DBB meets Dolores Hitchens

I first read Dolores Hitchens while preparing for a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, the first of my Beyond Chandler and Hammett sessions focusing on lesser-known crime writers from the middle of the twentieth century. Hitchens will be among the subject of this year's version of the panel at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans next month, and this pre-Long Breach post captures nicely why I like these panels so much: I get to read, experience, and come to grips with authors new to me.

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A friend sent along Dolores Hitchens' 1955 novel Sleep With Strangers because of its setting in Long Beach, site of Bouchercon 2014. Indeed, the book is even more evocative of its setting than is that other great Long Beach crime novel, Paul Cain's Fast One.

Hitchens is new to me, so naturally I start out thinking of her in terms of other crime writers her work evokes, and those writers are two of the best.  Hitchens' compassion for characters who lead marginal existences reminds me of David Goodis, particularly The Street on the Corner [At this late date, I don't remember if I meant The Blonde on the Street Corner or The Street of No Return. The latter, I suspect.] and Cassidy's Girl, and her dissection of family life in California brings to mind The Big Sleep. (Ed Gorman's discussion of Sleeps With Strangers invokes Ross Macdonald. I've never warmed to Macdonald, but I suspect that what Gorman sees as Macdonaldish is what I see as Chandlerlike. In any case, that's another illustrious name associated with Hitchens.)

The novel's opening is an atmospheric, moody, tension-filled inversion of the usual scene in which a P.I. meets a client, and it hooked me on Hitchens right away. (The client is named Kay Wanderley.  "Wonderly," of course, is the name Brigid O'Shaughnessy uses when she first calls on Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Homage? Coincidence? Either way, it's more good fictional company for Dolores Hitchens.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014, 2016

Happy birthday, Hammett: Three characters who stay true to their natures

On the occasion of Dashiell Hammett's 122nd birthday, I'll bring back this post a few years ago that takes a common observation about Sam Spade and the Continental Op and applies it to two of The Maltese Falcon's major supporting characters, as well. May this stimulate you to read one of Hammett's great novels or short stories. Happy birthday, Sam.

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 Trent Reynolds of the fine Violent World of Parker site mixed criticism and high compliment last month when he wrote of my Dashiell Hammett memorial post that "The Maltese Falcon is the greatest crime novel ever written. Not mentioned in this otherwise excellent post on Hammett."

I'd just read The Glass Key for the first time, so that book dominated my thinking about Hammett. And testimonials from crime writers, including Reynolds' own Donald Westlake, that I included in the post indeed did not mention Hammett's most famous work.

But I'd like to reassure Trent and everyone else that I love The Maltese Falcon, that it induces just as chilling an effect in the reader as does The Glass Key, and that I regard it as at least as great a book. (I'd also suggest that The Maltese Falcon's greatness is so universally acknowledged that the novel may simply be taken for granted in discussions of the best crime novel ever.)

And I'd like to add a thought to the discussion based on my recent rereading of the novel (I finished it last night.)

It's a commonplace that a Hammett hero is defined by his job, and that the job is more than just a way to bring in money. Here's Joe Gores, for example, in Dashiell Hammett Lost Stories:

"Hammett saw the private detective as a manhunter. ... The Hammett hero is on the side of the law but not particularly law-abiding. He has a job to do."

When it came to Sam Spade or the Continental Op, in other words, Hammett made his plan, and he stuck to it.

I realized last night that he did just the same with Brigid O'Shaugnessy and Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. Brigid is a liar from the beginning, her rigid cleaving to her nature reinforced by Spade's early, pointed, and repeated assessments: "You're good." "You're very good." "You're a liar." "That is a lie." She adheres as rigidly to the degenerate moral code that Hammett has drawn up for her as Spade adheres to his more upright one.

Gutman, his composure only fleetingly shattered when he finds the falcon is a fake, is positively joyous when he realizes this means he can resume his globe-hopping quest for the real falcon. He is as true to his nature as Brigid O'Shaugnessy and Spade are to theirs. (Of course, his global quest extends no further than a few blocks from Spade's apartment on Post Street; he gets blown to hell and gone by Wilmer Cook a few pages later.)

But consistency of character, that sense that there is no escaping from one's nature, is part of what makes the book so gripping.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Maltese Falcon and me

Statue of the God Horus
as a Falcon, Egypt,
Ptolemaic period
(335-30 BC), Art
Institute of Chicago

In honor of TMC's nationwide rerelease of The Maltese Falcon in theaters, here's a short-short I wrote five years ago that invokes a line from the movie, though the line does not occur in Dashiell Hammett's novel. 

The Philadelphia showing to which I had bought a ticket was cancelled because, said the manager of the Cinemark Penn 6 theater, of legal obligations to show the first-run movies on the theater's regular schedule. Those movies, should you be interested, included Zoolander 2 and Kung Fu Panda 3.

Down the Shore

by Peter Rozovsky

Sally took the Lavender Room and left the Leather ‘n’ Spice Suite for me. I thanked her for that much; a guy’s got a reputation to keep.

