Two-Gun Bob: PulpFest 2012

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Don

Among other things PulpFest is going to commemorate this year will be the eightieth anniversary of the coming of Robert E. Howard’s Conan — exploding into the culture in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales.

In many ways, and given that Howard killed himself at the age of thirty, the Conan series is the artistic peak of his career.

Sure, there are other stories he wrote that are as good as the best of the Conans. After a decade toiling in the pulp jungle Howard had achieved a professional polish that opened the gates of such prestigious markets as Argosy, and no doubt would have enabled him to move on to books and perhaps even film writing — but for what Howard did that no one else could touch, then or now, the Conan stories are him at his best, blazing away on the typewriter in Cross Plains, Texas.

If you’re in Columbus, Ohio in August you can catch me on the panel celebrating Howard’s landmark character. Rusty Burke — El Burko of the Howardian a.p.a. REHupa — will moderate. Also on board you’ll find my occasional Guest Blogger Brian Leno, who has emerged in recent years as one of the major new Howard scholars (Brian is especially good on Howard and boxing, and I think is far and away the reigning expert on the subject today — he just started a multi-part series of posts on a favorite boxer of Howard, Kid Dula).

Rounding out the panel is another name familiar to surfers into this blog, John D. Squires — JDS is one of those guys, like his and my pal Steve Eng, whose storehouse of knowledge is so vast I suspect no one starting out today would ever be able to equal it.

(Plus JDS has been on scene for firsthand moments in the history of Sword-and-Sorcery, such as a friendship with Karl Edward Wagner of Kane fame: “I met Karl during my years at Chapel Hill after the army. At that point he had published the first two Kane books and was just starting Carcosa. I was at a party at his house when he’d just gotten the galleys for Bloodstone.  I grabbed them, sat down and started reading, ignoring the party except when I commented on a scene or two. He finally had to let me take them with me to get me out of the house. I took them home and finished them that night.” Me, I got to meet Harry Otto Fischer at Fritz Leiber’s apartment, and Fritz and Harry were Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser — so between us JDS and I cover the two best S&S writers post-Howard.)

Anyway, the panel should be fun. If you’re there, say hello.

Posted in Lit, News, REH | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Hammett: The Lineup for Including Murder

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Don

If you don’t have the issue of Clues with the Robert S. Powell article on Including Murder, you may wonder which stories would have made up what would have been Hammett’s first book, if it had been published — all Continental Op tales straight from the wood pulp pages of Black Mask.

With the address 620 Eddy Street on the mockup for the book, Powell deducts that Hammett would have compiled the stories before the end of 1926, by which time he had left Eddy Street, and more likely by early 1925 — “Holograph material is in pencil in a consistent hand and suggests the paste-ups and emendations were carried out in a brief period following publication of the final piece.”

And the final piece, per Powell, was “The Golden Horseshoe” from the November 1924 issue of The Mask, which takes up pages 120-141 of the manuscript — a “manuscript” consisting of pages torn from the magazine, pasted down onto typewriter sheets. (One imagines Hammett got contributors copies of issues he appeared in, and sacrificed a couple for tearsheets he glued into place, front or back as needed — I can feel the agony of pulp collectors at the very idea, but I believe most pulp writers pulled tearsheets without thinking twice about it.)

Powell has the idea that Hammett and his editor at Black Mask, Phil Cody, may have been planning the book as a side product of the magazine, though against better evidence it is possible that Hammett mocked it up to shop around to other publishers. Powell refers to the info in Richard Layman’s Hammett bio Shadow Man that “in the summer of 1925” Cody urged Hammett to write a longer work — a novel. Layman guessed that this “first novel” would have been “The Secret Emperor,” never finished, the fragment held in the Humanities Research Center along with other fragments and miscellania such as Including Murder.

