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Authors: Nathan Ward
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nicking his face to emphasize how close to death he had come. Shaken by his near miss, Flitcraft spontaneously left his family, drifted to San Francisco, and eventually resettled in Spokane. Five years after the disappearance, Sam Spade, then working out of “one of the big detective agencies in Seattle” (as Hammett had), was hired by Mrs. Flitcraft to find her lost husband, whom she had heard might be in Spokane (where Hammett had also worked). He located the unrepentant Flitcraft in that city, where the missing husband had begun a whole new family and career under a new name. He explained to Sam the reasonableness of his reaction to his close call with the crashing beam:
“He was scared stiff, of course, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”
Flitcraft had left his first family well provided for, he tells Spade,
and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he couldmake that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.
“I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was.”
The Sam Spade of the rest of the novel might have hauled the errant husband by his ear back to Seattle to have him explain himself to Mrs. Flitcraft in person. She was the client, after all. In some ways it is a reworking of an earlier missing husband story, the sound-alike Norman Ashcraft in “The Golden Horseshoe,” relentlessly pursued by the Op on the wife’s behalf, even after she is dead.
But Spade’s reaction to the story Flitcraft tells him is muted and surprising; there is something deeper going on. As he wrote this, Hammett had been living apart from his own family off and on for several years, and was considering making the separation complete by moving three thousand miles away, to New York. He had come to the Post Street studio on orders to shield his young children from his TB, and, once living apart, found the solitude and freedom that, among other things, allowed him to become a novelist. As he finished the manuscript of The Maltese Falcon , Hammett had survived a full decade with a disease that might have killed him at anytime, an experi-ence that had certainly lifted the lid off life and showed him the works.
Flitcraft’s is a far colder, cleaner departure than Hammett’s gradual separation, but his story feels mysteriously charged as Spade tells it, because Hammett, a man between lives, is talkingto himself through his creation. He had tried living at home, and living away from home, and had adjusted to his new life. The fact that he could not return to his old life might seem unreasonable to others, but there it was.
If tuberculosis laid him low and forced him to find his way to a writing career, its later diminution allowed him a chance to roam. He convinced Jose to move the girls to Los Angeles, where some of her Kelly relatives wintered and where he felt his movie prospects might take him sometime in the future. If Jose took care of the girls, he promised, he would take care of her.
He departed San Francisco altogether in early October 1929, along with a woman named Nell Martin and a generous send-off loan of five hundred dollars from his fond ex-employer Albert Samuels. They arrived in New York just ahead of the great stock market crash. It somehow fits with Hammett’s biography that, having spent much of the Roaring Twenties sick and impoverished, his fate would again zig when the rest of the country zagged.
Nell Martin is sometimes described simply as a widowed music teacher and actress but in fact listed herself as divorced and was, by this time, the author of many stories, light mysteries and satires, including the novels The Mosaic Earring , Lord Byron of Broadway , and
“He was scared stiff, of course, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”
Flitcraft had left his first family well provided for, he tells Spade,
and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he couldmake that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.
“I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was.”
The Sam Spade of the rest of the novel might have hauled the errant husband by his ear back to Seattle to have him explain himself to Mrs. Flitcraft in person. She was the client, after all. In some ways it is a reworking of an earlier missing husband story, the sound-alike Norman Ashcraft in “The Golden Horseshoe,” relentlessly pursued by the Op on the wife’s behalf, even after she is dead.
But Spade’s reaction to the story Flitcraft tells him is muted and surprising; there is something deeper going on. As he wrote this, Hammett had been living apart from his own family off and on for several years, and was considering making the separation complete by moving three thousand miles away, to New York. He had come to the Post Street studio on orders to shield his young children from his TB, and, once living apart, found the solitude and freedom that, among other things, allowed him to become a novelist. As he finished the manuscript of The Maltese Falcon , Hammett had survived a full decade with a disease that might have killed him at anytime, an experi-ence that had certainly lifted the lid off life and showed him the works.
Flitcraft’s is a far colder, cleaner departure than Hammett’s gradual separation, but his story feels mysteriously charged as Spade tells it, because Hammett, a man between lives, is talkingto himself through his creation. He had tried living at home, and living away from home, and had adjusted to his new life. The fact that he could not return to his old life might seem unreasonable to others, but there it was.
If tuberculosis laid him low and forced him to find his way to a writing career, its later diminution allowed him a chance to roam. He convinced Jose to move the girls to Los Angeles, where some of her Kelly relatives wintered and where he felt his movie prospects might take him sometime in the future. If Jose took care of the girls, he promised, he would take care of her.
He departed San Francisco altogether in early October 1929, along with a woman named Nell Martin and a generous send-off loan of five hundred dollars from his fond ex-employer Albert Samuels. They arrived in New York just ahead of the great stock market crash. It somehow fits with Hammett’s biography that, having spent much of the Roaring Twenties sick and impoverished, his fate would again zig when the rest of the country zagged.
Nell Martin is sometimes described simply as a widowed music teacher and actress but in fact listed herself as divorced and was, by this time, the author of many stories, light mysteries and satires, including the novels The Mosaic Earring , Lord Byron of Broadway , and
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