A wandering granddaughter job: My Bouchercon Hammett panel

Here's a post from December 2013 that is more relevant today than ever. I'll be discussing Dashiell Hammett with Julie M. Rivett and Richard Layman at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., next month in a session called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett."  The Bouchercon schedule calls it a special event, and I agree. Hammett was the best ever, and Julie and Rick know more about him than just about anyone else. See you there; the fun starts at 8:30 a.m., Saturday, Oct. 10.

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Julie M. Rivett, co-editor of The Hunter and Other Stories, the new volume of previously uncollected and unpublished work by Dashiell Hammett, drove up from Orange County to chat with Detectives Beyond Borders about the book, Hammett, the movie interpretations of his work, his critical reception at home and abroad, and other subjects—including some of her favorites among current crime writers.

Rivett is not just a Hammett scholar and researcher, she's also the daughter of Hammett's daughter Jo (she met her grandfather once, when she was 3 years old) and, she says, "What I want to come from this is that people will read [Hammett's work] as literature. I want to make him a rounder character."  Your humble blogkeeper says the book, co-edited with the noted Hammett biographer and scholar Richard Layman, will do just that, especially in the form of "The Secret Emperor."

Rivett says the combination of her personal contacts and Layman's professional ones strengthens their partnership. (They also worked together on Return of the Thin Man, which brought together two previously unpublished stories about Nick  and Nora Charles.) And, asked about the portrayals of Hammett as a communist, a drunk, or a bad family man, Rivett rebuts some of the stories, concedes others, and says: "It's always a difficult thing for me when people co-opt my actual grandfather."

Her list of favorite contemporary crime writers includes Declan Hughes, Dennis Lehane, Michael Koryta, and George Pelecanos, and if I were a crime writer favored by a descendant and scholar of the greatest of all crime writers, my sinews would come unstrung and my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth for a few minutes before I was able to resume writing.

Coming soon: Rivett on Hammett's reception in France and Italy, and the possibility of more Hammett material to come.

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Rivett and I met for tea and a wine chaser at the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, close to stars on the Walk of Fame that honor several figures prominently connected with Hammett's life, career, and interests. Mary Astor's, Myrna Loy's, and Fatty Arbuckle's stars are within a block and a half of the restaurant, and later I found Peter Lorre's and also the one that honors some guy named Bogart. Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet were perfect for their roles in John Huston's celebrated film version of The Maltese Falcon, Rivett said, and Bogart, she added, while not physically perfect for the role, did marvelous things with the character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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

Hammett, Hamilton, and Jefferson

1) The United States might be a better country if everyone in it were forced to declare himself either a Jeffersonian or a Hamiltonian, and then read the life and works of the man he or she did not declare for.

2) The Hunter and Other Stories, the new collection of previously unpublished and uncollected work by Dashiell Hammett, highlights at least two aspects of Hammett's crime writing (though not all its selections are crime): the hard-boiled side, and the side that marvels at the inexplicable things that some men do (or, to cite two examples of the first tendency and one of the second, The Glass Key, the end of "The Gutting of Couffignal," the "Flitcraft Parable" from The Maltese Falcon.) Readers wary of rediscovered and other "lost" material can rest assured that these stories are nothing like Metterling's laundry lists.

Each of the book's four sections ("Crime," "Men," "Men and Women," and "Screen Stories") includes an introduction of its own, which means the reader gets a good, well-rounded picture of what Hammett was up to as a writer.  The book also includes a fragment from a Sam Spade story, and the e-book version includes additional fragments.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013