The BBC gets it wrong on hard-boiled fiction

(At right, poster for a movie based on Ernest Hemingway's effort in a genre previously pioneered by Carroll John Daly and perfected by Dashiell Hammett.)

In a recent BBC program about Raymond Chandler, John Sutherland asserts that Ernest Hemingway invented the hard-boiled story with "The Killers." He makes this assertion even though Dashiell Hammett had already published more than twenty Continental Op stories when "The Killers" appeared in 1927 (Not 1928, as Sutherland says. He gets the year wrong, too.)

Hammett had already written and published "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The House in Turk Street," "The Golden Horseshoe," "The Whosis Kid," "The Gutting of Couffignal" and "The Big Knockover" by the time Ernest Hemingway "invented" the hard-boiled story, in other words.

Why do you think the BBC got it wrong? Is John Sutherland so insecure or such a snob that he has to invent a noble lineage for hard-boiled writing to justify his own affinity for it? Or is the man who shoots Princess Zafrina in the leg at the end of "The Gutting of Couffignal" really soft-boiled in some essential way that Hemingway's characters were not?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2010: The last Hammett post

You know what the first picture is. It's on Burritt Street, a half-block from my post- #Bcon2010 hotel.

Scene Two is 580 McAllister Street, a key location in "The Whosis Kid," a fine tale in its own right and a prototype for The Maltese Falcon:

"My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness*. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood street. ...

"The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.

"A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall** when I took my plant there.

"It curved around my coupé, slid with chainless recklessness into the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.

"A curtain whipped loose in the rain. ..."

* — Van Ness Avenue is just out of the picture to the right. Redwood runs parallel to McAllister behind number 580, home of jewel thief Inés Almad, the mastermind of the heist that triggers the action in "The Whosis Kid." The view here shows the approximate location of the shootout to which Hammett is building up in the passage quoted above.

** — San Francisco City Hall was behind me and off to the right as I took this picture, and I presume it's still there. Much of Hammett is an accurate topographical guide to the city.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

"He ... talked liked a Scotchman's telegram"

Raymond Chandler was known for his extravagant descriptions of persons, but Dashiell Hammett was no slouch either. Here's the Continental Op on Dick Foley in "The Big Knockover":

"He was a swarthy little Canadian who stood nearly five feet in his high-heeled shoes, weighed a hundred pounds minus, talked like a Scotchman's telegram, and could have shadowed a drop of salt water from Golden Gate to Hongkong without ever losing sight of it."

The week's other good bit comes from Lisa Brackmann's debut, Rock Paper Tiger. I neglected to note the page where it occurs, so I can't quote it exactly, but it has the protagonist walking into a Starbucks in China, where "the latest Brazilian retro was playing."

That captures nicely the comfortable/creepy feeling of Starbucks (Well, comfortable as long as the baristas don't mispronounce doppio macchiato too badly), where the music is almost always good and is never a surprise. Starbucks is the Holiday Inn of coffee, though with Hilton prices. Or is it more like an upscale McDonald's?

What are your favorite bits of literary description?

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(Lisa Brackmann will be a member of my "Flags of Terror" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m. Dashiell Hammett will be at Bouchercon in spirit, as convention attendees seek out the Continental Op's and Sam Spade's favorite haunts.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Just a bit more Hammett, including the Continental Opera

I left the house without the non-American book I was going to write about, so I'll continue my Hammett holiday a bit longer.

1) Even the earliest Continental Op stories have that twist ending that casts into question all that has gone before, or comes as a comic anti-climax, or seems almost to be the beginning of a new story before the old one has ended.

2) The first great Op story was probably "Zigzags of Treachery" — and here I welcome comment from readers more up on their Hammett than I. I don't know how critical consensus ranks the Op stories. "The Golden Horseshoe" is the best of this batch I've read in recent days.

3) Hammett's experience as a private detective is often cited as contributing to the authenticity of his writing. It does this in the Op's convincing asides about detective work (good shadowing, the Op tells us, perhaps ironically, is not as hard as one would think), but also in observations like this:

"Little things, those, but a private detective on the witness stand—unless he is absolutely sure of every detail—has an unpleasant and ineffectual time of it."

4) Hammett's novel Red Harvest was made into an opera, which elicited the observation from the Thrilling Detective Web Site's Kevin Burton Smith that "I guess it won't be over until the Fat Man sings."

Go here for a compact but thorough discussion of Hammett's short fiction, including a typology of his plots.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Vintage crime, vintage cars

Yesterday I wrote about Dashiell Hammett. Today some cars from Hammett's time showed up at the DooWop Car Show & Street Festival in my neighborhood, though I heard no doo-wop, just three guys playing Credence Clearwater Revival and Stealers Wheel on acoustic guitar, drum machine and electric keyboard.

Nick and Nora Charles could have waved out of that first car's window to well-wishers in mid-town Manhattan. The Continental Op would have felt at home leaning out the same window firing shots, and Sam Spade might have rifled the interior for registration papers.

(John Huston's 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon has made such a strong impression that some people may forget Hammett wrote almost all his fiction in the 1920s and early '30s. The Ford Model A that I saw today and that you see at the top of this post rolled off the assembly line in 1929, the same year The Maltese Falcon began appearing in serial form in Black Mask.)

This little number at left takes us into late Raymond Chandler territory, and which fictional detective would have driven the humongous licorice-and-strawberry ice cream sundae on wheels that brings this post to a close? Travis McGee? James Garner's Philip Marlowe, perhaps?

Which cars (or other modes of transport) do you associate most closely with a favorite fictional detective, story or movie?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The week's best bit

"Begg was a freckled heavyweight, as friendly as a Saint Bernard puppy, but less intelligent. Lanky detective sergeant Hacken, not so playful, carried the team's brains behind his worried hatchet face.

"`In a hurry?' I inquired.

"`Always in a hurry when we're quitting for the day,' Begg said, his freckles climbing up his face to make room for his grin.

"`What do you want?' Hacken asked."

— Dashiell Hammett, "The Main Death"

I could write lots about that selection, but I'll let you do my work for me. Why do you think the passage works?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010