridden, from tuberculosis contracted during World War I. With a wife and children to support, Fechheimer suggests, "he would have done whatever he had to do to make a buck." "Down the years," writes Ward, "Hammett must have wondered what might have happened had he gone on chasing crooks for the agency; whether, once he had run out his string as an operative, he could have settled into a desk job bossing younger detectives." Or maybe not. Ward ends the biography in 1935, when Hammett was famous, celebrated, and usually drunk. A jaunty narrative for Hammett and hard-boiled fans only.

Kirkus Reviews