Excerpt from the lost detective
Scars had made him credible. When they were young, Hammett used to show his daughters the marks of his old trade—let them see the cuts on his legs or feel the dent in his skull where he’d once been knocked by a brick. His old wounds summoned up stories from a romantic past: Some people he told that the brick had come from an angry striker while he did anti-union work for Pinkerton’s, but both Hammett girls remembered another version, more typical of their father for mingling self-mockery with suspense. He was, after all, a man whose roof perch had once collapsed while on stakeout and who had fallen from a taxicab during a city chase.
“One of my earliest memories is of getting to feel the dent in his head from being hit by a brick when he bungled a tailing job,” remembered his younger daughter Jo Hammett, “and he let me see the knife tip embedded in the palm of his hand.” Her sister Mary told the detective and historian David Fechheimer, “You could feel it in later years. There was a dent in the back of his head like the corner of a brick.”
It might have been thrown by an angry striker, as he occasionally claimed, or was dropped on him by a shadow subject who surprised him in San Francisco, as reported by his wife, who watched him suffer for days afterward in a chair. In the thirties, he gave another account of being wounded in the course of arresting a “gang of negroes” accused of stealing dynamite in Baltimore during the War. “When I got inside this house men were being knocked around in fine shape. In the excitement I had a feeling something was wrong but I could not figure out what it was till I happened to look down and saw this Negro whittling away at my leg.” In the end, there was the dent and the scars and the gift for storytelling, his conversation hinting at a detecting career as colorful as it was peripatetic: the jewel thief nicknamed the ‘Midget Bandit’ in Stockton, California, the swindler in Seattle, the forger he trapped in Pasco, Washington, the imposing railroad worker he tricked into custody in Montana, and the Indian he arrested for murder in Arizona.
How did he get from detective to writer? Hammett never answered satisfactorily. He was a Pinkerton, then he was very sick, then he was peddling stories to magazines, with apparently little more ambition than that, at least at the beginning. “Maybe man-hunting isn’t the nicest trade in the world,” says the skinny, ungentlemanly operative in Hammett’s first detective story, ‘The Road Home,’ “but it’s all the trade I’ve got…” It was the trade Samuel Dashiell Hammett knew best at age twenty-eight when his bad lungs forced him to give it up.
--Nathan Ward
“One of my earliest memories is of getting to feel the dent in his head from being hit by a brick when he bungled a tailing job,” remembered his younger daughter Jo Hammett, “and he let me see the knife tip embedded in the palm of his hand.” Her sister Mary told the detective and historian David Fechheimer, “You could feel it in later years. There was a dent in the back of his head like the corner of a brick.”
It might have been thrown by an angry striker, as he occasionally claimed, or was dropped on him by a shadow subject who surprised him in San Francisco, as reported by his wife, who watched him suffer for days afterward in a chair. In the thirties, he gave another account of being wounded in the course of arresting a “gang of negroes” accused of stealing dynamite in Baltimore during the War. “When I got inside this house men were being knocked around in fine shape. In the excitement I had a feeling something was wrong but I could not figure out what it was till I happened to look down and saw this Negro whittling away at my leg.” In the end, there was the dent and the scars and the gift for storytelling, his conversation hinting at a detecting career as colorful as it was peripatetic: the jewel thief nicknamed the ‘Midget Bandit’ in Stockton, California, the swindler in Seattle, the forger he trapped in Pasco, Washington, the imposing railroad worker he tricked into custody in Montana, and the Indian he arrested for murder in Arizona.
How did he get from detective to writer? Hammett never answered satisfactorily. He was a Pinkerton, then he was very sick, then he was peddling stories to magazines, with apparently little more ambition than that, at least at the beginning. “Maybe man-hunting isn’t the nicest trade in the world,” says the skinny, ungentlemanly operative in Hammett’s first detective story, ‘The Road Home,’ “but it’s all the trade I’ve got…” It was the trade Samuel Dashiell Hammett knew best at age twenty-eight when his bad lungs forced him to give it up.