We do know that sometime in 1925 Hammett fell out with Cody and Black Mask and gave up crime writing in favor of advertising work. I’ve heard it was because Cody capped his word rate at 3¢ — but some fallout over the short story collection, I suppose, now can’t be ignored as a factor. And why finish a novel for a magazine you’ve decided to leave?

According to Powell, the mockup contains sheets with five Op tales:

“Crooked Souls,” pages 1-9 of the manuscript, with the title changed first to “The Gatewood Thing” and finally to “The Gatewood Caper” — from Black Mask for October 15, 1923

“Bodies Piled Up,” pages 10-19 — from BM for December 1, 1923

“Night Shots,” pages 20-30 — from BM February 1, 1924

“Women, Politics and Murder,” pages 103-119 — from BM September 1924

“The Golden Horseshoe,” pages 120-141 — from BM November 1924

For the lost pages 31-102 Powell figures the missing stories are “hypothetically. . . discernable.” He decides that Hammett put aside “Arson Plus” from October 1, 1923 and “Slippery Fingers” from October 15, 1923 because otherwise the stories included are in order of publication and these fall before “Crooked Souls.” “It” and “The Tenth Clew” do not appear and they fall between Crooked/Bodies and Bodies/Night Shots respectively.

Powell speculates that the first two Op tales may have been passed over because “they are early experimental stories,” and the later two “on critical grounds.”

He concludes, then, based on Op stories that had appeared, that a “correlation of pagination” from the original layout in Black Mask “generally supports” his assumption that the “seventy-two missing sheets contained the following Op stories:”

“Zigzags of Treachery” — from BM March 1, 1924

“One Hour” — from BM April 1, 1924

“The House in Turk Street” — from BM April 15, 1924

“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” — from BM June 1924

Assembled from stories published barely two years into Hammett’s writing career, that would have made for one fine collection.

Posted in Dash | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Sinister Cinema: Fort Point

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Don

As I just mentioned, when Evan/Dave Lewis came to town I showed him and his wife around for a few hours, witnessed by the shot above.

Fort Point, under the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Classic noir locale.

Behind us, behind the blue car, you can see a fenced-off area, where the terrain is eroding away — when I first came to the burg in 1974 and for many years after, you could walk out to this area and around toward the Pacific. No more.

That’s where Jimmy Stewart dives in after Kim Novak in Vertigo.

(Mel Brooks of course sets a scene here in High Anxiety, as well.)

To the left in the image, out of frame, there is a large rocky hill — where Bogie dukes it out with the punk in Dark Passage. (One of the on-the-ground flaws in the movie is that anyone who has been to the spot knows there is no way anyone could drive out to that area without alerting a passenger wayyyyyy in advance that something hinky is going down. Nonetheless, a great movie.)

And in the Civil War era fort itself, the scenes with Lee Marvin at the end of Point Blank — supposed to be Alcatraz, as I recall, but they couldn’t get an okay to shoot on The Rock.

Even a glimpse of the spot in Lady from Shanghai.

Yep. Classic noir.

Posted in Film, Frisco | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Hammett: Including Murder

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Don

A few months back Evan Lewis of Davy Crockett’s Almanack let me know he was drifting into town, so I lined up a day where I could show him and his wife as many of the lost byways, precipice gradiants, obscure Victorians, and noir sites as they could endure.

If we’d ever met before, it was during the 1982 Bouchercon that I chaired, and Evan checked to see if I had a copy of an item from that era.

He asked how many issues of Clues: A Journal of Detection I had in my collection.

Easy one. Exactly one issue — featuring an interview with Tony Hillerman in which he talks some about how much he likes the writing of Charles Willeford. I’ve got that one somewhere in a box of Willeford stuff.

I may have seen a couple of other issues along the way — Clues has been around almost as long as the Hammett Tour, after all — but I’d never been tempted to subscribe, given the academic bent of the magazine. In Robert E. Howard circles especially, I’m known for butting heads with various academics, but then it’s possible REH criticism has an overall lower grade of academics than other disciplines.

