Original subtitles

Three typewriters stand mute as tombstones in a wooden caretaker's

outside New York.

Still in pajamas at noon, a lean six -foot man with bushy hair paces the

without a glance at the keyboard, dusty in the bright sunshine.

If you draw his attention to the silent machines, he says, I keep them chiefly

to remind myself I was once a writer.

Once all three typewriters were needed to keep pace with the output of the

Haggard -looking man and brought him as much as $100 ,000 a year.

That's a reporter's overstatement.

Three typewriters were hardly ever needed to keep up with Hammett's output.

For this is Dashiell Hammett, the creator of the tough detective vogue and

mystery thrillers.

Before the age of a thousand private eyes, Dashiell Hammett coined the

Sam Spade, the Continental Op.

Some say that ex -Detective Hammett was the original.

Eventually, Hammett the man got rolled up together with his fictional heroes

into an embodiment of the American male mystique.

Hammett was also a mystery writer, wrapped in a mystery.

He was a self -made American success story, one of the best paid writers of

day. Yet somehow, along the way, he ended up without a penny and lost the

that mattered most, his writing voice.

When Hammett pounds out the stories we remember him for, he's a pulp fiction

writer working out of a tiny San Francisco apartment.

I'm one of the few people.

If there are any more moderately literate, we take the detective story

seriously.

I don't mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else's seriously, but the

detective story as a form.

Someday somebody's going to make literature of it, and I'm selfish enough

have my hopes.

Hammett pins his hopes on a new kind of hard -boiled hero.

Later made famous in the movies by Humphrey Bogart, a good guy, if you want

call him that, who doesn't mind mixing it up with cut votes, including the

attractive ones who can bat an eye and then shoot a man in cold blood.

We were talking about a lot more money than this. There are more of us to be

taken care of now. That might be, but I've got the falcon. You may have the

falcon, but we certainly have you. To survive in this brutal company, the

detective has to get around the gunmen.

He's also got to see through the lies of tempting clients.

Everybody's got a story.

And for starters, the detective's job, like Hammett's, is to see through

everybody's story.

Mr. Spade, I... I have a terrible, terrible confession to make.

That story I told you yesterday was just a story.

Oh, that. Well, we didn't exactly believe your story, Miss... What is your

Wonderly or LeBlanc?

It's really O'Shaughnessy. Bridget O'Shaughnessy. We didn't exactly believe

story, Miss O'Shaughnessy. We believed your $200.

You mean that... I mean you paid us more than if you'd been telling us the truth

and enough more to make it all right.

Tell me, Mr. Spade.

Am I to blame for last night?

Well, you warned us that Thursby was dangerous. Of course, you lied to us

your sister and all that, but that didn't count. We didn't believe you.

No, I wouldn't say that you were at fault.

Thank you.

Mr. Archer was so alive yesterday.

So solid and hearty. Stop it.

You know what he was doing?

Those are the chances we take.

Was he married?

Yeah, with 10 ,000 insurance, no children, and a wife that didn't like

The first thing that gets you about Hammett's writing is the style.

It is of its day, but it doesn't feel dated.

San Francisco's changed a lot since Hammett lived and worked there through

1920s, but his vivid words still haunt the locales he borrowed straight into

books.

He was a regular at John's Grill, which stands on Ellis Street today as it did

then. It's where Sam Spain asked the waiter to hurry his order of chopped

potatoes and sliced tomatoes.

And now they serve you your drink on a paper napkin picture of the Maltese

Falcon.

I was a graduate student, and I was reading a bunch of writers who were,

at that time, forgotten and out of print.

I'd never read detective fiction.

And I started The Falcon one night around 8 o 'clock and finished around

the next morning.

I was so astonished by it that I went across the street to the payphone and

called the Pinkerton agency because I had read on the book jacket that Hammett

had been a Pinkerton detective in San Francisco.

And I asked them if they hired people with no experience in beards, and they

needed somebody with a beard.

I've always thought that, you know, the special thing about Hammett was

language.

I don't know who you'd compare it to. Maybe the early Elizabethan playwrights

who were writing in the English vernacular for the first time.

Hammett takes workaday language and refines it to a diamond sharp point with

great intelligence and wit.

Blue collar language with white collar trim.

