Hard-Boiled Writing from a Private Eye: A Conversation with Steven Marcus

The Thin Man. In this crafted photograph, Dashiell Hammett appears to be
something of a poseur as he impersonates the character he created. (Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York)

A Conversation

with

Steven Marcus

Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1997

Dashiell Hammett's creations--Sam Spade, the Continental Op, the Thin Man--have

become the quintessential figures of American detective fiction. First appearing in the

1920s in Hammett's "pulp" fiction, these characters have appealed to generations of

readers and moviegoers. In this edited interview aired on Soundings, the National

Humanities Center's radio program that ran from 1980 through April 1997, Wayne

Pond talks with literary scholar Steven Marcus about his new edition of Hammett's

novels and stories, forthcoming from the Library of America.George Delacorte

Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, Marcus is author of a number of

books, including Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (1965), The Other Victorians

(1966), and Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984). One of the founders

of the National Humanities Center, he is a former Fellow and a current Trustee.

For ten years Dashiell Hammett was able to do what almost no other writer in the genre has ever done so well. He was able to really write, to construct a vision of a world in words, to know that the writing was about the real world and referred to it and was part of it; and at the same time he was able to be self-consciously aware that the whole thing was problematical and about itself and "only" writing as well. For ten years, in other words, he was a true creator of fiction.
--Steven Marcus

Steven Marcus at the National
Humanities Center
(Photo: Jean Anne Leuchtenburg)

POND: How did Dashiell Hammett get his start?

MARCUS: When Hammett began writing in the 1920s, he contributed his stories to what were then called pulp magazines. Printed on very cheap pulp paper--cheaper even than newsprint--these monthlies entertained unsophisticated readers with detective and adventure stories.

POND: I gather that these magazines did not earn much respect from the literary establishment?

MARCUS: Not at all in the beginning--they belonged to a semi-literary world. Yet one magazine in which Hammett published, Black Mask, became more and more popular as Hammett's career took off.

POND: Tell us a little bit about man himself.

MARCUS: He was born in 1894 to a poor family living in Baltimore, and at the age of fourteen, he left school to take on various odd jobs--one of them working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He ultimately landed a job at Pinkerton's, the famous American private-detective agency that was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was there that he began to get the experience invaluable to a future writer of detective stories. He was, in fact, the character that he was to invent: an operative, the figure who, in his fiction, worked for the Continental Agency--hence, the Continental Op.

POND: How did Hammett come to leave Pinkerton's for the life of a full-time writer?

MARCUS: Hammett first left the agency in 1918 to enlist in the army's Ambulance Corps. He served one year during the war and came down with influenza, then tuberculosis. After several hospital stays, he rejoined the agency in San Francisco, but even as he returned, he knew he was getting tired of being a Pinkerton. Then he found himself involved in the case of $200,000 in gold that had disappeared from an Australian ship that had docked in San Francisco. Pinkerton's assigned Hammett to sail back to Australia in hopes that he might find the missing gold, but in a final search before departure he discovered the loot in a smokestack. He had looked forward to the trip, and, frustrated by his success, he resigned.

POND: When did he start writing?

MARCUS: He actually wanted to write, I believe, from fairly early on. But it was not until 1922, the point at which he left the Pinkerton Agency, that he decided to really try. Separating himself not only from Pinkerton's, but also from his new family--he had a wife and one daughter then; a second daughter would be born later--he took a room in San Francisco and began writing, publishing small things here and there. He also had a part-time job turning out advertising copy for a jewelry store in San Francisco.

POND: When did he produce the works that we remember him for?

MARCUS: His writing career was relatively short, going from about 1923 into the early thirties. Although he continued to be active in journalism, in Hollywood, and on the radio, his really creative period was over by 1934.

POND: Would you explain the phrase, "hard-boiled school"? Does it relate to this period of Hammett's creativity?

MARCUS: Yes, it does. He is, indeed, the founder of the "hard-boiled school."

POND: Did he deliberately set out to move detective fiction in a new direction?

MARCUS: Not consciously, I think. But he was very aware of being a writer, of doing something new in breaking with the tradition of detective stories featuring such characters as Sherlock Holmes, continuing on with Raffles (the gentleman-crook detective), Chesterton's Father Brown, and Philo Vance, a creation of S. S. Van Dine, who was another gentleman detective writing at about the same time as Hammett.