And of course there are critics and there are great critics, there are academics and there are professors who have legendary stature. In hard-boiled circles, the late E. R. Hagemann is one of the legends — compiler of A Comprehensive Index to Black Mask, 1920-1951 from Pop Press in 1982. I’ve had that title since publication, with a letter inserted that I got from Hagemann thanking me for letting him know that “H. W. Guernsey” was a penname for Howard Wandrei, brother of Donald Wandrei — and Hagemann added some data sent to him by Will Murray, that “Leslie Charles Bowyer Lin” was an alias for Leslie Charteris of The Saint fame (“I goofed here,” he noted) and “Scott O’Hara” was actually John D. MacDonald (“another mishap”). A cornerstone work, the few errors can’t really do more than make a slight chip in the marble.

It turned out that Hagemann also had edited a whole section of Clues v2n2 for Fall/Winter 1981 concerning Pulp Detective Fiction — and Evan had an extra copy for me. Back then Clues was published by Bowling Green’s Pop Press and Evan Lewis was using the name Dave Lewis for his articles, including one in the Hagemann section about Frederick Nebel — “The Backbone of Black Mask.” Among other pieces, Will Murray provided an essay on Doc Savage author Lester Dent, one of his specialities. Hagemann contributed a really nice article on Cap Shaw, which has been reprinted in Blood and Thunder — but anyone with a major interest in hard-boiled crime fiction should track down the original seminar, one of the best I’ve ever seen —

And I’d never heard about it, as far as I can remember. Really amazing. If something this good is out there, sure, there’s probably more interesting essays I’ve never heard about, maybe even in other issues of Clues.

Yeah, I’ve got the excuse that those were pre-Internet years. This one slipped through the cracks. Whatever.

It goes on the shelf next to Hagemann’s Black Mask index, and I’m glad to have it.

The most startling piece in the seminar was “Including Murder: An Unpublished Hammett Collection” by Robert S. Powell — again, something I can’t recall ever hearing of before. Apparently among the Hammett papers in the Humanities Research Center in Texas, where Lillian Hellman housed various unpublished story drafts and fragments and so on, Powell found no less than sixty-nine 8½ x 11 pages under the title Including Murder. The address is 620 Eddy Street. The author’s byline: Dashiell Hammett.

On the sheets are paste-up pages taken from Black Mask of five Continental Op tales. Some of the planned contents are no longer with the archives, since the page numbers run from 1 to 30 — break — and then from 103 to 141.

Powell details several title changes Hammett contemplated, but more significantly “numerous instances of slight rewording or changes in sentence construction, obviously made to clarify or accelerate narrative.” He gives five examples each from “The Gatewood Caper,” “Bodies Piled Up,” and “Night Shots.”

Five more examples show Hammett editing “melodramatic excesses in dialogue and narrative. Punctuation, too, is less exaggerated.”

I looked over the examples in wonder:

 

and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle

to

and the room showed no signs of a struggle

and

“Dresses well and doesn’t look like a rowdy — but harder than hell! A big game hunter! Our meat, I bet you!” “It doesn’t look bad,” I agreed.

to

. . . A big game hunter.” “It doesn’t look bad,” I agreed.

 

I almost couldn’t believe it. This Powell guy was like some kind of proto Terry Zobeck!

Posted in Dash, Frisco, Lit, REH, Willeford | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Tour: Some Kindle Some More

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Don

Got another note from Vince Emery, letting me know that the dustup between Amazon and IPG — Independent Publisher Group — has been resolved and you can once again purchase the Hammett Tour book on your Kindle, if you’ve got a Kindle and want an eversion of the tour book.

Back on track to becoming a Kindle bestseller!

And this reminds me — every now and then I wonder what Lillian Hellman would think about ebooks.

In the tour book I quote from her introduction to the collection The Big Knockover (1966) where she writes about the Op stories, “by publishing them at all, I have done what Hammett did not want to do; he turned down offers to republish the stories, although I never knew the reason and never asked.”