His first novel, Red Harvest.

opens with a description of a big mining town, like the one Hammett knew as a

Pinkerton detective out west.

The city wasn't pretty.

Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness.

Maybe they had been successful at first.

Since then, the smelters, whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy

mountain to the south, had yellow -smoked everything into uniform

The result was an ugly city of 40 ,000 people.

set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up

mining.

Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the

smelter's stacks.

Hammett brings us a world of men who have to make their own rules.

Men who can play rough and who know how to mean what they say, even when they're

bluffing.

Do they know what that bird is, sir? What is your impression?

Oh, it's not very much to go by. Cairo didn't say he did and he didn't say he

didn't. She said she didn't, but I took it for granted she was lying.

Not an injudicious thing to do.

If they don't know, I'm the only one in the whole wide, sweet world who does.

Well, when you told me, that'll make two of us.

Mathematically correct, sir.

But I don't know for certain that I'm going to tell you.

Oh, don't be foolish. You know what it is. I know where it is. That's why I'm

here. Where, sir?

Where is it?

You see, I must tell you what I know.

But you won't tell me what you know.

It's hardly equitable, sir.

No, no. I don't think we can do business along those lines.

I'll think again and think fast.

I told that gunslinger you should have to talk to me before you're through. I'm

telling you now, you'll talk to me the day you are through. What are you

my time for? I can get along without you.

And another thing.

Keep that gunslinger out of my way while you're making up your mind.

I'll kill him if you don't. I'll kill him.

Well, sir, I must say you have a most violent temper.

Take it over. You've got till five o 'clock.

Then you're either in or out.

I'll keep.

Hamid.

who dropped out of school in the eighth grade back in Baltimore, begins his

unlikely journey to the top ranks of American literature in the wake of World

War I.

There was in the air very much the expectation that you could make

yourself. I don't know if you ever saw those matchbooks from the period that

said, improve your vocabulary or read the great book.

People were encouraged to go for this kind of...

self -improvement or advancement, to be entrepreneurs in the arts, to rise above

their station.

He had been in the service in the East, gotten very sick with the flu, and

come out to work for Pinkerton in the northwest part of the country.

These are some of the earliest pictures of my dad. I think they date from maybe

1921, all dressed up very elegantly.

The next picture is of a ward at Cushman Hospital outside of Tacoma where my

parents met.

When he got very sick, he was admitted there.

He knew he was smarter than the people around him. He knew that there was a

sophisticated and glamorous world that he wasn't a part of.

And we don't know where he had glimpsed that world, whether in Baltimore,

whether working his way west. But he'd seen it and wanted to be a part of it.

He had time to read Aristotle, Anatole France, the great

writer, which you probably didn't read in the seventh grade in Baltimore.

I think the combination of ambition and enforced idleness was a great gift to

him and allowed him to open out into a person who dared to write.

The summer of 1921, Hammett, no longer hospitalized, has come to San Francisco

and is looking out at the world from cheap downtown apartments.

Now he's about to be married, and the only work he knows is tinting for the

Pinkerton Detective Agency.

But his bad lungs have ruled that out.

He's got a money problem.

Aside from the time that he had been in the army and the time he had been in the

hospital, he'd only lived six months on his own. The rest of the time he lived

with his parents.

He's sick, 100 % disabled.

He's virtually helpless. He can't climb a flight of steps without difficulty.

And he finds out that his girlfriend is six months pregnant.

He's got to do something.

He pursues a job as an ad writer, a freelance ad writer.

It's freelance income.

There's nothing guaranteed there. What else has left him? How does he

his income?

He begins to write.

There are plenty of places to sell stories in the magazines of those days.

On the lowbrow end are the pulps, which pay their writers a penny a word.

Pulps would define a theme, romance stories, air stories.

Spicy stories.

Parisienne.

Stories about those evil Frenchmen.

On the upscale end are the slicks, like Saturday Evening Post and Collier.

They pay up to $4 ,000 for a story.

The March Stat wasn't in the class with Saturday Evening Post, but it had about

it a certain snobbishness that would have appealed.

I think he liked the title, The Smart Set. He wanted to be an aristocrat.

He did place five stories there, but they're very short.

You can imagine that someone at The Smart Set realized that Hammett didn't

a future with them. He just wasn't a smart set kind of writer.