--Nathan Ward
Author Appearances:
(NYC) Mysterious Bookshop (co-hosted with Lawrence Block), 9/17/15; Brooklyn Bookcourt, 9/21/15; WORD Bookshop (Greenpoint, Brooklyn), 9/24;
(SF )9/29 Berkeley at Books Inc ; Mechanics Institute, 9/30;
Miami Book Fair Nov. 20-21
Brooklyn Heights Public Library, Jan. 19th 2016
Reviews: Publishers Weekly (5/10/): (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8027-7640-2)
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. "
BOOKLIST (June 1, 2015)
The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett.
Ward, Nathan (Author)
Sep 2015. 240 p. Bloomsbury, hardcover, $26. (9780802776402).
Ward, author of Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront (2010), has written a brief, buoyant Dashiell Hammett biography that focuses on how Hammett’s brief career as a Pinkerton operative infused his crime writing and, especially, his characters Sam Spade and Nick Charles. Ward pored over the reports and memos written by Pinkerton operatives and housed in the Pinkerton archives in the Library of Congress; interviewed Hammett experts, including his daughter, who was able to tell Ward which of Hammett’s hands bore a knife scar; researched Pinkerton Agency cases; and read the entire Hammett oeuvre for clues as to early Pinkerton influences. Although, as Ward acknowledges, no reports written by Hammett are in the archives, Ward uses the terse, Damon Runyon–sounding reports to make a convincing argument for how this style translated into Hammett’s prose. Hammett worked for the Pinkerton NationalDetective Agency (whose motto, “We Never Sleep,” was the basis for “private eye”) before and briefly after WWI, until tuberculosis forced him into writing. This shines a light on Hammett’s life and writings in an entirely new way.
— Connie Fletcher
Library Journal (June 15, 2015)
Ward, Nathan. The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett. Bloomsbury USA. Sept. 2015. 240p. photos. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780802776402. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781632862778. LIT
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 unfamiliarcrime 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
A Detective’s DetectiveInspired by reading Hammett, David Fechheimer became the consummate San Francisco detective. But his longest case was investigating the world of his hero, and his findings made future Hammett scholarship possible.
By the early 1970s, sadly little proof remained of Dashiell Hammett’s one-time employment as a Pinkerton operative beyond the word of his family. The background of his former life as a sleuth had set him apart from his hard-boiled peers, and given his stories their plausible aura of authenticity. (Pinkerton’s, for their part, would not confirm or deny his employment.) In New York literary society, and in Hollywood, Hammett had entertained with many stories about his old Pinkerton days, but after his death it became cynically fashionable with some to doubt he had even been a detective.
When David Fechheimer arrived in San Francisco in the early Sixties, it was still “Hammett’s city,” he remembered. “Men wore hats, everybody drank.” But by 1965 the city was entering its countercultural bloom; Fechheimer was a “budding flower child” and poet on his way to a literature degree at San Francisco State when he encountered the books that got him off his academic track. (It was not a one-night transformation from reading The Maltese Falcon, as would be repeated in later profiles.)
“We all lived hand-to-mouth then,” he said, and all were looking for work; after noting the collection of Hammett’s other jobs listed on the backs of his novels he’d admired, Fechheimer called up Pinkerton’s San Francisco office and began his own detecting career where the writer had finished his. While working out of the very same Pinkerton branch in San Francisco in the late 1960s, David Fechheimer became increasingly interested in the history of the man whom no one at the businesslike Flood Building seemed to remember.
He learned all the skills of sleuthing, and, later under his longtime boss Hal Lipset, quite a few tricks unknown to Hammett, before eventually going into practice himself as a San Francisco private eye. Like Hammett, he began to learn the city around him right down to its bones.
As an investigator, he noticed things: While waiting for the M car on the traffic island opposite the House of Lucky Wedding Rings, he met Albert Samuels sweeping the sidewalk, who had once employed Hammett to write jewelry ads. He got his hair cut by an old barber named Bill Sibilia, who remembered trimming Hammett’s graying pompadour and that he was a good tipper.
Fechheimer also located a woman Hammett had written poems for in San Francisco; she talked to him in whispers outside her house, having never told her husband about her romance with Hammett or that he had said she inspired Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. He next found and interviewed Mrs. Hammett, long presumed dead by scholars at the time, then, hoping to find any of his hero’s old colleagues, he used the same method that had drawn Hammett into the agency to begin with — placing a simple newspaper ad.