As we all know, in ten volumes Frederic Dannay collected (sometimes with brutal editing) a total of 54 out of 66 Hammett short stories. And Hammett himself, or his agent, sold an unknown number of his short stories to newspapers over a period of decades. Those stories, they got around.

It’s quite possible Hellman never knew about the many reprints. She could have been busy with other matters, more uptown stuff, not paying attention.

But I’ve always thought she must have been one of the people who didn’t think of something as a “real book” unless said book appeared in hardcovers from a respectable press such as Knopf or Random House. Paperbacks, they weren’t real books, they didn’t count.

I’ve actually met several people who held that idea — around thirty years ago a guy who was telling me about how it was too bad Fritz Leiber didn’t have more than a handful of books published, he was such a good writer.

What do you mean? I said — Fritz has published at least thirty or forty books.

After wading through the confusion, I finally figured out that the guy didn’t count paperback first editions, only first edition hardbacks. You could have a huge body of work but until you started hitting hardcovers, none of it counted — which is why it took a long time for writers such as Philip K. Dick and Charles Willeford to bust their reps out of the paperback ghetto.

And if some people didn’t think a paperback was a real book, what will they think about an ebook?

Even I don’t think of ebooks as real books, and I try to remain open-minded on the subject.

Posted in Dash, Lit, News, Tour, Willeford | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Hammett: The Complete Op

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Don

Say what you will about Frederic Dannay — and we’ve said so much about him on this site that his name is threatening to take over the Tag Cloud — but at least in his ten collections of Hammett’s shorter fiction he managed to get each and every Continental Op tale into uniform editions. Even today, if you want to get each and every Op, you still need to track down a couple of the Dannay edits — or the pricey original pulp publications.

Yeah, Dannay butchered “Death and Company” in his edit, taking changes already made at King Features and adding more. Changed some titles. If only he’d gotten it right, we wouldn’t need the piecemeal collections that have been appearing post-Dannay — I’d never have bothered with Crime Stories from Library of America if I already had a complete set of the Dell Mapbacks with authentic first appearance texts (yes, yes, stickler people — I know that the last two collections, Woman in the Dark and A Man Named Thin never made it into mapback reprints — I’d have them stuck off to the side as backup for the Maps).

Library of America volumes currently have prestige, but the Dell Mapbacks are forever cool.

In my review of Crime Stories I lamented the fact that they didn’t go for a complete collection of the Continental Op stories. In theory, they could have — a lot of space was wasted on material such as the short novel Woman in the Dark, already easily available in its own trade paperback edition, and the fragment of the early draft of The Thin Man (if you’re going to use fragments, then why not the partial draft for an Op story titled “Three Dimes”??? — that’s something Hammett fans might want to see, that wasn’t already in another book), plus miscellaneous standalone crime tales that don’t add up to much. When Dannay gathered almost every story Hammett wrote in ten collections, yeah, the standalone crime tales seemed to have some purpose, but just a handful taking up space in one book where the page count could have been used for something grander? I’d rather have seen more Op stories, including a missing classic such as “Corkscrew” and even the tight little actioner “One Hour.”

Since they couldn’t find the original pulp text for “This King Business” by the time they issued Crime Stories in 2001, it’s possible that other texts might have been impossible to track down (I’m getting the sense that “Who Killed Bob Teal?” may be a tough one to locate, as well). But a stab at it would have historic. Instead, sure, the largest story collection so far — but someday I expect that we’ll get larger collections.

What Hammett — or Hammett fans — need at this point is one nice big book with all the Op tales, and another big book with the rest of his short stories. Boom. Boom. You spend your money, you get what you want.

At this moment, after you acquire Crime Stories, you still have to buy some recent editions to round up the strays —  the 1999 Nightmare Town for a few other Op tales, the 1966 Random House version of The Big Knockover for “Corkscrew,” and you’re still left with two loose Ops: “Death and Company” from Dannay’s The Return of the Continental Op (1945) and “It” from Dannay’s Woman in the Dark (1951) — and after you run those down then you need to hop back to Terry Zobeck’s pure text posts to find out how the original texts read.