But they noticed that he had this interest in detective stories, and they

decided to give him a referral. The referral that they gave him, one can

imagine, was to Black Mask.

The editors of the smart set are also connected to several pulp magazines.

Black Mask is one they founded. So Hamid is coaxed away from his more

pretentious aims and starts churning out crime fiction for Black Mask.

And they brought him a needed supplement to his income to support this little

girl that's just been born and his wife.

Penny Award.

Hammett's first lasting creation is a fictional detective he comes to call his

meal ticket.

Black mask readers know him as the Continental Op, an operative or op who

for the Continental Detective Agency.

It's very important he has no name. The detective is an anonymous character. He

has, as it were, no individuality. His individuality is simply in what he does.

Hammett doesn't write autobiographically.

But he uses his experience as a detective, as a Pinkerton.

For example, he writes, A detective may shadow a man for days, and in the end

have but the haziest idea of the man's features.

Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, individual mannerisms, all as

from the rear, are all more important to the shadow than faces.

The detective himself is described as a shadow.

Nothing but a shadow. And the person that he is shadowing and tracking is

seen from the rear.

Now, what's interesting, of course, there was a certain anonymity about

himself.

He didn't speak about his past.

He didn't speak about his life.

Both Hammett and his characters are shy on details about personal history.

Hammett almost seems to have willfully covered the traces of his own life.

When I went to work for Pinkerton's, it was roughly 40 years after Hammett had

worked there.

And as I was learning how to be a detective and occasionally thinking

fact that it was Dashiell Hammett who had gotten me into this, I began to look

him up.

I found a record of his marriage.

Found his different residences, city directories, and other records.

Initially, he lived in the area very near the Pinkerton office, the

Never been able to definitively find out the origin of the word Tenderloin, but

the story I like the best is...

A number of people told me that it derived from the fact that the wives of

policemen who worked in the Tenderloin could afford to say to the butcher, I'll

have Tenderloin.

And that's because it was a neighborhood that was filled with speakeasies and

prostitution and gambling.

And the cops, particularly in San Francisco, were all on the take.

From the anonymous viewpoint of the operative, Hammett pokes at the

of his America, the America of the Prohibition era, with its underpinning

corruption and cynicism.

Loads of otherwise ordinary citizens break the law.

Official morality is widely seen as unenforceable.

The society is so totally corrupt, and the corruption is so endemic.

Hammett understands immediately how interconnected the government is with

police, the police with the press, the police and the press and the government

with the mob.

Hammett shows us the ruthless mainspring of American machine politics in the

glass key.

The hero is a small -time gambler and political operative who dares to take on

his boss's enemy.

And you can stick this in your ear.

If you want it this way, you can have it.

Thanks.

Jeff!

And he wasn't afraid of very raw violence.

This is a violent society.

It started as a violent society.

He caught that. He captured that.

What do you got?

Two pair.

Now, sweetheart, you know what I told you. Take it easy, Jeff.

Give me two cards.

Oh, sweetie pie, you ought to lie down.

You don't feel so good.

Jeff, be careful. You're liable to croak him.

You can't croak him. He's tough.

He likes it.

Don't you, baby?

Hammett is one of the first writers to write about organized crime, to see the

possibility of a gang of criminals taking over society.

But what does happen is that the criminals...

fall out with one another.

That is to say, what prevents them from becoming Hitlers or Stalins or things

like that is that they are really Hobbesian characters. It's the war of

against all.

Intrigue, dishonesty, and betrayal are essential to Hammond's vision of the

world. And that includes a detective.

The Maltese Falcon ends in a kind of contest.

of betrayal.

Is Sam Spade betraying the client who has become his lover?

Or did Brigid O'Shaughnessy betray the man she hired when she shot his partner?

You do such wild and unpredictable things.

Don't be silly.

You're taking the fall.

You've been playing with me.

Just pretending you care to attack me like this.

You didn't care at all.

You don't love me.

I won't play the sap for you.

Oh, you know it's not like that. You can't say that. You never played square

with me for half an hour to stretch since I've known you. You know down deep

your heart that in spite of anything I've done, I love you. I don't care who

loves who. I won't play the sap for you. I won't walk in Thursdays and I don't

know how many other footsteps.

You killed Miles and you're going over for it.