Sally was all right. Sure, she’d cooed over the scented candles and chintz-covered throw pillows. But she drew the line at the teddy bears – five on the parlor settee, seven on a second-floor notions table, and one that scared the hell out of her when it fell on her head from the top of an ivory-inlaid cabinet in the breakfast nook.

That’s why I suspected her when I found a bear with its guts ripped out the next morning. She just looked at me funny as we headed out for an iced coffee before hitting the beach.

*

Two more teddy bears disappeared that evening, though one turned up under the porch swing soaking in a puddle of spilled mint tea. The glass pitcher that had held the tea lay on its side, next to a knocked-over white rattan table.

Diane shook her head as she mopped up the mess, muttering that some guests lack the simple good manners to come forward when they have an accident. But no one can stay grumpy for long and still run a successful bed and breakfast. “I’m no escapee or anything,” she said, laughing. She slapped the puddle with her mop. “I won’t rip their heads off.”

*

“Let me do your neck,” Sally said.

*

I winced as we sat in the Mexican coffee shop reading our newspapers the next morning. “Did you see— Damn!” I threw the paper down and rubbed my left forearm hard. “Itching. We stayed out too long yesterday. Pass the Gold Bond, will you?”

A skinny guy with a faded green baseball cap and a laughing gull tattooed on his left temple stared at the little white clouds as I slapped the powder over my arms.

*

I recognized the tattoo when I saw it again late that night. Its owner lay face down on the bed and breakfast’s porch, his hands cuffed behind him and a police sergeant kneeling none too gently on his back.

“It was the bears,” the sergeant’s boss said. “This guy’s been a small-time heister for years. He heard a load of heroin was coming down the Shore in one of them teddies, and somehow he got it into his head that this was the town.” He nudged the perp thoughtfully in the ribs with his boot. “It gets pretty shitty for a guy like him in the winters here, and this was his chance to get away. I don’t know what we can charge him with; B&E and cruelty to animals, maybe.” He bent down and hauled the skinny perp up by the arm pits. “Come on, Grizzly Adams. We don’t have much of a downtown, but we’re taking you there.”

*

If the dope was in Cape Friendly, the skinny guy never found it. Maybe he’d be no worse off than he was before. But maybe whoever had paid for the heroin would make an example of him. Either way, I didn’t envy the skinny guy with the laughing-gull tattoo.

They’d taken him away when Sally came down the stairs. Her mouth made a silent O. “What happened? What is all—” She waved her arm out over the guts of a dozen toy bears.

"It’s nothing, baby, just the stuffing that dreams are made of. Now, let’s go to bed. Your suite or mine?”

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015: Nathan Ward on how Hammett became Hammett

Nathan Ward's book The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett proposes that Hammett's experience as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency was a formative influence on his writing.

Ward is not the first Hammett scholar/researcher to make the connection; Richard Layman titled his 1981 Hammett biography Shadow Man. Ward, too, notes Hammett's writing about being a good shadow man — that is, being good at tailing someone without himself being detected.  One key, Hammett wrote, is to note the quarry's physical attitude. The way a person moves or wears clothes can be vastly more important in identifying one's quarry than can his or her face.

Commentary on Hammett's work as a detective generally suggests that the experience lent his stories verisimilitude, that he could write more convincingly about fictional detectives because he had been a real one.  Ward is the first Hammett scholar I can remember who suggests that the most valuable lesson Hammett learned was concision. He and other Pinkertons had to be brief and no-nonsense in their reports for the agency, a contention supported by Ward's research in Pinkerton archives, and this, Ward says, helped form Hammett as a writer.

Good prose style has never been valued less than it is now, and it does not figure prominently in discussions of authors. If you have even a passing familiarity with themes in Hammett biography and criticism, you'll know that scholars have focused on his politics, his love life, and his drinking. Ward's book is not, as reviewers and others have maintained, a biography. (Layman, on our Hammett panel at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, recognized this.) Rather, it is something rarer: A book about a writer that concentrates on writing. And that's why it's a Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015.

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Fresh off reading Ward's book, I picked up The Maltese Falcon again, to find Hammett turning his detective's eye on Sam Spade.:

"The steep rounded slope of his shoulders made his body seem almost conical—no broader than it was thick—and kept his freshly pressed grey coat from fitting very well."

You'd know that man if you saw him again* and, having shown than he can do it, Hammett puts description to brilliant thematic use right from the start. But that's a subject for a future post.

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* Hammett's Spade is blond and "quite six feet tall." He looks, that is, about as far from Humphrey Bogart as it is possible for a human being to look.
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Dana King's Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Dana King, is a tribute to The Maltese Falcon through and through, from its title, to one of its plot strands, to explicit references to Hammett's novel and the Bogart-Astor movie version.

That's pretty high-concept, or at least it would be had King not made a compelling, even touching story out of it.  King obviously loves The Maltese Falcon (Raymond Chandler, too), mid-century hard-boiled stories, their moral urgency, and their cultural legacy, and there is nothing jokey or campy about the tributes. He doesn't hammer home the Falconisms, either, instead just bringing them in when they advance the story.

