In last week’s analysis of the Hitchcock film “To Catch a Thief” we talked about John Robie (Carrie Grant)’s ability to catch the thief by working under the wire of the law. In fact, since he was a suspect, he could only do his job (catch the copycat) by being “invisible” and creating his own surveillance and apprehension system.

This week I challenge you to find some mystery-solving similarities as we examine another mystery sub-genre: the hard-boiled detective.  Read on to learn about this important mystery writer, his life and times, and our story, “The Main Death.”  By the way, what’s with the title?

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There he met Josephine "Jose" Dolan, a nurse whose care proved so attentive that they moved to San Francisco and married in July of 1921. They welcomed their first daughter four months later. In October 1922, after a year of scribbling at the San Francisco Public Library, Hammett sent H.L. Mencken a very short story called "The Parthian Shot" for his magazine The Smart Set. The story was published, launching Hammett's career.

From The Smart Set, Hammett soon graduated to detective stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask about a nameless detective. In time, self-contained stories gave way to installments of serial novels, which Hammett then reworked into the books Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929). He published The Maltese Falcon in 1930, moved to New York, and wrote The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934), his last novel.

By 1934, Hammett was written out. Though he had separated from Jose five years before and begun a lasting affair with the playwright Lillian Hellman in 1931, he remained a devoted absentee father to his girls in southern California.

"I'm one of the few—if there are any more—people moderately literate who 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. Some day somebody's going to make 'literature' of it ... and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes."

—Dashiell Hammett in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf

The invention of the detective story predates the invention of the private detective by at least 2,500 years. If Oedipus Rex, the story of a Theban king on the trail of his father's killer, isn't a story of detection, what is? But credit for creating the first true detective probably belongs to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), whose story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," pioneered the idea of a lone mastermind sifting clues and out-thinking everyone around him. The most popular fictional detective surely remains Sherlock Holmes, the London-based amateur sleuth created by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).

Dashiell Hammett, first in his short stories for Black Mask and later in his novels, transplanted the genteel British detective story to America and gave it an urban realism that would have baffled Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hammett wrote more than 80 short stories and five novels. His crisp style and vivid slang created a gritty, street-level realism that registered strongly with the public.

Often set in large, corrupt cities, Hammett's stories tend to feature an independent-minded detective, a working man at odds with his violent society. His motivations—whether monetary reward, a search for truth, or the preservation of his integrity—remain for the reader to decide.

As Hammett's great successor Raymond Chandler wrote in his fine, funny essay "The Simple Art of Murder," Hammett "took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.... [He] gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish."

In a phrase popularized by the great newspaperman Damon Runyon, a Hammett detective was "hardboiled": fundamentally a good egg, but far from soft. Hammett's genius lay in devising a style to match his masculine heroes. Even more than his heirs Chandler, James M. Cain, and Ross Macdonald, Hammett never wasted an adjective, refining a tightly visual vocabulary until everything inessential was boiled away.

Hammett is credited with developing the Hardboiled detective prototype. You know the guy. He wears a trench coat and pulls his hat over his forehead, obscuring his face. He keeps a bottle of booze in his desk (in his office in the seedier part of town). He carries a gun (which he sometimes uses). He chain smokes.

According to tvtropes.org, the Hardboiled Detective is an offshoot of the Great Detective tradition.

The Hardboiled Detective may not have the mind of Holmes or Poirot, but he (usually male but not always) sticks to a case until he figures it out. He uses street smarts, observation, and sometimes a punch in the chops.

As an interesting aside, Hammett based the character of Nora on writer Lillian Hellman, with whom he had an affair lasting more than 30 years.

According to one biography, many of Hammett’s characters were based on people he knew through his detective work with Pinkerton. He wrote more than 80 short stories and five novels (Dashiell Hammett Biography, 2021). 

This newly acquired financial stability came to an end in July when Hammett collapsed in his office amidst a pool of blood from a hemorrhaging lung. Diagnosed with hepatitis on top of his tuberculosis, he was unable to continue working. Samuels sent a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau so that Hammett could collect disability, and the Bureau awarded him 100% of the allowable amount of $90 a month. To avoid the risk of infecting his family, he rented his own small apartment on a narrow lane that today is known as Dashiell Hammett Street. In the spring of 1927, Jose moved with the children 20 miles north to San Anselmo in Marin Country, and the couple lived together sporadically over the next two years. In truth, their marriage was all but over.