What happens at the end of these novels is always the same.

The hero doesn't restore order.

He's a man defining the best values he can and doing the best he can with it.

But it's not restoring order because it's a chaotic universe.

Spade's explanation of his own behavior comes when he first... senses something

dangerously crooked in Bridget's game.

The parable he tells her gets us as close as we may come to Hammett's own

of how the world works.

It's a parable about a man named Flitcraft.

Flitcraft was a respectable, happily married real estate dealer in Tacoma who

went out to lunch one day and never returned.

There was no apparent explanation.

He went like that.

Like a fist when you open your hand.

Five years later, Spade was investigating his disappearance for Mrs.

Spade found him in Washington, living under another name.

He spoke to Flitcraft and learned what had happened on that day, five years

earlier.

Going to lunch, Flitcraft had passed an office building that was being put up.

A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk

alongside him.

The brush pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the

sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek.

He was scared stiff, of course, but he was more shocked than really frightened.

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.

Slitcraft had been a good citizen, husband and father, simply because he

man most comfortable in step with his surroundings.

He had been raised that way.

The people he knew were like that.

Now, a falling beam had shown him that men lived only while blind chance spared

them.

Insensibly ordering his affairs, he had got out of step and not into step with

life.

By the time he had eaten his lunch, he decided he would change his life at

random by simply going away.

He went off that afternoon.

wandered around for a couple of years, then drifted back to the Northwest,

settled in Spokane, and got married.

His second wife did not look like the first, but they were more alike than

were different.

Flitcraft wasn't sorry for what he had done.

He had left his first family adequately provided for.

Spade didn't think he even knew he had settled back into the same groove that

had jumped out of in Tacoma.

But that's the part of it he always liked.

He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell.

And he adjusted himself to them not falling.

End of parable.

I think Hammett did realize in himself some of the things that he expresses in

this parable that he's made up.

He did lead in some ways.

and irresponsible life.

That is to say, he did, in fact, simply leave his family.

He did, in some sense, live at random, drinking, as it were, sleeping

with a variety of women, and then pulling himself together.

periodically, with decreasing frequency, for bouts for extremely

ascetic, puritanical, and self -denying bouts of writing.

This is a portrait of my mother taken in the early part of the 1930s. I think

this is a very sad portrait to me. And I think she had it taken and sent to my

father as a remembrance, you know, here I am.

He probably didn't save it as he saved almost nothing.

The picture of him is when he first went to New York, very much in demand,

popular, a big celebrity figure right then.

The tastemakers are noticing Hammett.

Dorothy Parker writes, My own shrill yaps have been ascending since the day I

found Red Harvest, and from that day the man has been God help him, my hero.

It wasn't like my mother thought that the marriage was over or anything. She

just thought my father was not the kind of a person that could live with someone

else, and particularly as a writer, he needed his privacy.

And then, of course, when Lillian appeared on the scene, my mother was

shaken because this was the first real rival in her mind.

Lillian Hellman is 10 years younger than Hammett when they meet in Hollywood.

She's reading scripts at MGM.

dreaming of becoming a writer.

Lillian Hellman was very upset that she was a Jew.

Born in New Orleans, one of the most anti -Semitic places in the United

She meets the man of her dreams.

She thinks she's died and gone to heaven. Here he is. He's what she would

goy. He's not Jewish. He's tall. He's ascetic. He's not like her father. He's

not like her husband, Arthur Kober.

And he could help her become a writer.

What more could any woman want?

David Selznick thinks Hammett is a hot prospect and Paramount has him brought

out to Hollywood.

Who better than the ex -detective and master of hard -boiled mystery to write

stories for its matinee idols?

The Hollywood ideal, whether it was Gary Cooper, whether it was John Wayne,

later Clint Eastwood, you could say that that Hollywood ideal of masculinity was

modeled on...

Dashiell Hammett in his real life and also in his fiction.

Silent, tall, thin, sexy, undomesticated,

greatly intelligent, heroic.

He also had a great sense of humor.

He was also childlike.

I think he retained some of the Catholicism of his childhood.

And he tended to put women into those two categories, the Madonna and the

His mother was the Madonna, and then the loose women, whom he enjoyed very much,

were the whores, and these were the ones and the only ones who could give him

pleasure. On the other hand, what's extraordinary about Hammond is that he

appreciate Lillian Hellman.

