Pulp Poem of the Week

Three times
I have been mistaken
for a Prohibition agent,
but never had any trouble
clearing myself.

          Dashiell Hammett
          “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective” 
          1923

Pulp Poem of the Week

The cheaper

the crook

the gaudier

the patter.

Dashiell Hammett

The Maltese Falcon

1930

Book Review: Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Maybe it’s sacrilege to be thinking of John D. MacDonald while reading The Maltese Falcon, but that’s what I’ve been doing. In 1981, when asked if he were an admirer of Hammett, JDM answered in part, “The prose style of Hammett is certainly a more solid and a more artful style than that of Chandler. But he was an idiot as far as plots are concerned. If you want to drive some high school or college kid nuts, make him do an outline of the plot of The Maltese Falcon. It’s incredibly mixed up and nothing ever happens the way it’s supposed to. But the flow of the narrative is such that you’re caught up in it and you believe it. But you can’t believe it if you try to dissect it.” What I kept thinking as I was reading was how strange it was for JDM to criticize Hammett’s plotting of The Maltese Falcon in the same breath that he was mentioning Chandler. Worse than being “mixed up,” I find the plot of The Maltese Falcon to be patently uninteresting, but Raymond Chandler sets the standard for incomprehensible hardboiled-detective plots. The thing about it, though, as JDM does seem to know, is that with Hammett and Chandler plots may well be beside the point. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

Kill yourself
into a hole,
and the chances are
a time comes
when you have to
kill yourself out.

Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse
1929

Book Review: William F. Nolan, The Black Mask Boys: Masters of the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction (1985)

Stories included: “Three Gun Terry” (1923) by Carroll John Daly; “Bodies Piled Up” (1923) by Dashiell Hammett; “Hell’s Kettle” (1930) by Erle Stanley Gardner; “Sal the Dude” (1929) by Raoul Whitfield; “Rough Justice” (1930) by Frederick Nebel; “Frost Flies Alone” [original title: “Frost Rides Alone”] (1930) by Horace McCoy; “Gundown” [original title: “Murder Done in Blue”] (1933) by Paul Cain; and “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) by Raymond Chandler.

William F. Nolan gathers eight representative stories from Black Mask’s heavy-hitters and seasons the mix with a history of the magazine, biographical overviews of the writers, and bibliographies of their work for Black Mask. Unfortunately, by almost any critical yardstick, Black Mask fiction is pretty bad. Joseph T. Shaw, who edited the magazine during its glory years, was interested in good writing, but he was more interested in series characters who would build and keep a base of loyal readers. (Thus, the many, many appearances of Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, whom even Shaw knew to be terrible.) On the whole, the best story here (no surprise) is Dashiell Hammett’s “Bodies Piled Up,” which manages to be brilliant even if it doesn’t add up to much as a story. And this is the perspective from which Black Mask fiction is best enjoyed: as collections of moments rather than as unified narratives. Approached in this way, even Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry”—the world’s first hard-boiled detective story—can be fun. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

Lying
requires
imagination.

Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse
1929

Pulp Poem of the Week

The flare of my gun
showed me nothing.
It never does,
though it's easy
to think
you've seen things.

Dashiell Hammett
Red Harvest
1929

Book Review: Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (1929)

Readers of Red Harvest who suspect that Dashiell Hammett got paid by the corpse will have their suspicions confirmed by The Dain Curse. The important difference between the novels is that while the town-tamer plot of Red Harvest has a kind of hardboiled dignity, the psychodrama of The Dain Curse is, to use the Continental Op’s own word, “goofy.” And the Op is being kind. Grade: C-

Review: Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)

Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for "[giving] murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse . . . [and putting] these people down on paper as they were, and [making] them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes." But these strengths are not too much in evidence in Red Harvest, Hammett's debut novel. The Continental Op, who narrates the proceedings, is more a catalyst than a character, and the many criminals who populate his story are too busy killing to emerge as much more than killers. Perhaps the most interesting characters are Sheriff Noonan, who somehow manages to seem a precursor to both Lou Ford and Chief Wiggum, and Dinah Brand, a femme fatale whose femme-powers are provocatively difficult to account for. Bottom line: Hammett's snappy prose rescues this hard-boiled cartoon. Grade: B-