POND: What about Poe? You mentioned that Hammett was born in Baltimore. Did he feel any connection with this earlier writer from that city who is credited with being the creator of detective fiction?
MARCUS: Actually, Hammett breaks with Poe as well, because the detective in Poe's works, like some of these others I have just mentioned, simply sits in his armchair and figures things out in his head. The Op never does that. He is a sleuth; that is to say, he shadows people, he asks questions, he looks up records, he brings together people who don't want to be together--in other words, he stirs things up.

POND: You have made the case in your work on Hammett that his "hard-boiled school" introduced moral ambiguity into detective fiction. What do you mean exactly?
MARCUS: The moral ambiguity that one finds in his stories has to do with the fact that the Op is himself very much involved in the same kind of activities that the people whom he is both working for and working against are involved in. On a formal level Hammett conveys this ambiguity through the narrative. When the Op comes into a situation, a number of people give him accounts of what happened. These accounts do not make a great deal of sense and may, in fact, contradict one another. The Op begins to set these stories against one another, to take them apart--to use a fashionable word, to "deconstruct" them. Then he starts substituting alternative stories--stories that he has made up, stories that he has figured out, stories that he thinks are plausible for the characters with whom he is dealing. Now, the interesting thing is that most of the time the stories that he substitutes don't make any more sense morally or rationally than the ones that the people who are either guilty of a crime or involved with a crime tell him. Through one means or another, he usually finds the crook, but it is not clear that the story which he has concocted is any more accurate--or, shall we say, any less fictional--than the stories put forward by the people whom he will subsequently turn over to the law for punishment.

POND: So I gather that "truth" is a very slippery term for the Thin Man, the Continental Op, and Sam Spade--that is to say, for Hammett?

MARCUS: You are very much on the point. What actually occurred is less important to these detectives than trying to bring to a satisfactory conclusion one or another version of the story.
POND: You are getting at the heart, then, of what any serious writer attempts to do. Hammett's fiction replicates what a writer goes through in presenting all the conflicting narratives that are part of real life.

MARCUS: I think that is true. For example, one of his novels, The Dain Curse, is entirely about conflicting fictions. The Op has one narrative, the chief villain has another, and they play against each other all through the novel. Behind this action, we are always conscious of Hammett himself creating this super-fiction with all of its conflicting versions.

POND: Tell me about The Maltese Falcon, a novel that is an emblem of what Dashiell Hammett stands for in the popular imagination. You argue that it is not only a detective story, it is also a mini-history of capitalism.

MARCUS: Well, first of all--I'll get to capitalism sooner or later--Sam Spade represents a very interesting invention of character. He is morally ambiguous himself--you can never figure out which side Spade is on. He is certainly not on the side of the cops in any simple way, because he is always fighting with them. He is not on the side of the crooks, although he is conniving with them and indeed falls in love with Brigid O'Shaughnessy, who is a lady crook. He is not on the side of his partner who gets murdered. And he is not on the side of his partner's wife whom he seduces and has an affair with but then throws over.

POND: Why are we fascinated by such a character, who is certainly not most people's idea of a hero?
MARCUS: Spade is not admirable, but he is very intriguing. He is not afraid to face the facts that the world is not a very nice place and that the work of a detective--or, as he calls himself, a manhunter--is very difficult and not particularly pleasant, although he likes doing what he does. So the answer to the question, "Whose side is he on?" seems to be: on his own side. But then, we might ask, what side is that? Is it the side of law and order? Not quite. Is it the side of the crooks? No, not quite. Is it the side of his enriching himself? Not really, because he doesn't get rich. And here is where we get into capitalism.
POND: How does the Maltese Falcon symbolize that enormous concept?