And the tributes themselves are delightful, and delightfully clever, going beyond obvious plot parallels, famous lines, and explicit mentions and extending to appropriation of speech patterns, in some cases. I'll refrain from giving examples, so you can have the pleasure of discovering them yourself.

It's a kind of authorial magic that The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of works as a tribute and as a story, and that neither aspect interferes in the least with the other.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Which books do you keep going back to, and why?

Statue of the God Horus
as a Falcon, Egypt,
Ptolemaic period
(335-30 BC), Art
Institute of Chicago

My re-reading of The Maltese Falcon this week sparked a Facebook post that enlarged my TBR list and may have introduced a reader to the delights of Bill James.

I asked readers which books they had read the greatest number of times, and why they keep reading it. Now I'll ask you: Which books have you read most often? And why?

***

P.S. Among the passages I noted during this reading of The Maltese Falcon was Sam Spade relating the black bird's history to Effie Perrine

"as he had heard it from Gutman, from Charles V's grant to the Hospitallers up to--but no further than--the enameled birds's arrival in Paris at the time of the Carlist influx."

How many crime writers today would feel confident enough to use influx in a novel, much less of the Carlist variety? Thing is, Hammett provides the context that works the reference smoothly into the story, illuminating the falcon's origins for even the reader unfamiliar with Spanish imperial history. He was not, in other words, afraid to show bit of learning.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Gunsel has nothing to do with guns: When crime writers become word makers

Gunsel has nothing to do with guns, or at least it didn't until the mistake became so widespread that the word's meaning changed — and a crime writer is responsible.

The word means catamite, a young man kept by a pederast. (It comes from the Yiddish word for gosling.) The story goes that Dashiell Hammett included it in The Maltese Falcon hoping that editor Joseph Shaw, fastidious about "vulgarisms," would be ignorant of its meaning and let it stay in. He did:

“Hammett laid a trap for Shaw. In his next story he included the term gooseberry lay. Shaw pounced on this and rejected it, though it wasn’t a rude term at all but tramps’ slang for stealing washing off clotheslines to sell. But Hammett also included gunsel in the story, which Shaw left in, thinking it meant `gunman.'”

Here's the passage from The Maltese Falcon:

“`Another thing,' Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: ‘Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.'”

Knowing the word's real meaning lends a chilling edge to Gutman's treatment of Wilmer.

***

I have also read that A White Arrest, title of Ken Bruen's first Brant and Roberts novel, acquired a meaning that Bruen invented in the book: an arrest that can reverse a police officer's bad luck and put his career back on track. And I think I've also read that Donald Westlake made up a term and used it so effectively that readers assumed it was established underworld slang.

Who else has done this? What other writers have fooled us into thinking that usages they made up were, in fact, established terms?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

This day in crime fiction history

The Maltese Falcon was published in book form eighty-one years ago today, which makes it the perfect gift for the crime-loving loved one in your life. (The novel had previously been serialized in Black Mask.)

Here's a trailer for John Huston's 1941 film version, the third, best-known, and best movie made of the novel.

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A first edition of The Maltese Falcon in near-fine condition might be a bit pricey for your beloved. If you don't have $136,000 (plus $7.25 for shipping), you might try the Library of America Hammett volumes instead (one containing his crime novels, the other short stories and other writings), or Hammett books from Vince Emery Productions that have guided me through Hammett's fiction and through the streets of his San Francisco.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Dashiell Hammett, existentialist

I've just found this capsule description of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938):

"The novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea."

Why Nausea? Why here? Because of this, from The Maltese Falcon, as published originally in Black Mask:

"The tappity-tap-tap and the thin bell and muffled whir of Effie Perine's typewriting came through the office door. Somewhere in a neighboring office a power-driven machine vibrated dully. On Spade's desk a limp cigarette smoldered in a brass tray filled with the remains of limp cigarettes. Ragged gray flakes of cigarette ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current."

And this, from Frederick Nebel's story "Doors in the Dark":

"He saw Halo Rand standing at the far side of the room. The room was dimly, discreetly lighted. A parchment shaded floor lamp stood back of the woman and built an amber glow about her amber hair."

I'd bet my beret and pipe that Sartre knew his Hammett, if not his Nebel. What else has French culture borrowed from American?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

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

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

Maltese Falcons for the birds

I blame The Thin Man. Why else would anyone have wanted to film The Maltese Falcon not just once but twice as a comedy?

The movies in question are The Maltese Falcon (1931) and Satan Met a Lady (1936). Watch either at your peril, especially if you know Dashiell Hammett's novel or the celebrated 1941 film version with Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, Mary Astor and Peter Lorre.

On second thought, the 1931 version is odd less for its considerable comic moments than for its casting of Ricardo Cortez (real name: Jacob Krantz), who played Sam Spade as an eyebrow-raising Latin lover. Weird all around, to the point where the occasional displays of emotion seem strange and intrusive.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009