I’ve heard that one prominent New York editor has said that there is no market for a Complete Op, that no one would buy it. That’s one opinion.

Personally, I’d buy a copy of the complete pure text Op tales, instantly.

A guy from the Netherlands came out on the tour last month and wanted to get all the Op stories — I gave him the info as above, told him good luck in hunting it all down. He’d have gone straight to a bookstore and bought a Complete Op.

I think any Hammett fan would — and any and all Hammett fans that emerge as the years march on.

The only big question facing whoever finally assembles all the Op stories in one big book will be whether to use the original pulp texts, as Library of America chose to do with Crime Stories — or use preferred texts and titles in the cases where Hammett edited the stories, especially for the proposed but never published story collection Including Murder.

Posted in Dash, Lit, Tour | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Tour: Sunday June 17

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Don

About three months ago a guy emailed from Australia, letting me know he was rolling into the burg and wanted to walk the walk.

Great advance notice.

Anyone interested can join him on the tour on Sunday June 17. Just show up with ten bucks and four hours available to go the distance. Noon at the “L” sculpture.

And if you can’t make that one, the next Hammett tour open to anyone who wants to show up will be Sunday July 1.

Posted in Tour | Tagged |

Hammett: “You’ve Never Read Hammett!”

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Don

A few years ago I was in the now gone “M” Is For Mystery Bookstore for a talk. Near the end of the remarks the speaker — kind of an absurd little guy — suddenly remembered that the collection Crime Stories and Other Writings was out from the Library of America and exclaimed (to a room of mystery readers, which included someone who had led The Dashiell Hammett Tour for decades):

“You’ve never read Hammett!”

My understanding is that the speaker had some peripheral involvement with that project, so you can sort of understand why he got excited and wanted to spread the word. The premise of Crime Stories, first released in 2001, was that the texts would be based on either author typescripts or the original magazine appearances, not on later reprints known to have been edited by Frederic Dannay, and perhaps by others.

The one exception to the rule (and who knows why they included it if they couldn’t get a good text) was the Op story “This King Business,” where they couldn’t find a copy of the first pulp publication — Terry Zobeck solved that problem for them in a corrected third printing. But that means the first two printings are crippled. You’d only want the first edition if you are a true collector of first editions. The second printing is worthless. The third printing, that’s the one to get.

But meanwhile, as the world waited for Crime Stories, somehow Hammett became a bestseller and would see edition after edition of novels and stories appear here and in translation around the world. By 2001, he was a standard literary figure — without question, at the least Hammett was one of the major writers in the history of crime fiction. Otherwise he’d never have been picked up for inclusion in the Library of America, right?

You can understand why the audience in “M” Is For Mystery squirmed in discomfort and didn’t say anything about “never” reading Hammett. What an off-the-wall statement. . . . I got the sense that they thought the speaker suddenly had gone off his meds.

If people have read any Hammett at all, typically they will have read The Maltese Falcon. The 1930 text established by Knopf. For that version, it is known that Hammett made around 2000 changes from the original serialization in the pulp Black Mask. He didn’t use the pulp text as in Crime Stories, he polished it to achieve a preferred text.

In short, if you’ve read The Maltese Falcon, you’ve read Hammett.

Even with some of the short stories — as Terry Zobeck has shown with his series of pure texts posts on this site — a few of the tales saw no changes at all (once again, you’ve been reading Hammett, dammit!), and others had very minor changes. Even stories where a wrecking ball was used in the editing room — I’m thinking especially of “Death and Company” — weren’t affected by the appearance of Crime Stories, since they weren’t collected in Crime Stories.