MARCUS: The Maltese Falcon has its origins in the Crusades. When the Knights of Malta, who were leaders of the Crusaders, invaded the Holy Land, they seized the original Maltese Falcon--a gold bird encrusted with gems. It was part of the plunder they brought back from the East, which is one of the ways that capitalism started. It turns out, however, that the Maltese Falcon that is stolen in the novel is, in fact, a fake, just a commodity that is moving around, not the valuable booty which helped capitalism get started. So the pursuit of the Maltese Falcon has to go on continually even after the novel is over.
POND: This, then, is an instance in fiction that forces us to ask, "What do we believe in? What is it that we truly value?"
MARCUS: I think that Spade answers that. And I think the Continental Op also answers that. What both of these characters value is their work and the code by which they behave. For example, the Op, unlike the police, is saved from corruption by the fact that the Continental Agency does not allow its operators to share in rewards for any crime that is solved. In The Maltese Falcon Spade turns in Brigid O'Shaughnessy because she has killed his partner, or has been involved in the killing. He says to her, "Listen. When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. . . . When one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around--bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere." Even if Spade did love her, it didn't matter, because it was more important to behave the way a detective was supposed to behave.
POND: The routine work, then, appears to be the supreme value.
MARCUS: The rules that have to be followed everyday are what saves one. However, something else impinges. The means that the Continental Op uses, and this is very close to "hard-boiled fiction," are themselves ambiguous. He has no compunctions about framing people, about lying, and--most important--about using violence.
POND: So we are talking about conflicting means and ends?
MARCUS: Exactly. Where "hard-boiled fiction" really represents a difference in what has gone before, where it comes together with what Ernest Hemingway was doing at the same time is this: In Hammett's stories there is a great deal of violence--a great deal of shooting, of hitting, of torturing. Indeed, his detectives get pleasure out of it. Once you see that, you realize that the means Hammett's characters use are corrupting, which adds another level of moral ambiguity--good ends can be corrupted by the means one uses. At the same time, one would have to be very naive to believe that the only way to accomplish good ends is to use good means.
POND: We read such fiction first and foremost for pleasure, I suppose, but you seem to be suggesting that it can be subversive.
MARCUS: What Hammett did was to take a fairly innocent form of fictional amusement and make it more complex, that is, closer to the actual world where means and ends exist in uneasy relation, an approach heretofore nonexistent in detective stories.
POND: Who are Dashiell Hammett's heirs?
MARCUS: Two of the most important are Elmore Leonard and Robert Parker. In particular, Leonard, because what Hammett introduced into detective fiction was the free use of the vernacular--with the exception of four-letter words. At the time he was writing, four-letter words were censored.
POND: You have pointed out that when John Huston made a movie of The Maltese Falcon, he basically lifted the dialogue wholesale. This would appear to make a compelling literary case for Hammett.
MARCUS: The literary case for Hammett is that he did something very much like what Hemingway was doing. He was able to get in touch with a certain kind of American speech and translate it into writing. That is a very big contribution, for it brought a new kind of style, a new kind of realism--sometimes a surrealistic realism--to the detective story, which before that had been a rather genteel form. Contributing to this realism are Hammett's many allusions to things that were happening at the time.
POND: In an essay on Hammett you talk about Prohibition, pointing out that America had committed itself to "a vast fiction." In a way, that goes to the writing of Dashiell Hammett.
MARCUS: The fiction was that by virtue of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it was illegal to produce, transport, or sell liquor. At the same time, it was not illegal to buy or consume liquor. So Americans were in effect being encouraged to support an illegal trade in liquor.
POND: And Hammett, the artist, was supremely aware of this and uses that backdrop.
MARCUS: He uses it all the time, as he uses the organized gangs of bootleggers and criminals.
POND: Why do you read Dashiell Hammett? Why is he among your favorite writers?

MARCUS: I read Hammett largely because of the marvelous living prose style that he achieved. The dialogue and some of the descriptive prose is as alive today as when it was written in the 1920s. That for me is proof of a real writer.