The disability payments were not enough to support two residences and a family of four, so Hammett took on as much writing as he could handle. He became the crime-fiction critic for the Saturday Review of Literature, publishing twenty-four columns between March 1927 and October 1929. Three short poems were accepted—two by The Stratford Magazine and one by Bookman. He wrote a series of five articles on the advertising business for Western Advertising. And, of supreme importance both to Hammett and to American literature, Joseph T. Shaw became editor and part-owner of Black Mask and encouraged the magazine’s star author to come back to the fold. An announcement in the January 1927 issue informed readers that “Dashiell Hammett has called back the Continental detective from his long retirement and is setting him to work anew.” In reality, though, the Continental Op’s “long retirement” had not even lasted a full year.

By the way: be sure to peruse this great Dashiell Hammett Website...

Hammett’s return to the magazine in 1927 began with two linked stories, “The Big Knock-Over” and “$106,000 Blood Money.” (The longest works by Hammett to date, they were published together as a book in 1943 and deceptively marketed as a “new novel.”) At the beginning of June, he wrote to Jose:

Got home tonight to find a stack of letters from the Black Mask: one from Shaw telling me how good I am, one from Cody telling me the same thing with further trimmings, and one from [Erle Stanley] Gardner telling me the last dingus he read of mine was not only the best ever printed in the Black Mask, but the best he had ever read anywhere, and so on and so on and so on.

Overwhelmed by this applesauce I’m wiring them to shoot me some dough and I'll do them some more of the shots-in-the-dark.

“The last dingus” was “The Main Death,” which would be the last short story he published in Black Mask for a while. Instead, Hammett would fill the pages of the magazine for the next two years with the serialization of his first two novels: Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. The two years after that, he would send to Shaw three short stories and two more novels (The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key) before ending his association with the magazine for good.

On its surface, “The Main Death” seems to be a straightforward puzzle mystery: an abundance of seemingly contradictory clues perplex the cops and detectives (and the reader), the Continental Op hunts down evidence that resolves the paradoxes, and he then reveals who committed the crime—or more accurately, in this case, crimes. What distinguishes this story, as Hammett’s biographer Richard Layman points out, is that “the Op’s personal sense of right and wrong is the only guide he follows.”

In order to determine who killed Main, however, the Op finds it necessary to dive into the marital affairs of his detestable client, and he decides to solve the case in a manner that avoids satisfying Gungen’s ulterior motive—even if it means that everyone involved might get away with their crimes.

Notes: A cacoethes carpendi, in the context used by the Op, is an uncontrollable mania for enjoyment or consumption. Highgrading is the theft of ore or dealing in stolen ore.

A pivotal scene takes place in the Mars Hotel on 4th and Howard streets, two blocks from the stretch of Market Street where Hammett worked as a detective and an ad manager. The Mars would later become a place where Jack Kerouac crashed when in San Francisco; his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz resides at the “skid row hotel” at the opening of Big Sur. The building was immortalized in a painting by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse for the cover of The Grateful Dead’s 1974 studio album, From the Mars Hotel. All the structures on the block were demolished in the late 1970s to make way for the Moscone Convention Center.

This was one of those stories I had to read through several times in order to catch the clues and follow the threads of the plot.

A few things to notice:

Point of view is especially interesting in this story. Who is telling the story, and how does this affect your reading of it?

Characters: Find details that help you imagine each character. In particular, how does Hammett describe the central character of Mr. Gungen (his client)—and how does that help us hate this little man?

Along these lines:  who are good guys?  Who are bad guys?  And how do you know?

Plot:  seems simple—find the cause of “The Main Death”. But how does Hammett complicate this crime?  What are some of the subplots that weave in and out of the story?

Theme: Several come to mind, ranging from revenge to greed to _____? What would you add?

Ultimately, it’s hard to miss that the Ops Guy plays god in this story, both in his method of inquiry and how he manipulates each character in order restore “justice.” 

How is justice served in this case?  And what is a hardboiled detectives code of ethics?

Try to answer these questions as you read and analyze our story!

Dashiell Hammett website. (2024). https://www.mikehumbert.com/Dashiell_Hammett_15_Dashiell_Hammett_Place.html

The Main Death. (2023). Retrieved from https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2023/05/the-main-death.html

The Maltese Falcon. (2024). Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/nea-big-read/maltese-falcon