Two old men answered his query: Jack Knight had been a well-traveled Pinkerton in the early twenties who never worked directly with Hammett but knew his reputation as one of the “fellows with particular ability.” The other, Phil Haultain, said he had learned to shadow from ‘Sam’ Hammett himself, and was his partner in the last months of Hammett’s career as an operative. Fechheimer went to meet Haultain in the office of his conveyor belt company in Emeryville, California in early September 1975. Their conversation remains the only eyewitness testimony about Hammett as a detective.
Shaking the old operative’s hand, Fechheimer must have felt, in the words of A.J. Liebling, “joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.” Haultain was eighty years old, looking paunchy but stockily powerful at his desk, wearing a buff-colored Stetson and dark plaid shirt, flower-pattern tie and thin white mustache. “I was telling my wife today,” he said. “Sam Hammett made me a good shadow man.” Haultain recalled his Pinkerton mentor as “tall, thin, smart as a steel trap. He knew his business. He wasn’t a drinking man in those days, not that I know of. But he used to smoke like hell. Rolled his own cigarettes.” Like Sam Spade.
According to Haultain, Hammett schooled him in shadowing that fall of 1921, when Pinkerton’s was hired by the defense in the first manslaughter trial of the film comedian Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. The two men were tailing a couple from Los Angeles who were likely witnesses for the prosecution, and Haultain remembered “we circled round them, and even with this hat [of mine], they didn’t get wise. He was a wonderful investigator.”
The ex-detective pictured for a newspaper profile, 1934/Harry Ransom Collect.So, too, was the man Haultain was talking to, who gathered this and other interviews for a special Hammett issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s weekly, City of San Francisco, on November 4, 1975, much of it compiled, researched, and written by guest editor David Fechheimer. (The issue also served as a run-up to a Hammett film Coppolla was producing directed by Wim Wenders.)
A reviewer of a Hammett bio in the 1980s complained that all Hammett lives offer the same slideshow, they just reshuffle the slides. With his discoveries for that issue of City, Fechheimer made most of the slides biographers have shuffled since the seventies. He never published his own Hammett book, although he got close — commissioned to do one by a New York publisher, he got far enough along to draw warning letters from Lillian Hellman. But in the end he handed off his research to future Hammett biographer and executor Richard Layman and returned to detecting. The material he had gathered made later books possible about this strangely secretive man who destroyed so many letters.
Most important, perhaps, was something that did not appear in the City issue: Fechheimer “borrowed” Hammett’s Army medical record, which detailed, year by year, the biography of his disabling Tuberculosis and the emergence of his art when it rendered him unfit to keep working even part-time for Pinkerton’s or, later, for Samuels Jewelers. After recieving the VA file in a steakhouse, he read it into his tape recorder and had it transcribed by an English typist recommended by Eldridge Cleaver.
The medical file was central to testing Hammett’s origins story that he began writing his authentic crime stories because he was confined to his bed of pain in San Francisco. Thanks to Fechheimer, you could follow along as each government nurse evaluated Hammett for disability, sometimes reporting that he had even bragged about selling a few stories to magazines.
After Richard Layman graciously shared the transcript with me, I hung much of my own Hammett book on this account of his transformation. (The real government file went officially missing and was presumed lost in a fire at an archive. Or Fechheimer’s contact never returned it to the shelf.)
When I first met Fechheimer in later years, his stealthy profession didn’t seem at first to jibe with the trim white beard and rimless glasses, which suggested a professor of American Studies, perhaps, or Constitutional Law, instead of a detective. We had several wonderful meals together, during which the fact that he was a detective sometimes added gravity to even trivial things he was talking about — recommending a new coffee place, for instance, like it was a secret passed on by his criminal informant (“You go behind the old Mint, and there it is.”). He was generous enough to appear with me and the Hammett historian Don Herron on the stage of the Mechanics Institute, after which I had him sign my copy of his 1975 issue of City.
At the last of our lunches, I somehow left my phone on the table while visiting the rest room. When I returned, the private detective was scrolling through my roll of Western landscapes. “Is that Montana?” he asked, more to confirm what he already knew. Of course it was. Butte, to be precise, where he had already been, chasing Hammett.