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Copyright © 1997 by the National Humanities Center.
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Last modified: November 1997
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POND:	How did Dashiell Hammett get his start?
MARCUS:	When Hammett began writing in the 1920s, he contributed his stories to what were then called pulp magazines. Printed on very cheap pulp paper--cheaper even than newsprint--these monthlies entertained unsophisticated readers with detective and adventure stories.
POND:	I gather that these magazines did not earn much respect from the literary establishment?
MARCUS:	Not at all in the beginning--they belonged to a semi-literary world. Yet one magazine in which Hammett published, Black Mask, became more and more popular as Hammett's career took off.
POND:	Tell us a little bit about man himself.
MARCUS:	He was born in 1894 to a poor family living in Baltimore, and at the age of fourteen, he left school to take on various odd jobs--one of them working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He ultimately landed a job at Pinkerton's, the famous American private-detective agency that was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was there that he began to get the experience invaluable to a future writer of detective stories. He was, in fact, the character that he was to invent: an operative, the figure who, in his fiction, worked for the Continental Agency--hence, the Continental Op.
POND:	How did Hammett come to leave Pinkerton's for the life of a full-time writer?
MARCUS:	Hammett first left the agency in 1918 to enlist in the army's Ambulance Corps. He served one year during the war and came down with influenza, then tuberculosis. After several hospital stays, he rejoined the agency in San Francisco, but even as he returned, he knew he was getting tired of being a Pinkerton. Then he found himself involved in the case of $200,000 in gold that had disappeared from an Australian ship that had docked in San Francisco. Pinkerton's assigned Hammett to sail back to Australia in hopes that he might find the missing gold, but in a final search before departure he discovered the loot in a smokestack. He had looked forward to the trip, and, frustrated by his success, he resigned.
POND:	When did he start writing?
MARCUS:	He actually wanted to write, I believe, from fairly early on. But it was not until 1922, the point at which he left the Pinkerton Agency, that he decided to really try. Separating himself not only from Pinkerton's, but also from his new family--he had a wife and one daughter then; a second daughter would be born later--he took a room in San Francisco and began writing, publishing small things here and there. He also had a part-time job turning out advertising copy for a jewelry store in San Francisco.
POND:	When did he produce the works that we remember him for?
MARCUS:	His writing career was relatively short, going from about 1923 into the early thirties. Although he continued to be active in journalism, in Hollywood, and on the radio, his really creative period was over by 1934.
POND:	Would you explain the phrase, "hard-boiled school"? Does it relate to this period of Hammett's creativity?
MARCUS:	Yes, it does. He is, indeed, the founder of the "hard-boiled school."
POND:	Did he deliberately set out to move detective fiction in a new direction?
MARCUS:	Not consciously, I think. But he was very aware of being a writer, of doing something new in breaking with the tradition of detective stories featuring such characters as Sherlock Holmes, continuing on with Raffles (the gentleman-crook detective), Chesterton's Father Brown, and Philo Vance, a creation of S. S. Van Dine, who was another gentleman detective writing at about the same time as Hammett.
POND:	What about Poe? You mentioned that Hammett was born in Baltimore. Did he feel any connection with this earlier writer from that city who is credited with being the creator of detective fiction?
MARCUS:	Actually, Hammett breaks with Poe as well, because the detective in Poe's works, like some of these others I have just mentioned, simply sits in his armchair and figures things out in his head. The Op never does that. He is a sleuth; that is to say, he shadows people, he asks questions, he looks up records, he brings together people who don't want to be together--in other words, he stirs things up.
POND:	You have made the case in your work on Hammett that his "hard-boiled school" introduced moral ambiguity into detective fiction. What do you mean exactly?
MARCUS:	The moral ambiguity that one finds in his stories has to do with the fact that the Op is himself very much involved in the same kind of activities that the people whom he is both working for and working against are involved in. On a formal level Hammett conveys this ambiguity through the narrative. When the Op comes into a situation, a number of people give him accounts of what happened. These accounts do not make a great deal of sense and may, in fact, contradict one another. The Op begins to set these stories against one another, to take them apart--to use a fashionable word, to "deconstruct" them. Then he starts substituting alternative stories--stories that he has made up, stories that he has figured out, stories that he thinks are plausible for the characters with whom he is dealing. Now, the interesting thing is that most of the time the stories that he substitutes don't make any more sense morally or rationally than the ones that the people who are either guilty of a crime or involved with a crime tell him. Through one means or another, he usually finds the crook, but it is not clear that the story which he has concocted is any more accurate--or, shall we say, any less fictional--than the stories put forward by the people whom he will subsequently turn over to the law for punishment.
POND:	So I gather that "truth" is a very slippery term for the Thin Man, the Continental Op, and Sam Spade--that is to say, for Hammett?
MARCUS:	You are very much on the point. What actually occurred is less important to these detectives than trying to bring to a satisfactory conclusion one or another version of the story.
POND:	You are getting at the heart, then, of what any serious writer attempts to do. Hammett's fiction replicates what a writer goes through in presenting all the conflicting narratives that are part of real life.
MARCUS:	I think that is true. For example, one of his novels, The Dain Curse, is entirely about conflicting fictions. The Op has one narrative, the chief villain has another, and they play against each other all through the novel. Behind this action, we are always conscious of Hammett himself creating this super-fiction with all of its conflicting versions.
