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Authors: Nathan Ward
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The Constant Simp . She was a witty survivor who had held an even wider variety of jobs than Hammett had, including working as a newspaper reporter and migrant worker and driving a taxi in Chicago. She had a movie adaptation of one of her novels in production and shared Hammett’s interest in the new field of screenwriting that the talkies made possible. The pair went to New York, where they stayed in an apartmentin the east Thirties, from which he snapped street scenes to send his daughters. § Hammett worked there to finish his next novel, The Glass Key , which he would gratefully dedicate to Nell Martin after they had dissolved as a couple; she returned the gesture with her next book, cheekily titled Lovers Should Marry.
Hammett had arrived in New York just as the first installment of The Maltese Falcon triumphantly ran in Black Mask , announced by editor Cap Shaw as the greatest detective fiction to appear in any magazine he had ever read. When the novel was published by Knopf in February 1930, Gilbert Seldes in the New York Graphic wrote, “The detectives of fiction have been knocked into a cocked hat … by the appearance of Sam Spade in a book called The Maltese Falcon. ” “The horsepower of Mr. Hammett’s pen,” said the New York Herald Tribune , “must be sampled to be believed.” The novel would be reprinted seven times in a year. It wasn’t, however, dedicated to Nell Martin but to Josephine Hammett (“To Jose”), the steadfast woman he had left behind, at least for now. As consolation, their daughter Jo Hammett pointed out, her mother got the best book.
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* A falcon statuette used in John Huston’s 1941 movie sold at auction for four million dollars in 2013.
** In fact, he could now date friends from eras of his life by which name they called him.
† Although the city directory has him living at 1155 Leavenworth in 1928-29, he continued to write letters from 891 Post Street right up until he left town in October 1929.
‡ The novelist Joe Gores pointed out (in his introduction to Lost Stories ) that the name Flitcraft refers to a book of “actuarial tables” known to all private detectives in Hammett’s time. Pinkerton’s (as well as the fictional Continental Agency) had sizable insurance companies for clients. The A. J. Flitcraft Life Insurance Manual from 1918, which Hammett presumably consulted, has since become available online. It seems more likely that he plucked this name from the manual to amuse himself than that he was referring to obscure philosophers of flux, as some suggest, but the debate over the “Flitcraft Parable” will go on, because it is a mesmerizing piece of writing worth staring into.
§ There is scholarly confusion about their romance: the 1930 federal census lists one Nell Martin, “writer,” at 133 East Thirty-Eighth Street, a “divorced” “head of household” living with two other women as “lodgers.” Hammett would move in with her at Thirty-Eighth Street for a time after he returned to New York from a stint in Hollywood in 1931.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began for the best of reasons: I wanted to read a book that did not exist on Dashiell Hammett’s years as a real detective, and about exactly how he had made his famous transformation from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story. No such work existed devoted to this hazy but important period in his life, but many of the experienced Hammett chasers helped me attempt it. Mike Humbert posted my original call for materials on his superb website on Dashiell Hammett ( http://www.mikehumbert.com/Dashiell_Hammett_01_Short_Bio.html ), which helped get things going. My fellow writer and Hammett fan Mike Rogers then made introductions to Rick Layman, Hammett’s biographer, who assured me that to understand how a man could actually go from Pinkerton op to world-beating writer, I needed to reread Hammett’s stories in the order he wrote them. Layman was right. Over the decades since
Hammett had arrived in New York just as the first installment of The Maltese Falcon triumphantly ran in Black Mask , announced by editor Cap Shaw as the greatest detective fiction to appear in any magazine he had ever read. When the novel was published by Knopf in February 1930, Gilbert Seldes in the New York Graphic wrote, “The detectives of fiction have been knocked into a cocked hat … by the appearance of Sam Spade in a book called The Maltese Falcon. ” “The horsepower of Mr. Hammett’s pen,” said the New York Herald Tribune , “must be sampled to be believed.” The novel would be reprinted seven times in a year. It wasn’t, however, dedicated to Nell Martin but to Josephine Hammett (“To Jose”), the steadfast woman he had left behind, at least for now. As consolation, their daughter Jo Hammett pointed out, her mother got the best book.
----
* A falcon statuette used in John Huston’s 1941 movie sold at auction for four million dollars in 2013.
** In fact, he could now date friends from eras of his life by which name they called him.
† Although the city directory has him living at 1155 Leavenworth in 1928-29, he continued to write letters from 891 Post Street right up until he left town in October 1929.
‡ The novelist Joe Gores pointed out (in his introduction to Lost Stories ) that the name Flitcraft refers to a book of “actuarial tables” known to all private detectives in Hammett’s time. Pinkerton’s (as well as the fictional Continental Agency) had sizable insurance companies for clients. The A. J. Flitcraft Life Insurance Manual from 1918, which Hammett presumably consulted, has since become available online. It seems more likely that he plucked this name from the manual to amuse himself than that he was referring to obscure philosophers of flux, as some suggest, but the debate over the “Flitcraft Parable” will go on, because it is a mesmerizing piece of writing worth staring into.
§ There is scholarly confusion about their romance: the 1930 federal census lists one Nell Martin, “writer,” at 133 East Thirty-Eighth Street, a “divorced” “head of household” living with two other women as “lodgers.” Hammett would move in with her at Thirty-Eighth Street for a time after he returned to New York from a stint in Hollywood in 1931.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began for the best of reasons: I wanted to read a book that did not exist on Dashiell Hammett’s years as a real detective, and about exactly how he had made his famous transformation from Pinkerton operative to master of the American detective story. No such work existed devoted to this hazy but important period in his life, but many of the experienced Hammett chasers helped me attempt it. Mike Humbert posted my original call for materials on his superb website on Dashiell Hammett ( http://www.mikehumbert.com/Dashiell_Hammett_01_Short_Bio.html ), which helped get things going. My fellow writer and Hammett fan Mike Rogers then made introductions to Rick Layman, Hammett’s biographer, who assured me that to understand how a man could actually go from Pinkerton op to world-beating writer, I needed to reread Hammett’s stories in the order he wrote them. Layman was right. Over the decades since
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