He could like her. She didn't fit any of the physical ideal of women at the

time. And he liked starlets. He liked beautiful women.

But when he saw Lillian Hellman, here's a woman who could talk about literature,

who could talk about T .S. Eliot, who could mention the name T .S. Eliot. It

astounding to him, and he enjoyed her.

He told her she was better than pretty.

Hammett begins a love affair with Lillian Hellman and with a whole new

sophisticated writers and intellectuals.

They are equally at home in the swimming holes of Sunset Boulevard and the

watering holes of Broadway.

For Hammett, I imagine it was thrilling to find himself in a smart set

which accepted him or even adored and adulated him.

Hammett's lifelong habits of alcohol and loose sex follow him into his success.

He is now living hard and living high.

Sued by starlet Elise Debian for allegedly attempting to rape her in his

Hollywood hotel room, Hammett pays the fine without appearing in court.

I've decided to live flamboyantly, he will tell friends.

William Hammett thought that she was...

Tough enough, charming enough, smart enough, interesting enough to banish the

other women.

She was wrong about that.

He was unfaithful to her from the start.

And she found that very difficult.

So it was push and pull.

She retaliated. What else could you do but retaliate?

I think the whole Hollywood crowd did what they did. Here are the Perelmans.

And Laura Perelman.

finds out that her husband has had a chippy up in the upstairs, which Hammett

arranged, and she and Hammett take off for San Francisco, and Lillian is

furious.

They were in bohemian circles.

They were too smart to abide by narrow convention.

Hammett serves up a playful portrait of his newfound world in his next novel,

The Thin Man.

Six months later.

It's a movie.

You see, the important thing is the rhythm.

Always have rhythm in your shaking.

On Manhattan, you shake to Foxtrot time.

On Bronx, to two -step time.

The dry martini, you always shake to Waltz time.

I suspect that Hammett felt a little uneasy with his fame.

And the thin man is...

You know, Hammett parodying his success, I think.

Thank you.

There's certain people that... Hello there.

Hello.

Another glass.

How are you?

You know, we do know each other.

Well, of course we do. We've known each other for years.

Aren't you Nick Charles?

Yeah. You don't remember me.

I'm Dorothy Winant.

Not that scrawny little bit of... How do you ever remember me? Oh, you used to

fascinate me. Real, live detective.

You used to tell me the most wonderful stories. Were they true?

Probably not.

It's difficult to imagine anyone who could drink as much as Nick Charles

He doesn't take his job seriously.

Nick Charles is a new kind of Hammett leading man.

A playboy who lives off his wife's money and would rather be partying than

solving a murder.

Can't you tell us anything about the case?

Yes, it's putting me way behind in my drinking. Come on, let's get this in.

Thanks, Nick. What's your next step, Nick?

Nora Charles is also a new figure in Hammett's writing, modeled after Lillian

Hellman and her fast -talking, fast -living friend.

Well, here you have the new introduction of a rather more imposing female

character.

Back to California, huh?

My soul woman, I give you three murders and you're still not satisfied.

Well, if you insist.

I don't insist.

This is a woman self -respecting the equal of her mate.

First the dove.

Not without a warrant. So you say.

Go on, Bob.

What's that man doing in my drawers?

Sort of a new woman, capable of witty repartee.

Here you are, Lieutenant.

You got a pistol permit?

No. Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?

Oh, that's all right. We're married.

Nora was very much taken in that spirit by readers.

They loved Nora. People would write to him and say, we've been talking about

Nora in our writing class or our reading club.

Can you tell us how old she is? Can you tell us things about her?

The irony of the Nick Charles figure is, of course, that when Hammett wrote it,

he was out of money.

There's the wonderful story about writing most of it at the Sutton Hotel

time that Nathaniel West was the desk clerk.

West would let friends of his, Hammett, James T. Farrell, and others, check in

under assumed names and then periodically jump their bills, and then

recheck them in on their under - assumed names.

The Thin Man is enormously popular as a book and a movie.

Six sequels will follow, making lots of money for everyone, including Hammett,

though he seems to spend his faster than it comes in.

Hammett writes Hellman that The Thin Man will be his last detective novel. He

has raised his sights.

Hammett is at the height of his celebrity.

