Dashiell Hammett: Secret Viking?

On this, the fifty-third anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's death, I'll resurrect a post about my favorite reference to Hammett in a work by another writer. Did the Icelandic sagas really influence Hammett?  I have never read such a suggestion anywhere else, but I call this an apt and imaginative tribute to a great author and to a great body of writing from the Middle Ages.

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. Oh, boy, was this an exciting discovery. A bit less than halfway into Josef Škvorecký's Two Murders in My Double Life, I found this exchange between the narrator/protagonist and a student at the Toronto college where he teaches:

"I asked his permission and sat down beside him. Then I looked into his book and was able to read the page heading: NORDIC SAGAS. ... Beside Freddie, on the bench, I saw a paperback with a loudly coloured jacket: Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op. ...

"`Any connection?'

"`I think there is,' said Freddie with some enthusiasm. `I think that the Old Nordic sagas were the source for Dashiell Hammett's style, and his inspiration in general.'

"`Really? Usually it's assumed that he was influenced by the harsh realities of American big cities, and by Hemingway.'

"`I'm not saying he wasn't,' said Freddie, as if he were already defending his M.A. thesis. But his main inspiration came from the Nordic sagas.' ... 

"I spent the next half hour on that bench, and Freddie, quoting from Song of Eric the Red and from the Hammett stories featuring a detective called Continental Op, demonstrated how identical were the respective poker-faced killers of those works, and how the authors presented their bloody brutalities with equal lack of comment or show of emotion."

Why do I enjoy that so much? Because Arnaldur Indriðason also cited the sagas as an influence on his own laconic prose style, and because I've posted about crime-fiction-like features in Njal's Saga, commonly considered the greatest of the genre. It seems that Škvorecký was on to something.

(Link to free online versions of some of the sagas here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009, 2014

No-nonsense openings then and now

My Nordic kinsman Thjostolf the Thinker is no great shakes as a farmer and too given to moody self-analysis to be a great warrior in the business world. An executive must feign passion where none exists, what most people call lying, and Thjostolf couldn't do it (though when a colleague, in the course of lighthearted office persiflage, called Thjostolf weak rather than morally upright, Thjostolf cleft him in twain, from collarbone to hip, with his great sword.)

One day Thjostolf suggested that similarities existed between the Icelandic sagas and the pulp and paperback-original crime fiction I sometimes read.

"Behold," he said, indicating the opening of Egil's Saga:

"There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless."

and "Dig this," pulling out his tattered reprint of Charles Runyon's The Anatomy of Violence:

"Each evening a twilight wind blows through Cutright City."

"And this," voice hushed, as he read from a text we both regard with near-scriptural reverence:

"Kells walked north on Spring.” * 

Thjostolf was right. In each case the author plunges right into the story, wasting no words. Arnaldur Indriðason, the best of the current Nordic crime writers, claims inspiration from the Icelandic sagas, though I edged toward the door as I reminded Thjostolf that Arnaldur attributed their concision to economic necessity rather than love of laconic prose. Ruminations, false starts, lengthy description, useless adverbs, and seventy pages of the hero dipping his madeleine in a cup of tea would have made a prodigious waste of calfskin, the expensive material on which the Icelanders set down their stories.

But Thjostolf just nodded and reminded me, in turn, that Josef Škvorecký once had a character suggest the Nordic sagas had inspired Dashiell Hammett. Škvorecký may have been taking the piss, but Hammett, the sagas, and punchy openings of the kind offered above will appeal to readers who like their stories brisk, their prose clean, and their humor deadpan.

Speaking of clean prose that wastes no words, I reminded Thjostolf, I have to get back to work on the copy desk. Thjostolf, who hates a bad sentence as much as I do, tightened his hand on the grip of his sword but said nothing. Maybe he'll make an executive after all.

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* Fast One, by Paul Cain

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

One more word about Two Murders ...

Josef Škvorecký's novel Two Murders in My Double Life, a subject of discussion here in recent days, would make interesting fodder for a debate about crime fiction and mainstream or "serious" fiction.

The double life of the title refers to the narrator's current life as a professor at a Canadian university and his past as writer sucked into a labyrinth of betrayal and squalor in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia.

"North America leads, by a wide margin, in the worldwide statistics of murder," Škvorecký writes in a short introduction, "but North Americans have never experienced total crime. In Europe and Asia, millions of people fell victim to it, many millions in large countries, but it is not only the body that is murdered by this mega-assassin, it is the soul: the character of the community called a nation. However, one can hardly write a murder mystery about the assassination of souls. That's why the Edenvale [College] story has all the paraphernalia of the guilty vicarage, but the Prague sequence of events lacks them entirely. It characters, as the narrator says, are not in a detective story written for the entertainment of the reader, but in a very serious novel."

Lest a reader be tempted to think that a put-down of the detective story, consider that Škvorecký devoted an entire book of fiction, Sins for Father Knox, to affectionate engagement with detective stories, absurdity and all.

So, while perhaps few crime writers engage themselves with matters as serious as Škvorecký's, the man is willing to have fun, too, and I get the feeling that he regards this as a task of high importance.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More proto-detectives!!!

Yesterday's post about Nordic sagas and Dashiell Hammett quoted from pages 77 and 78 of Josef Škvorecký's Two Murders in My Double Life.

I've just read the following on page 103, and I leapt like Archimedes from the bathtub, though I wrapped a towel around my waist and dried myself before shouting, "Eureka!":

"I, too, received an honorary degree. For my detective stories, I guess. Most professors suffer from the secret vice of reading such stuff. even if in their courses they lecture on Elizabethan poetry and Shakespeare. But the bard, too, in a sense, wrote crime stories. Dickens, then? Well, Boz was the author of several thrillers. Mark Twain? What about Pudd'nhead Wilson, not to mention Tom Sawyer, Detective? Faulkner? Who concocted Knight's Gambit and Intruder in the Dust? For a while it seemed to me that everybody in English and American literature wrote crime fiction, except perhaps Victorian female novelists."

Longtime Detectives Beyond Bordersniks may remember my posts about Shakespeare and other proto-detectives. My own list goes back beyond Nordic sagas all the way to Gilgamesh. But then, perhaps Škvorecký's does, too. I still have about fifty pages left in the book.

(Click here and here for more about Škvorecký. I recommend his stories about Lieutenant Boruvka, and I expect to have more to say about his deeply human and humane views on the lingering effects of life under a totalitarian regime. And now, back to the bath.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009