Dashiell Hammett, father to John le Carré?

Did Donald Westlake spend much time in Texas, in particular browsing the Dashiell Hammett archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin? (If the good folks at The Violent World of Parker know the answer, feel free to weigh in.)

I ask because a passage from "The Secret Emperor," a fragment included with e-book editions of the new Hunter and Other Stories by Hammett, contains a scene that reads just like a favorite bit from The Score, one of my favorite of the Parker novels — and Hammett wrote his fragment in 1925. Westlake has said of his own precursors that "For early influences we have to start, and almost end, with Hammett." Even if he never read "The Secret Emperor," I like to think Westlake would smile at the thought that he captured a bit of its style.

The Hunter and Other Stories contains twenty stories uncollected or unpublished during Hammett's lifetime, plus a tantalizing fragment of an uncompleted Sam Spade story. E-book editions include three additional pieces of what Hammett hoped would turn into political novels, according to Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and, with Hammett scholar Richard Layman, a co-editor of the new volume.  Rivett invokes The Maltese Falcon in discussing "The Secret Emperor," but I'm reminded of The Glass Key.

Like that novel, which appeared in 1931, "The Secret Emperor" feels like it could have been written decades later, even today.  Had he completed "The Secret Emperor," and if the result were as good as the opening chapters included here, it's entirely possible that, as well as a father of hard-boiled crime writing, Hammett would be considered an ancestor of modern political thrillers, including those of alienation and paranoia. As well as the progenitor of Raymond Chandler, Hammett might thus be regarded as a forerunner to John le Carré, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Alan Glynn, and all the 1970s paranoia thriller movies Glynn likes so much.

Yep, the man was that good.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The man who came in from reading Fred Vargas

The Oz Mystery Readers group is discussing John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a classic espionage novel and an occasion for some lessons in history.

You know the history I mean, don't you? The history of the fictional spy, which meant, at that time, James Bond. Le Carré's protagonist, Alec Leamas, is an anti-Bond. His life, according to the article to which I link above, "is far from the glamour of James Bond's world: he has a love affair with a lonely, unpaid librarian, not with a fashion model."

Then there's that other history, that of the Cold War, of us vs. them, with its harsh symbol of division, the Berlin Wall. And us vs. them, Le Carré tells us, is decidedly not good vs. evil. It was probably easy to call the book a classic back in 1963, and the dust jacket of my handsome old hardback edition trots out a lineup of superstar blurbsters: Daphne du Maurier, Alec Waugh, J.B. Priestley and Graham Greene, the last of whom called the book "the best spy story I have ever read."

But that was then; this is now. How does the book's laying bare of the amorality of espionage hold up today? Pretty well, even when the prose seems tendentious by current standards:

"Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression on quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the ends and the means were identical."

I'll report back later on a bit of plot manipulation that just might be shocking or even offensive, depending on the next thirty or so pages. In the meantime, sit back and reflect on the vanished days of the rivalry between Russia and the West, that golden era of international spying.

Say, who was that Alexander Litvinenko guy, anyway?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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