Town and country writes him up alongside Dostoevsky and the newest Nobel

laureate. His drinking companions are Hemingway and Faulkner.

But beneath the surface, something has collapsed in his writing.

He is not contributing at Hollywood story conferences.

Everybody considered that he would be an outstanding writer because of the way

he handled dialogue.

and his visual sense.

But I gradually learned that he wasn't doing the job.

I knew the people who were working with him on the script, Albert Hackett and

Francis Goodrich.

And although they both liked Hammond a good deal, they

were having a rather tough time.

pretending that he was guiding their work.

Hammett can't produce a novel promised for publisher Alfred Knopf.

In 1938, he switches to Random House.

It doesn't help.

The tales from Hollywood, from his years in Hollywood, are really

appalling if you try to think of somebody trying to write.

All you hear about is somebody lying dead drunk at parties.

When he drank, he was somebody else, and it wasn't a good... It was both

sarcastic and hard, but then also maudlin.

I just didn't want to be around.

And one time, much later, we went to dinner with Dorothy Parker and Dorothy

Parker's current whoever, whomever.

And we sat down, I think it was at the Brown Derby, and there was a woman, a

friend of some director or something that was sitting on the other side.

My father leans over me and starts to tell the woman he wants to go to bed

her. He's gorgeous.

She wasn't. She was a mess.

But he wanted to go to bed with her. I was so embarrassed.

I got up and took my coat and said, I'm going to the ladies' room. And I was

gone. And I was petrified. My father was going to be furious at me.

The next morning he comes in looking really hanged on. He says, I guess I was

pretty awful last night. And I said, yes.

My mother never worked. My father always supported her.

Checks might be irregular, but they always came eventually.

My mother had been a nurse, of course, but it wasn't anything she particularly

loved doing. It was a way to make a living.

And she told me once my father had said, you take care of the girls and I'll

take care of you.

And that's the way it always was, as long as he could manage it all.

As Hammett's own writing stalls, his career takes an exceptional turn, a

remarkable redirection.

Hammett realized that he was pretty much finished as a writer. He knew it. And

here's this energetic woman who's so smart and...

He thought he could transfer, I think whether this was conscious or

that he could transfer the energy of his writing gift to her.

And we can see it happening. He wanted to write a play.

He discovers the material that became The Children's Hour, and he thinks he's

going to write this into a play, which has to do with girls at school who

the teachers of being a lesbian.

And he gives it to Lillian Hellman.

He gives it to her because of her need for it.

He gives it to her because he has doubt whether he's going to write anything

anyway, and he made her into a writer.

I think in the history of literature, we would be hard -pressed to find another

example of a man who so selflessly helped a woman to achieve the most out

her, I would say, somewhat limited gifts.

She was smart, she was clever, but she wasn't a natural, and he was a natural.

And he gave her everything that he had. He taught her how to write a sentence.

He taught her how to revise, which is the greatest thing that you can give to

student.

He edited the plays.

There are notebooks of Hammett's corrections of the children's hour.

Hammett starts another new chapter in his life, left -wing politics.

The former operative for the Pinkertons with their union -busting history.

becomes a secret member of the American Communist Party.

He makes his name and his money available to causes, like the Abraham

Brigade, Americans who volunteered to fight against Franco in Spain.

Many veterans returned from Spain wounded, and they had to be

taken care of.

Handed out money like it didn't exist.

He gave me a sum of money when we met for a drink.

And he said he had wanted to go to Spain, but he was advised by some

sources, which he didn't name, he would be more valuable in the States

as a famous writer.

This celebrity.

On the wings of her literary triumphs, Lillian buys a property in upstate New

York called Hard Scrabble Farm.

Hammett sets himself up in his own upstairs room at the end of the hall.

He enjoys his time on the farm, hunting and fishing as he did as a boy.

But even first -time guests can't help but notice a sadness in the life of a

writer. was no longer able to write.

Well, this was Thanksgiving, and Lillian suddenly said, we'd

better go up and see Dash. He'd gone on a terrific binge and was scraped off the

sidewalk in Harlem.

We walked up, and Lillian put on quite a show about it.

It was a dark room when we got there, and she carefully pulled up the shades,

and then they proceeded to kid -dash unmercifully.