POND:	Tell me about The Maltese Falcon, a novel that is an emblem of what Dashiell Hammett stands for in the popular imagination. You argue that it is not only a detective story, it is also a mini-history of capitalism.
MARCUS:	Well, first of all--I'll get to capitalism sooner or later--Sam Spade represents a very interesting invention of character. He is morally ambiguous himself--you can never figure out which side Spade is on. He is certainly not on the side of the cops in any simple way, because he is always fighting with them. He is not on the side of the crooks, although he is conniving with them and indeed falls in love with Brigid O'Shaughnessy, who is a lady crook. He is not on the side of his partner who gets murdered. And he is not on the side of his partner's wife whom he seduces and has an affair with but then throws over.
POND:	Why are we fascinated by such a character, who is certainly not most people's idea of a hero?
MARCUS:	Spade is not admirable, but he is very intriguing. He is not afraid to face the facts that the world is not a very nice place and that the work of a detective--or, as he calls himself, a manhunter--is very difficult and not particularly pleasant, although he likes doing what he does. So the answer to the question, "Whose side is he on?" seems to be: on his own side. But then, we might ask, what side is that? Is it the side of law and order? Not quite. Is it the side of the crooks? No, not quite. Is it the side of his enriching himself? Not really, because he doesn't get rich. And here is where we get into capitalism.
POND:	How does the Maltese Falcon symbolize that enormous concept?
MARCUS:	The Maltese Falcon has its origins in the Crusades. When the Knights of Malta, who were leaders of the Crusaders, invaded the Holy Land, they seized the original Maltese Falcon--a gold bird encrusted with gems. It was part of the plunder they brought back from the East, which is one of the ways that capitalism started. It turns out, however, that the Maltese Falcon that is stolen in the novel is, in fact, a fake, just a commodity that is moving around, not the valuable booty which helped capitalism get started. So the pursuit of the Maltese Falcon has to go on continually even after the novel is over.
POND:	This, then, is an instance in fiction that forces us to ask, "What do we believe in? What is it that we truly value?"
MARCUS:	I think that Spade answers that. And I think the Continental Op also answers that. What both of these characters value is their work and the code by which they behave. For example, the Op, unlike the police, is saved from corruption by the fact that the Continental Agency does not allow its operators to share in rewards for any crime that is solved. In The Maltese Falcon Spade turns in Brigid O'Shaughnessy because she has killed his partner, or has been involved in the killing. He says to her, "Listen. When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. . . . When one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around--bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere." Even if Spade did love her, it didn't matter, because it was more important to behave the way a detective was supposed to behave.
POND:	The routine work, then, appears to be the supreme value.
MARCUS:	The rules that have to be followed everyday are what saves one. However, something else impinges. The means that the Continental Op uses, and this is very close to "hard-boiled fiction," are themselves ambiguous. He has no compunctions about framing people, about lying, and--most important--about using violence.
POND:	So we are talking about conflicting means and ends?
MARCUS:	Exactly. Where "hard-boiled fiction" really represents a difference in what has gone before, where it comes together with what Ernest Hemingway was doing at the same time is this: In Hammett's stories there is a great deal of violence--a great deal of shooting, of hitting, of torturing. Indeed, his detectives get pleasure out of it. Once you see that, you realize that the means Hammett's characters use are corrupting, which adds another level of moral ambiguity--good ends can be corrupted by the means one uses. At the same time, one would have to be very naive to believe that the only way to accomplish good ends is to use good means.
POND:	We read such fiction first and foremost for pleasure, I suppose, but you seem to be suggesting that it can be subversive.
MARCUS:	What Hammett did was to take a fairly innocent form of fictional amusement and make it more complex, that is, closer to the actual world where means and ends exist in uneasy relation, an approach heretofore nonexistent in detective stories.
POND:	Who are Dashiell Hammett's heirs?
MARCUS:	Two of the most important are Elmore Leonard and Robert Parker. In particular, Leonard, because what Hammett introduced into detective fiction was the free use of the vernacular--with the exception of four-letter words. At the time he was writing, four-letter words were censored.
POND:	You have pointed out that when John Huston made a movie of The Maltese Falcon, he basically lifted the dialogue wholesale. This would appear to make a compelling literary case for Hammett.
MARCUS:	The literary case for Hammett is that he did something very much like what Hemingway was doing. He was able to get in touch with a certain kind of American speech and translate it into writing. That is a very big contribution, for it brought a new kind of style, a new kind of realism--sometimes a surrealistic realism--to the detective story, which before that had been a rather genteel form. Contributing to this realism are Hammett's many allusions to things that were happening at the time.
POND:	In an essay on Hammett you talk about Prohibition, pointing out that America had committed itself to "a vast fiction." In a way, that goes to the writing of Dashiell Hammett.
MARCUS:	The fiction was that by virtue of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it was illegal to produce, transport, or sell liquor. At the same time, it was not illegal to buy or consume liquor. So Americans were in effect being encouraged to support an illegal trade in liquor.
POND:	And Hammett, the artist, was supremely aware of this and uses that backdrop.
MARCUS:	He uses it all the time, as he uses the organized gangs of bootleggers and criminals.
POND:	Why do you read Dashiell Hammett? Why is he among your favorite writers?
MARCUS:	I read Hammett largely because of the marvelous living prose style that he achieved. The dialogue and some of the descriptive prose is as alive today as when it was written in the 1920s. That for me is proof of a real writer.