I reviewed Crime Stories when it came out, and the process I used was to take the proof copy and more recent editions — The Big Knockover, Random House 1966, selected by Lillian Hellman and The Continental Op, Random House 1974, selected by Steven Marcus — pick a few stories and go through line-by-line to see if there was a big difference. I didn’t do every story, and now can’t recall each one I did survey. I went through “The Big Knockover” because it’s a personal favorite and one of the more elaborate — lots of names and place settings.

Overall, I thought the changes from the pulp originals to the Random House texts were minimal, and for an average reader, inconsequential. On the tour I blurb the Op series in particular — and the majority of people who have taken the walk — The General Public — have never heard of the Op. These days I tell them about the Library of America collection being available, but if they are just curious and want to try something they can find easily and cheap, I have no hesitation about plugging the two Random House editions, which have seen many paperback reprints.

Most of the changes in “Knockover” seemed to be typographical — if a song title was mentioned in the pulp appearance it appeared in quotes, then the modern editions had it in italics. BFD. I do remember one line in a story where in the pulp the Op climbed aboard a streetcar and in the reprint he hailed a cab. Nothing about the ride after, just the one line.

The most spectacular change in a story was when one of the Op’s reasons for solving a crime was deleted entirely — I’ll do a whole post on this one pretty soon.  (And once you see it, you’ll probably agree with the editor who deleted it.)

If interested, you can find the review I did on the Amazon page for Crime Stories — the anonymous one from Publishers Weekly. It was the eighteenth review I did for PW after starting in December 2000, and looks to be largely what I turned in — PW reviews are anonymous because various people, editor above editor, can step in and change something. (Once the term “smitten” was inserted into a review I did, I was kind of glad the things are anonymous.) You’ll notice that I don’t say anything about “This King Business” not being taken from the original pulp appearance — with these reviews, you’ve got less than 200 words for everything, title, author, pub info, so you’ve got to leave stuff out and stick to something you think is important.

And what I thought was most important was that they had a shot at doing a Complete Continental Op in one volume — and didn’t do it.

Posted in Dash, Lit, Tour | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

Hammett: “What About His Daughter?”

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Don

Birthday 75 for the Golden Gate Bridge. Birthday 118 for Dashiell Hammett. . . .

What to do for the birthday this year?

How about something Hammettesque I’ve never heard of before? I checked some sources, not a mention — as far as I know, this is news.

The Christopher Columbus figure in this story is Sue Montgomery, from the first walk this month. On that one, a chunk of people who were obvious big Hammett fans — two or three guys who’ve been on the walk before, several had their copies of The Dashiell Hammett Tour book. One of the guys returning reminded me that he had had the Unabomber as a math teacher in Berkeley — and the others knew who he was from the blurb I gave him in the back of the tour book. The guy who had the Unabomber as a math teacher! In a way, it was the meta-tour to end all meta-tours.

Sue had a question for me — Did I know why Hammett put in a reference to Casper Gutman and his daughter in The Maltese Falcon long before Sam Spade possibly could have known about them?

I presumed she’d misread something, but told her I’d look into it. One guy pulled a copy of the novel out of his backpack and handed it over (these people were serious).

Okay. So where did the reference occur?

Near the end of Chapter V The Levantine. . . . Okay, looking. . . . Next to last page, what the hell, there it is!

Cairo is speaking about the true owner of the black bird:

“. . . you know that the means by which it was taken from him shows that his right to it was more valid than anyone else’s — certainly more valid than Thursby’s.”

“What about his daughter?” Spade asked.

Excitement opened Cairo’s eyes and mouth, turned his face red, made his voice shrill. “He is not the owner!”

Spade said, “Oh,” mildly and ambiguously.

“Is he here, in San Francisco, now?” Cairo asked in a less shrill, but still excited, voice.

At this point Spade has done nothing we know of toward learning about Gutman. He has had his initial contacts with Brigid. He has just heard from Cairo about the statuette of a black bird, which he didn’t know about before. It’s not until Chapter VII G in the Air that another oblique reference to Gutman emerges, when Cairo states that he is seeking the bird “For its owner.”