And I looked at him, and I thought he looked kind of frail but handsome, his

white shock of hair against the pillows, and I liked his looks enormously.

And he smiled and took their kidding all right.

I think he knew that in the eyes of other people, he was considered a

or at least sad person who'd thrown away a great gift.

And I think his heroism is in a sense that he avoided that view of himself.

I think Hammett wrote the perfect novel in that hard -boiled genre.

And at some level, that may have ceased to interest him, really.

After that, he tried to go back to his own experience and his own inner life to

some extent.

He went back to his life in that hospital.

But he couldn't find the vehicle, the flexibility in his profile

or the access to his inner self, one or the other or both, to allow him to move

on beyond the detective story. And I think he would have liked to.

America goes to war, and Hammett, at the age of 48, makes his way into the army.

He and his radical political record are shipped to a remote Alaskan island.

The name of this island is Adak.

The only bird life on the island is its scavenger raven.

He got into the army by charming the doctor because his chest was full of

tuberculosis lesions and obviously he was so underweight. And there was that

marvelous line that Hammett must have made up where the doctor says, okay,

let you in this time, but don't come back to me for the next war.

It was very unusual to have somebody that old who wasn't a senior officer.

But he liked being treated without deference.

the fact that he was a celebrity being ignored, okay?

So one night he was telling us a story about going into his favorite place,

which I think was either 21 or the Star Club.

He was then stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey and had maybe one stripe or two.

And he would walk in, pass this long line of majors, colonels, and generals,

the mayor would greet him with, your table is ready, Mr. Hammett, we're right

over here.

And he chuckled about that, he liked that quite a lot.

Dearest Princess, it's about midnight Saturday.

I'm spending this weekend on the post, divided between watching baseball and

cleaning up some work I should have done weeks ago.

Working here is very satisfactory nowadays.

I'm supposed to be the authority on the enlisted men in the Aleutians. May they

never get wise to me.

And everything is yes, Sergeant Hammett, and no, Sergeant Hammett. And as you

say, Sergeant Hammett, it kind of amazed him that he could...

Squeak by doing the physical stuff that they had to do, which he said, you know,

he had to rest up all day to do the 20 -minute hike they did in the morning.

It was his last good time, the last time when he really enjoyed himself.

Well, he was always comfortable, even most comfortable in the world of men.

You see that in his writing. All of the characters are men's men.

On another time, he might have been a good monk, something like that.

doing his writing and saying his prayers and having a kind of ritualized

existence. It was really when he tried to move into the world of women and

society that he came apart.

To Lillian, on the occasion of one of her birthdays.

Dashiell, nothing is too good for the little woman.

Hammett.

When Hammett returns from the army, Hellman...

is with another man.

His daydreams of nesting with her are shattered.

But if Dash and Lily are not to be together, neither are they to be apart.

He continues to spend time at Lillian's farm.

He steps up his political activities as celebrity supporter of communist causes.

The New York Civil Rights Congress names Hammett its president.

Dash and Lily remain companions.

They enjoy time with friends and their young children, though they've never had

their own.

Lillian climbs in prominence and respectability.

Hammett doggedly renews his attempts to write, working out of his New York

apartment. He buys a new IBM typewriter and hires a secretary.

There would be many hours when we just sat absolutely still.

I wasn't allowed to start a conversation.

He always instigated any conversations we had, and we would just sit there,

sometimes in armchairs on either side of the wood fire, and sometimes I would

barely keep my eyes open waiting for him to start talking.

He did intend writing again, but all he did was a page and a third of some

notes.

His writing, even when it gets off the ground, it doesn't get far.

There's the wonderful story of him getting, you know, a fat check to do a

to The Thin Man and writing on a piece of paper The Fat Man, which,

of course, somebody ran with.

Hammett's commercial success in radio and movies plows into the 50s, but it

not last.

In 1951, four communist leaders convicted under the Smith Act jumped

was posted by the Civil Rights Congress.

Hammett and his fellow bail fund officers are hauled into court.

He is a fine catch for the McCarthyites. The communist leaders are obscure.

Hammett is famous.

The court demands the names of fund contributors.

Of course, there was always a possibility that people would answer.

and give the names of other members of the party.

A lot of people in Hollywood did that, for example.

But that possibility was not available to

Dash or the others. Not available in... I don't mean that it wasn't available

legally. It was, of course.

But they were, if I may quote, they were of the left.

And people who were of the left did not inform.

Hammett's silence in court eerily recalls the code of silence he has so

depicted in his stories.

Where you been?

Where you been?

I said, where you been?

Out with that shooting gallery mug again?

Answer me.

Come on.

Spill it.

Good kid.

Don't never tell nobody nothing.

Like his hero in the glass key, he will not be bullied into disloyalty.

No matter what.

Ned Beaumont was lying there two hours later when Whiskey came into the room.

Use your head, Whiskey begged him.

These mugs will kill you. They've got no scent.

Okay, Ned.

Ned Beaumont looked dully at Whiskey through a dull and bloody eye.

Let him, he managed to say.

He refused to tell O 'Rory anything about Paul Matvig's affairs.

In Hammett's world, courage can redeem a man.

But it cannot redeem the whole rotten world that tortured him.

The Civil Rights Congress manages to raise $10 ,000 for Hammett's bail, and

secretary brings it to court.

Money was in my hand, but they wouldn't take it because I could not reveal the

source of the money. They refused to grant him bail. Any slimy racketeer

could get out on bail, but Dash could not.

Hammett served 22 weeks in prison for contempt of court.

But the rougher punishment is financial.

His work vanished from radio and TV.

He owes over $100 ,000 in back taxes with no way to pay.

His companion, Lillian Hellman, is not much help.

People thought that he should be disappointed in Lillian. She was

She abandoned him when he was about to go to jail. She ran away to Europe.

And was afraid that the McCarthyites would come after her and really pretty

left him high and dry.

And it was truly unforgivable, but he forgave her.

He never expected anything of people beyond what they could give. A true

really.

He never expected much more of the Communist Party either. And so whatever

did, he understood.

We can run down the whole list of the crimes against socialism that were

committed by the Soviet Union.

That's still.

And I think many people expected more of him because he wrote those marvelous

books, because he was so smashing a man, because it seemed in his heyday as if

he could do anything.

He said, maybe something better will come along later.

When it does, I'll join that.

Meanwhile, this is my commitment.

It was better than endorsing the lies of capitalist society.

That he never did and wouldn't do.

The last years of his life, Hammett depends on the help of friends.

He takes a spare room in upstate New York over the garage of the Rosens.

He was increasingly shutting himself off. And once Judy

Rosen suggested that Dad needed somebody from his past to

come out in the world again. So she said, I should call him, see if I could.

do anything to bring him back into the world.

And I did call, and he was friendly and

cordial, but he said, Ring, I really

don't want to see anyone.

As Hammett's health fails, Hellman takes him in to her New York apartment and

looks to bring some closure to their 30 -year involvement.

Lillian Hellman recorded Hammett in his dying days and her feelings toward him

as he's lying in bed and her wanting him to acknowledge that he did love her,

that what they had was fine and that it was better than what other people had.

And she remembers how afraid of him she had been and afraid of crossing him

because she was afraid of his violence and of his disapproval.

And at one point she asked him, wasn't it better or wasn't it? And he refuses

talk about it. He shuts her off.

In the final scene of an early Hammett story, the girl with the silver eyes,

op is coloring a vicious but ravishingly beautiful criminal.

The girl pleads with the op for something more precious than freedom.

I'm going to the jail tonight if you are the same hard man who has goaded me

into whining love into his uncaring years.

But before that, can't I have one wholehearted assurance that you think me

little more than quite pretty?

Or at least a hint that if I were not a prisoner, your pulse might beat a little

faster when I touch you?

Can't I take my vanity there, not quite in tatters, to keep me company?

Can't you do some slight thing to keep me from the afterthought of having

bleeded all this out to a man who is simply bored?

It sounds like Lillian Hellman speaking to Dashiell Hammett, although The Grow

of the Silver Eyes was written before Dashiell Hammett met Lillian Hellman. So

he created the terms of their relationship before they even met.

A critic once said of Hammett, the writing is better than Hemingway, since

conceals not softness, but hardness.

It was a hardness he lived, worked, flourished, and suffered by.

He died at the age of 66, not having added to his legacy for nearly three

decades. But he had won a new place in the catalog of world literature for

detective fiction and a place for Dashiell Hammett as an American