Surprise illuminated the girl’s face. “So you went back to him?’

“Naturally I did.”

Not until Chapter X The Belvedere Divan does Spade use the “G in the air” signal made between Brigid and Cairo earlier to taunt little Wilmer: “You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny — some of you will — and you can tell G. I said so.”

Obviously he doesn’t yet know Gutman’s full name — not until the next chapter, The Fat Man.

In Chapter XIV La Paloma Spade “went to the Alexandria Hotel. Gutman was not in. None of the other occupants of Gutman’s suite was in. Spade learned that these other occupants were the fat man’s secretary, Wilmer Cook, and his daughter Rhea” — first time in the text that the daughter Rhea is mentioned.

So, what’s going on?

Easiest guess: somewhere in the writing process Hammett lost track of where he was and dropped the Casper/Rhea bit in much too soon, and no one noticed. I checked the original pulp version from Black Mask to see if any juggling from that text to the Knopf text could have caused it — no, nothing. The same lines appear in the pulp, same place in the action.

In short, I think Sue Montgomery has noticed a big plotting error in a recognised classic — and Happy Birthday, Dash!

Sure, I can explain it away — Spade just tosses the info about a guy with a daughter out as a shot in the dark, fishing for information. Didn’t mean anything. Just stirring the pot.

And if it does mean something, if on some level Hammett meant for Spade to have this uncanny knowledge of Casper Gutman and Rhea, then it would have to go to some deep, deep level — the sort of speculation that would make a person think that Wilmer Cook and Rhea Gutman are the same person, that sort of thing.

But in any case, it’s something any Hammett fan ought to have fun thinking about.

Posted in Dash, Frisco, Lit, News, Tour | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Hammett: A General Disclaimer for Future Use

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Don

About two years ago now I finally got to Butte, Montana and environs, and knocked myself out roaming up and down those mean streets, checking for buildings that date from the Hammett era (and there are a lot of buildings standing from the 1920s and earlier).

To make the most of it, I also did a reread on Red Harvest, the Op novel set in Butte (and/or Walkerville, the village just up the enormous hillside from Butte — you think San Francisco is hilly, trust me, hit Butte — damn). And this time, as I read merrily along, I noticed something that had never struck me before — a why the hell didn’t I ever notice this before moment.

Really cool. Kind of a “beams falling” bit. Recalling Cap Shaw’s comment that, “It was once an ambition of Hammett — it may still be — to set forth his own philosophical reasonings.”

In short, the find deserves an essay.

Before blurting it all out —- or taking the time to do up a proper essay only to find that everyone else on the planet already knows about this bit — I decided to check to see if anyone had noticed it before. Nothing in any of the biographies (honest, I don’t expect any cool litcrit from the biographers, it not in their wheelhouse). Of the litcrit volumes I have on hand, Peter Wolfe in Beams Falling and Rhino Thompson in Hammett’s Moral Vision uttered not a peep. (I’ve always disliked Wolfe’s handling of The Maltese Falcon, but looking through his entire book again, I saw that he really gets into the Continental Op stories — and anyone who digs the Op is okay with me.) Only Dennis Dooley in his book Dashiell Hammett from Ungar (1984) touched on the discovery, without going for the whole thing. Dennis is a great guy, he took the tour in 1995, so if he’d claimed the total find, that would have been okay with me. One less essay to write.

But, in the books I have on hand, no, not the whole bit. In a quick search of the web, nothing.

Since I don’t have on hand every essay on Hammett that has ever been done, and don’t have time to look through every comment in every usergroup in all the chatrooms in all the world, I’m going to presume I found something new.

And I’ll write it up, sometime in the future.

But if someone got to it first in some piece buried in a journal I haven’t read or on a website I haven’t seen, I apologise in advance.

If I’ve never heard of it after more than three decades of leading The Dashiell Hammett Tour, maybe, just maybe, it might be something new.

Posted in Dash | Tagged , , , , , , |